" The 'Island' we dreamed of"

A New Year and more Brexit. Howard Quayle MHK Chief Minister (aka ‘The Great Man’) has been setting ot his vista of the Brexit future.

He really wants to reassure the business community because everything on this Island is apparently designed to assuage the fears that keep members of the Chamber of Commerce awake screaming. However Howard knows he has to also communicate with us - ‘the hoi polloi’ - so his ‘Brexit and Beyond’ message is tailored accordingly. The title of the Chamber concave ‘Brexit and Beyond’ says a lot about the business community it says for a start they are all style and no substance.

The Chief Minister says we live in ‘uncertain times’ but chooses to deliver the message to a room full of the greedy and self interested. He delivers his ‘cosy homesteads’ message to the wrong folk. He is talking to the community but these paragons of self interest are the obverse of that. However berating the Chamber is for another day for now its good just to hear ‘the Great Man’s’ reassurances.

Howard bemoans the fact that in the UK folk are playing politics with the issue politics is a concept alien to him after all he is er….a politician.

For the meantime at home here we have to keep our heads down and buy more local produce. His speech is less Churchillian ‘backs to the wall’ and more the De Valera speech in Xmas 1943 which a ‘really great man’ delivered. In his ‘The Ireland we dreamed of' speech Dev talked of :

“A land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.”

He also talked about ‘the island of saints and scholars’ but I suppose with Graham Cregeen as Education MInister we can’t go that far in the 21st century revamp.

All in all there are a lot of parallels now to 1943. Europe was tearing itself apart then physically thank heaven now its just economically. Indeed of course Ireland at that time still had a thin constitutional umbilical to the the United Kingdom (although the 1937 constitution renamed the state Ireland. In 1949 it explicitly became a republic under the terms of the Republic of Ireland Act 1948, definitively ending its tenuous membership of the British Commonwealth).

Dev concluded his 1943 address by saying:

“We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being, and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought.:

Go for it Howard!

Here is the link to Howards ‘Brexit and Beyond’ news report.

http://www.iomtoday.co.im/article.cfm…

Here is the link to ‘The Ireland we have dreamed off’ Speech:

https://www.rte.ie/…/eamon-…/719124-address-by-mr-de-valera/

Images; Two ‘Islands’ two ‘great men’ - you chose!

Bernard Moffatt

Celtic League