“I have no doubt about that..”

Is it May yet? In the Derry Journal we hear what the Northern Ireland deputy First Minister, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, has been telling the people of Londonderry.

“The march towards Irish reunification is unstoppable. I have no doubt about that. The people who know that best are not the people here tonight or the people who vote for us but they are the people who vote for the DUP or the UUP. “There are unionists who believed that if you give power to nationalists it means the end of the union as they know it and they are absolutely right,” he said.

There are, of course, alternative opinions on that. Still, no better time to remind readers of what out-going Taoiseach Bertie Ahern had to say on the prospect – in the absence of Longley’s “opposite of war” approach.

“That can only happen in the long term future. How long that will be I don’t know. If it is done by any means of coercion, or divisiveness, or threats, it will never happen. We’ll stay at a very peaceful Ireland and I think time will be the healer providing people, in a dedicated way, work for the better good of everyone on the island. If it doesn’t prove possible, then it stays the way it is under the Good Friday Agreement, and people will just have to be tolerant of that if it’s not possible to bring it any further.”