Wonderful timing! Today, as a report launched by the Irish Peace and Reconciliation Platform describes the Republic's intolerance of unionists, north and south, Michael Noonan and Enda Kenny are promising to green Fine Gael. That quaint notion of John Bruton's that Irish governments should be pluralist is, apparently, passe.
Noonan and Kenny are clever and sophisticated and have made many a speech full of reassuring rhetoric about respecting other traditions. So they must know what an appalling signal they are sending by telling unionists that if either of them becomes leader of Fine Gael, only nationalists need apply. Bruton would not have sanctioned such a regression to tribalism, but then Bruton was ahead of his time.
Noonan/Kenny have thought about their party and the electorate and have concluded that there is no percentage in showing consideration to the million or so unionists on this island.
And in doing so, they have graphically proved the main point of the Platform report (Peace- Building in the Republic of Ireland). While Ireland does not reach the depths of bigotry that characterises Northern republicans, in its attitude to unionism, it is ignorant, prejudiced and illiberal.
The Platform is a loose grouping of 18 non-governmental organisations and institutions in the Republic who devote themselves to helping people in this island get on better. At one end of the spectrum is the well-funded Co-operation Ireland; at the other, the Guild of Ancient Uriel, whose 20 members help cross-community groups take a pride in their shared culture.
The term peace group evokes a yawn in most Irish people. And unionists are only slightly more popular than pederasts, so the members of these groups truly are unsung heroes.
I doff my cap to those members of the Irish Peace Institute in Limerick who braved intimidation and vilification because they had formed good relationships with the Apprentice Boys, the RUC and other groups who have been the victims of black republican propagandists and lazy-minded, credulous nationalists.
New Consensus, the Meath Peace Group, the Drogheda Ecumenical Peace Group and so many more demonstrate that at least there are a few people with the courage and dedication to buck the narrow nationalism of the Republic.
"Since the formation of the Irish State," says the report in a telling sentence, "there has been a prevailing mindset which, whilst it enables the claims of jurisdiction to be upheld, at the same time wastes no effort in its implementation." In other words, successive governments did nothing to try to resolve problems in a territory they aspired to rule and, apart from the IRA and its sneaking-regarders, the people of the South were apathetic.
There was no concerted attempt to learn about Northern Ireland or to get to know the people of either community, let alone to woo unionists by showing them respect and demonstrating through action that they had nothing to fear from a united Ireland.
Instead, unionists saw in the South the development in the Roman Catholic church, the GAA and so on of what the report calls "rigidly nationalist institutional mind-sets".
Northern unionists saw the intolerance with which Irish governments and society treated their only substantial minority, even though, unlike the minority in Northern Ireland, it posed no threat to the State. ("A latent attitude exists under the surface in the Republic which seeks to exclude anyone who does not fit the Roman Catholic, nationalist/ republican stereotype.")
This was fostered by "selective cultural and historical amnesia", which allowed whole swathes of people to be "airbrushed" out of history if their "faces didn't fit" - those who fought in the two world wars, the Protestants who died in the Famine, and so on. And - a point not made in the report - to those one could add the Redmondites, sneered at and reviled for being constitutional.
PART of the historical airbrushing has been a refusal by the majority to acknowledge that they required the minority to conform or get out. Robin Bury of Reform (a movement which campaigns for the recognition of the British part of the culture of Ireland) has put emotionally what the Platform report starkly confirms: "A narrow, nationalist Catholic state was calculatedly established after 1922. It was based on the silly myth of a pure, Celtic, Gaelic-speaking race living in an Arcadia in the west. Deeply Anglophobic, the new state vigorously pursued a policy of de-Anglicisation. The Anglo-Irish were wrenched from their culture overnight, and made to feel unwelcome in a theocratic state."
The majority counters such statements by saying that there is now no hostility towards Protestants. Arthur Aughey, quoted in this report, says it is a fair argument: "However, one reason may be that the Protestants have little or no political significance as a community. They tend to be encountered purely and simply as individuals. As such they disappear more easily into the body of a nation."
In other words, most Protestants kept and keep their politics to themselves. Ian Beamish from west Cork, a young member of Reform, puts it bluntly: "Protestants here who support the Union shut up because they were plain terrified to speak up . . . preferring to keep the peace by sacrificing their opinions and not wanting to bring unwanted attention upon themselves for fear of having their businesses boycotted." Dr Martin Mansergh, the Taoiseach's Special Adviser, will, no doubt, have played an important part in the drafting of the revised Article 3 of the Constitution: "It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions."
Yet in recent correspondence with Reform, he has been contemptuous of its claim to speak for a minority whose needs deserve addressing: Article 3 does not, apparently, apply to those in the Republic who cherish the British part of their inheritance. Yet, as Simon Partridge, the political commentator, put it: "If the Irish State cannot respect its indigenous unionists, why on earth, at some future possible point in time, should it respect and value those in Northern Ireland?"
Partridge argues that the response to the Platform Report will provide a litmus test against which "the good intentions of the `Irish nation/state' will be judged by European civil rightists and, particularly, Northern Unionist opinion." It certainly turns the heat on the complacent. In the words of another unionist member of Reform: "This is the first time since the 1920s that anyone has accepted that there is a political minority in the State." In American terms: we are not prepared to go to the back of the bus any more.