The establishment of a sovereign and independent State, 

the free association or integration with an independent State 

or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people constitute modes of implementing the right of self-determination by that people.

Every State has the duty to refrain from any forcible action which deprives peoples referred to above in the elaboration of the present principle of their right to self-determination and freedom and independence.  In their actions against, and resistance to, such forcible action in pursuit of the exercise of their right to self-determination, such peoples are entitled to seek and to receive support in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter.”

(United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2625  (XXV)

Micheál Martin’s political legacy is to use power to defy  and misjudge Irish public opinion—as he has done spectacularly in both the Presidential Election and the last Referendum on the Family.  By acting in this way he is demoralising and wrecking his great party and its heritage.  Yet he feels confident enough to defy the considered wisdom and experience  of the then 127 states of the UN and repeat the mantra about territorial integrity of Ukraine.  Between them, those states and their statesmen and women had more political experience than Micheál could ever hope to even  dream of.  Rhetoric and word mongering, as with language itself, never adequately define the reality of experience. 

So, according to the UN, what we know as unionism is legitimate, as is separation, as is any form of devolution which the Eastern Ukrainian Oblasts had, and wanted to keep—provided that any of these forms is what the people concerned want.  But the coup of February 2014 changed all that.  I assume it is accepted by all that a coup d’état against a legitimate state is illegitimate—without consulting the UN—though the resounding silence about it fromTaoiseach Micheál and others shows that they condone it.

Anyone with an elementary knowledge of what the Ukrainian nationalists  did with the support of the US and the EU in February 2014 will realise that the Ukrainian State, which they established by the coup of that month broke these principles.   Kiev launched a war against a national minority, a people, because the Ukrainian nationalists now and historically could not abide, or cope with, a multi-national state.  It is a regular problem for many nationalists.  

That was the cause of the current War. The SMO [Special Military Operation] was aimed at stopping a war against a national minority in the Ukraine which had been going on for  8 years.

Micheál,  if he does not learn from his history, might recall an event in his own lifetime as a politician—one that resonates on a micro scale with what happened in Ukraine.  In 1969 the forces of the State launched a pogrom against the national minority in Northern Ireland.  That minority understandably appealed for help to their fatherland.  But the fatherland and its leader Jack Lynch “stood idly by”  (to quote himself), and the  minority was left to its own devices. 

The device they chose was to set up a citizen defence force, which evolved into the Provisional IRA, which was then forced to go to war against the state and, after a 25 year war, succeeded in remedying the grievances that  had  culminated in the pogrom.  War works. There are winners and losers:  and the winners decide what the war was about.

The EU will learn that lesson, with knobs on, if it ever contrives to get its war with Russia. zresounding silenceIt  will, assuredly, come to regret what it wished for. 

Jack Lane