Letter: Sinn Fein's strategy is to demoralise unionists with talk of a united Ireland being inevitable

But is it inevitable that we are to be pushed into a “united Ireland”, or as Professor John Wilson Foster put it, "amputated from the UK, which is what a 'united Ireland' means”?

Sinn Fein have to keep saying it is inevitable in order to reassure their followers and keep them on board, and they have been saying it a long time. Twenty years ago, at a Sinn Fein Easter Rising commemoration, Adams said: “The creation of a united Ireland is an inevitable consequence of the peace process.” That was in 2003 but he was saying it before that and he has been saying it since then.

That has long been part of the propagandist rhetoric of republicanism, but there was a brief moment of honesty in September 2017 when Adams went off message. He addressed a republican book launch in Tralee and said: “We believe that Irish unity is achievable and winnable, but it is not inevitable. It has to be worked for.”

Sinn Fein know it is not inevitable but they are working for it. Inside the H-blocks they developed a long-term strategy to achieve it, and outside they built a broad movement to work for it. We know that because Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison wrote about it in the mid 1980s.

Today they are still working tenaciously to achieve their goal and part of their strategy is to demoralise unionists. Military strategists have always recognised that when an army believes defeat is inevitable it becomes much more likely, because it demoralises and paralyses.

The same is true in the political realm and that is why Sinn Fein leaders have talked so much about inevitability, even though they don't really believe it.

Nelson McCausland, Newtownabbey