Henry McDonald: Sinn Fein leaders Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald engage in ‘politics of illusion’

Down Under in Australia, Mary Lou McDonald appealed to the newly-elected Aussie Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to campaign in favour of a united Ireland on the international stage.

It brought to mind one of the best books about the ideological basis of modern republicanism written by the University of Ulster academic Henry Patterson, “The Politics of Illusion”.

That title was more than apt to describe the wishful thinking the Sinn Fein President was displaying at the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra. To imagine that the Australian PM would have time, let alone the motivation, to lobby on behalf of Sinn Fein and bash the Brits into submission over a Border Poll is simply deluded.

Australia has just signed post-Brexit trade deal with the UK and has entered into a defence pact with the British military in alliance with the Americans, with particular focus on security in the Pacific. Which means beefing up their armed forces in the region as a deterrent against an expansionist China.

Why would Mr Albanese risk a rupture with a global trading partner and key military ally by taking sides in Northern Ireland?

Meanwhile, in Washington DC, Michelle O’Neill was also banging the drum for a united Ireland and imploring Joe Biden to send a Special Envoy to Northern Ireland, preferably one, of course, willing to threaten to scupper any trans-Atlantic trade deal if the British did overturn the NI Protocol through the legislation passing through Parliament.

President Biden might talk the kind of talk that friends of Sinn Fein on Capitol Hill like to hear but he and the advisers around him trying to keep him propped up have other more important matters on their mind.

Soaring inflation, the energy supply crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the cracks emerging in the EU over Putin’s gas supplies, and the mid term elections in November that could see the President and the Democrats lose Congress to the Republicans.

Add to all those crises, the necessity to have reliable military allies like the UK when facing Putin or Xi in China, and you can imagine what the hard-headed realists in the State Department really must be thinking when they hear Sinn Fein leaders pressing the US to go on a collision course with the UK.

As well as the illusions over Anglophone powers turning on the Brits, there was the usual deluded ham-fisted “reach out” to unionists. This followed an announcement last week from Mary Lou McDonald for a people’s assembly as part of the Sinn Fein “Commission on the Future of Ireland.”

The choice of location for the launch of this latest love-bombing exercise in the autumn was telling, not only for unionists - Belfast Waterfront Hall, just a few yards from the site of the old Oxford Street Bus Station where the biggest loss of life occurred on Bloody Friday. Not exactly a smart site to persuade unionists about any new Ireland.