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It may have been important to de Valera he said waving an

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"It may have been important to de Valera," he said, waving an arm at the bullet holes in the columns of the Post Office, "but we don't want any more animosity. "They're so chippy." Odd that, I thought, coming from an IRA man. Back at the GPO, 73-year-old Paddy O'Brien from Tipperary was waiting under those forbidding columns for his friend, Ed O'Shea. I heard that 80 per cent of primary school children in the north are Catholics these days They're going to grow up nationalists. That's what's going to redraw the border in the end." "They're integrating the youth," said Pat, the ex-bank robber-cum-fruit-and-veg seller, who said he wasn't even sure he much liked Northern nationalists anyway.

"But there's no point in having unity if people don't want it." Like most Dubliners, an astonishing level of ignorance about the North (related to the fact that many have never been there) feeds mushy general conviction that nothing has been lost over the constitutional amendments because "one day", "some day", "not in our lifetime", the north and the south will merge. Like a trip to a state-of-the art dentist, the extraction of the Brits will be painless for all concerned. "The constitutional claim could not be enforced anyway," Eunan added "It was like Argentina claiming the Falklands The demography is moving our way. "I was brought up singing Four Green Fields," he said, humming a bar from the famous old folk song that laments mother Ireland's loss of the "green field" of Ulster. "It was all religion at the bottom of it, and why should Protestants and Catholics be fighting now when they've got Muslims and every other religion up there in the North?" "Getting rid of Article 41, about the special position of the Catholic Church, was much more important than 2 or 3," said Eunan Dolan, an off-duty policeman in his forties.

She knew nothing of Ireland's territorial claim to the North "I've got two children in Derry," she said. "Pat" wouldn't give his real name because he had served six years in Portloaise jail for robbing a bank in an IRA funding operation."Ah well, we've all got to compromise," he said, all passion over Articles 2 and 3 apparently spent "It's a step forwards..." "To what?" I asked. "Well, it's a step and that's the main thing." And the weather-beaten women of Moore Street, rubbing their hands in the winter twilight behind their stacks of oranges and bananas, nodded in agreement. "Frankly, I don't give a shit," said one confidently, with a huge grin, but a woman called Margaret disagreed, saying it would be "nice for the people up there, going shopping at Christmas and all, in peace and no bombs". If I went to Britain I wouldn't expect to live under Irish laws, now would I?" But Leonora's was the only fighting spirit I encountered in the streets of Dublin on that supposedly "historic" day, which had me wondering whether the Irish newspapers were quite right when they opined that 2 December would be remembered for ever. Even "Pat", who served fruit and vegetables from his Moore Street market stall, was vague. "From the constitution, Articles 2 and 3," I prodded tactfully, "the 1937 constitution, which lays claim to the whole island." Suddenly she warmed to the theme, as if embarrassed and keen to make up for lost nationalism.

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