Be careful what you wish for.
You just may get it.
32 Counties. The final phase of Nationalist aspirations — a totally configured island from coast to coast; fully integrated and operating in totality. Together once again. The dream rises and falls like the tides, surfacing in the discourse only to sink below the waves. All the same, it continues to persist — a phantom that lingers.
Its appearance triggers a discharge of national vigour throughout the populace.
Everyone talks about it. Opinions are voiced and argued by government officials; statements broadcast on digital media, consumed and discussed in households, offices, and classrooms. Love it or hate it — the possibility is invigorating.
It exists as an aspiration, a vision that structures the imagination of masses across the island — the culmination of Irish history, the final chapter. But completion is a quiet thing. And in that quiet, what survives? What comes next, when the horizon has been reached, the land fully mapped, and there is nowhere left to go? Satisfaction is the death of desire; dissatisfaction, its wellspring.
The act of wanting something. Not having it, and being impeded in its pursuit, is what charges our desires with infinite potential. Out of reach — they can be anything.
Until the 2018 amendment of The Intoxicating Liquor Act, the sale of alcohol was prohibited in Ireland on Good Friday. Many clandestinely bypassed the system, purchasing alcohol the day prior and gathering at prearranged locations across the country, staying one step ahead of the system. Talk of its repeal saturated the conversation — of being finally able to go to a pub on Good Friday. Now we have it. It’s just like going to the pub. Why even think about it anymore?
As the object of our desire is charged by our projections, we too are charged by it. Not having it is why we get up in the morning. We get what we want, only to be poorer for it.
Similar subterfuge is perpetrated by teenagers — attempting to avoid the detection of parents and state authorities; hiding, smuggling, and covering up illicit alcohol consumption. Utilizing technological countermeasures as camouflage and a means of co-ordination, running from the law, it is no surprise most recall this as the point drinking was most fun.
What holds true for the individual holds true for the nation: desire derives its vitality not from possession, but from denial. Encoded through enough generations, accumulating force — it assumes mythic proportions. Man once only dreamt of flight. Now it is something to be suffered through on budget airlines.
The continued separation of the six counties is a traumatic reminder of the island’s history of subjugation. Flashback: Cromwell. The Famine. 1916. Coffin ships. The Plantations. The loss of language. Black and Tans swarming the island.
The border acts as a transponder for Ireland’s past — a scar carved across the land, broadcasting ghosts.
As history plays itself out — not having the six counties is the realest thing we have. It is why so many cling to their enmity towards their former masters — it is easier to define oneself by what you are not and what you do not have. The flag pays testament to this. We exist in relation. Not in ourselves. To have the six counties is to lose ourselves. Once Northern Ireland is part of Ireland, history is satisfied.
Desire organizes society. We are arranged around it. Structured by it.
The border functions as a databank or repository of nationalists’ collective dreams and aspirations. It is a living monument, feeding off unresolved tensions; its very incompleteness revivifies the past.
Partition acts as a load-bearing structure; an open wound still bleeding a century later, haunting the Irish consciousness like the echo of Cromwell’s boots marching across the island. It supports collective investment and sustains national fantasies, and by resurrecting the past, it keeps the present on life support.
Once in hand, there is nothing to dream. Nothing to dream about. Nothing to dream for.
And yet the border hums — a nexus throbbing with shades whose work is undone.
The horror of the past, infesting the present, reanimated, clawing its way back.
The separation of the North animates history. Mobilizing the past.
A united Ireland is not an ending; it is a bureaucratic afterlife, indefinite. The dream culminates not in liberation or fulfillment, but in paperwork. Maintenance. Boredom.
The land unites, only to be divided once more—not by borders or history, but by the soul-crushing reality of governance. History fades into the faint hum of bureaucracy, its once-vibrant pulse now just a background noise.
Once free from colonial chains — where does longing go? Once the spectres are banished, history loses its charge.
Separation resurrects the past. Keeps it alive.
“An Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” United: it shall finally be laid to rest.
Identity built on negation cannot survive completion. The border separates two empty spaces. Fulfilment crashes on the rocks. Lack becomes explicit. The Berlin Wall fell to celebration. Preserved. Memorialized. Gathered around like a relic.
Should the border come down, the imagination will build a new one. Desire thrives not on what is, but on what is withheld, opposed, or imagined to be elsewhere.
Difference bolsters identity. Preserves it. Crystallizes it. To dismantle it is simply to kick out the supports. Once the missing piece is claimed, the self dissolves. The dream ceases to circulate. Long entrenched, Home Rule’s advocates are reduced to footnotes. Stripped of charge. Deprived of their propulsive capacity. The dream collapses.
32 Counties. The last stop. History ends. We end.
Do you wish to continue wishing?