Republican News · Thursday 21 February 2002

Winning the Republic

This weekend, Sinn Féin activists from all corners of Ireland will converge on Navan for a key meeting to discuss what has become known as the All-Ireland Agenda. They will arrive on the back of two promising polls showing gains for individual party candidates, a strong signal that the party's optimism for the forthcoming general election is not misplaced.

But the Navan conference is looking beyond this election and the inevitable advance for the party that it will bring. That is because Sinn Féin is unlike other political paties. Republicans don't want to tinker with the system; we want to transform it. When we talk of freedom, justice and peace we are not just sloganeering or fantasising; we are in the business of achieving a united Ireland based on the principles of inclusion, justice and equal rights and opportunities for all. The Good Friday Agreement offfers an opportunity to move closer to that goal.

Republicans will this weekend be putting new energy into defining a strategy that will see republicans working to strengthen cross-border bodies and working to foster all-Ireland links. But that I not enough We need to ensure that all the work we do is infused with a political worldview that refuses to be constrained by the Border or the artificial divisions it has created in areas such as service provision and education, even down to the money we have in our pockets.

People from Antrim to Wexford to Galway to Dublin and on to Belfast have the opportunity to vote Sinn Féin and are seizing it in greater numbers. As the polls show, more and more people are buying into our vision. It is a vision driven not by personal greed or political ambition but by a shared notion of the Ireland we want to live in.

We are in the business of making revolution, not of waiting until 50% plus 1. That does mean persuading unionists of the benefits of a united Ireland for all our people but it also means working assiduously to destroy the Border's relevance and secure a British disengagement.

In the 1990s, the Irish National Congress ran a successful campaign to reopen closed Border roads. Travelling on these expeditions showed the absurdity of the Border, which arbitrarily divides farms, townlands and even individual homes. Local people were inspiring in their absolute refusal to recognise that artifical line.

We too must remove all limiting vestiges of partitionism from our mindsets. Therein lies the key to victory.