Source: The Stormont Papers – View Volumes.
The renegade Left forgets conveniently that the democratically elected parliament of Northern Ireland voted in 1922 to not be governed from Dublin. That was after a democratic election where both Sinn Fein and another nationalist party contested under a single transferable vote that was specifically designed to maximise the number of seats that the Irish nationalists could win. Éamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith were elected to the Northern Ireland House of Commons.
There are no elections for the House of Commons of Southern Ireland because anyone who stood against a Sinn Fein candidate knew they would be murdered for doing so. The Irish Republic chose to regard that election as elections to the Second Dáil. The 124 Sinn Féin candidates elected, plus the Sinn Féin members elected to the House of Commons of Northern Ireland elected at the same time, assembled as the Second Dáil.
As is typical of the Irish Republicans (and nationalists around the world), the Sinn Fein and nationalist party MPs elected to the Northern Ireland House of Commons refused to take their seats because they refused to accept that losing the election with two thirds of the vote for a party who wanted to leave Ireland was a democratic choice that should be respected by anyone with even a sliver of democracy in their moral fibre.
Under the Anglo Irish treaty negotiated with the Dublin government, the Parliament of Northern Ireland had the option of opting out of rule from Dublin and staying in the United Kingdom.
Irish revanchism has been a recipe for almost endless war. Revanchism is the desire to reverse territorial losses. It is linked with irredentism, the conception that a part of the cultural and ethnic nation remains “unredeemed” outside the borders of its appropriate nation-state.
Those that support the IRA have always been enemies of democracy and the rights of succession to minorities everywhere.