The new dawn of peace in Ireland will probably last for at least a decade, then as racist crime begins to climb, the violence will bubble for a few years, but by 2025 at the latest the New Troubles will have erupted.
Okay, so this lands a major tsunami on the current mood of happy clappy euphoria sweeping the island now the new power-sharing Executive has finally ended eight centuries of religious slaughter.
In spite of all the well-meaning back slapping, grinning photo calls and fresh faced ministers touring the North, the latest hate crime figures show another significant rise.
In the year ending 31st March, 2007, according to the cops, racist incidents were up 111 or almost 12 per cent on the same period for 2006. And the 2006 figures had shown a rise on the 2005 data.
One of the first joint events by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness since taking over the reins of power less than a month ago was to host a reception at Stormont for the North’s ethnic communities.
Everybody wants to work together in this new honeymoon of supposedly lasting peace – and that includes welcoming migrant workers, the ethnic communities and asylum seekers to the island. They are everybody’s friends.
Well, if this is truly the case, is the increase in racial crime imagined? Nobody wants to talk about racial crime for fear of being branded a scaremonger, racist, fascist or Nazi.
Who wants to speak about a potential race war when 800 years of religious conflict have just been finally solved. The late Enoch Powell’s career in Britain came to a shuddering halt following his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech.
But the seeds of the next Troubles are already being sown. Worse still, they are being carefully nurtured right under the noses of the luvvy duvvy Assembly.
In this month’s parliamentary and local government elections in Scotland, England and Wales, the Far Right British National Party notched up more than 301,000 votes.
And while it only increased its seats tally by a couple and the feared break-through did not emerge, it should have sounded an alarm bell as to what could happen on this island if racial crime is not properly combated.
Already, nutters in the Ku Klux Klan have launched their own so-called umbrella group to unite all of Ireland’s various loony Right-wing crack pots under the banner of the White Aryan Resistance.
Stickers from the equally extremist British People’s Party have appeared across the North, and it’s a dead cert the BNP will want to follow up its vote in Britain by trying to raise its profile in the North.
The power-sharing Executive between Sinn Fein and the DUP will last – even beyond the eventual retirement of Paisley Senior.
It will cement relations between Unionists and Republicans so firmly that anything resembling the sectarian Troubles will never again erupt.
But another political volcano could flare when the ‘feel good factor’ fades from the welcomes to the ethnic communities – when Catholic Irish and Protestant Irish are in direct competition with Migrant Irish for jobs, homes, benefits and university places.
The New Troubles which will erupt by 2025 will be Catholics and Protestants uniting against the migrants – especially if large numbers of those migrants are Asian Muslims.
How the ghosts of Powell and Blueshirt boss Eoin O’Duffy will laugh if this seemingly far off nightmare becomes a social reality before 2025.
