Irish unity: Iceberg or Opportunity?
The Dublin Review of Books is an on-line journal that publishes short and long-form contributions on literature, history, arts, society, politics and culture. It is well worth checking out and not just because access is free. The articles are generally of a high standard.
An exception was a piece that appeared in December from a regular contributor. John Wilson Foster (whose Wikipedia page describes him as a literary critic and cultural historian) wrote on the rising tide of discussion about Irish unity, given the prospect of referendums on the issue north and south of the border becoming “live” possibilities sooner than some might have thought when they were provided for in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Mr. Wilson Foster’s view is summed up in the title of his piece: “Too much too soon”[i]. I will attempt to summarise his case before reflecting on it.
Calls for a referendum, even for a debate on a future Ireland, whatever the source along the spectrum, from the committed and impatient to the more cautious and aspirational, are all premature — whether they emanate from Sinn Féin, organisations like Ireland’s Future or the Taoiseach’s shared island unit.
Why?
First, whatever such “calls” are designated; debates, reviews, reflections or studies, they are all predicated on the presumption that a united Ireland is the right answer. Such moves are all unilateral, without engagement with and oblivious to unionists’ sensibilities and sensitivities. They are all about “getting the north”.
Second, any dimension of persuasion has as its backstop the expectation that breeding alone will eventually cause nationalists to outnumber unionists and deliver the issue. The mailed fist protrudes prominently from the velvet glove. It’s like Tony Soprano grinning broadly as he offers to buy your business for a reasonable price. For unionists, hearing these drumbeats “is like being present at one’s own elaborate funeral”. “Quite simply, the micks have it. The prods are done for.”
Third, “the unification campaign is founded precisely on Irish history and its alleged imperatives”, the fulfilment of the mission of 1916. As such, it will be predicated on the notions of the southern state as a success and the northern enclave as a failure. Any such campaign “simply will not fly”, not least because it would be founded on illusion. Before embarking on any campaign, the south needs to contemplate its historic navel more openly and honestly than it has done heretofore, especially the religious discrimination embedded in its post-independence past and longer history, for which the south needs to recant and apologise.
Fourth, what’s the hurry? Before Brexit threw a spanner in the works…
Catholics and Protestants were coming together in a shared home place, a time when those of a Catholic or nationalist background could even take the lion’s share of the administering of the capital city… Who knows where this might have led in a generation once Northern Ireland was sincerely made to work and unionists no longer felt besieged?
These green shoots of reconciliation are being withered by this impetuous revanchism. “It’s all far too soon and too headstrong.”.
A crucial time-sensitive work in progress — making a non-sectarian Northern Ireland work, which I have always thought a prerequisite to any reasonable talk of a united Ireland — will be cancelled overnight.
Fifth, there has been little or no consideration of what concessions will need to be made to unionists to reconcile them to unity. More generally, is the south ready for the greater intensity and broader deliberate pluralism that will be required for the project to work? More pointedly still, is “unity” in the sense of a homogeneous society possible at all? History, before and post-partition, has created two obviously different societies. Can they be put back together again as one?
What unionist symbols will be incorporated into the Southern public sphere — and what residual anti-British, anti-Protestant and anti-unionist political and cultural manifestations will be stripped out of the new Ireland? Will the Catholic church continue to dominate primary education? What will be “the mandatoriness and purview of the Irish language”. Will there be an entirely new and deliberately representative police force? Will there, indeed can there, be a shared history — will the Troubles be represented nationally as a historical necessity or as something more akin to the vicious terrorism that the IRA campaign of the Troubles was? Likewise, for a shared contemporary culture.
Sixth, there is the risk of a backlash. The grisly possibilities are implied clearly but stated only obliquely.
If the unification issue really spills into the unprepared public sphere, we will all relive the nightmare of history from which James Joyce said we were trying to awake.
…if the unity actually became a real and serious debate, I suspect some buried resentment among southern Protestants might disinter itself.
Rallies, meetings, “debates” in the highly territorial public sphere will provoke protests and probably worse, since unhealed wounds heighten sensitivities and inflame feelings.
If we don’t pull back from this premature and disruptive campaign, I’m tempted to put a menacing traditional Chinese spin on Bob Dylan’s line in his great dark lament “Mississippi”: “Things should start to get interesting right about now.” I hope Southern onlookers are also listening.
So, if they are to hold off on pursuing Irish unity, what constructive options are there for nationalists to reconcile themselves to remaining within the Union?
Unity campaigners don’t seem to understand unionism, let alone have any sympathy for it.
They appear to believe that unionists who voted Remain in the Brexit referendum were indirectly voting for a united Ireland. They fail to understand that no amount of betrayal by British governments induces many unionists to want to leave the UK. So why not start now by engaging with all the recent arguments for retention of the union made by educated unionists, a proper engagement that has never taken place.
And there you have it.
I want to make three sets of observations on Mr. Wilson Foster’s arguments.
Let’s start with a reminder of the conditions for the attainment of Irish unity specified in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) to which all mainstream political parties on the island claim to subscribe and which was, in any event, endorsed by separate referendums north and south. The GFA acknowledged that it was then the wish of a majority within Northern Ireland that it should remain part of the United Kingdom and that this status would not change without the consent of a majority of its people voting to change it. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has the power to “call” such a poll…
if at any time it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland.
If the referendum did not pass, a minimum interval of seven years would apply before another could be held.
Arising from the GFA, the republic amended its constitution to provide:
that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island.
Key points relating to any vote in Northern Ireland are (a) that the available options are remaining in the Union or a united Ireland; and (b) that a decision is determined by “a” majority, in other words, a simple majority. The necessary condition for a united Ireland is that 50%+ one of voters in both jurisdictions should be in favour of it. There is room for debate about whether that should be regarded as a sufficient as well as necessary aspirational target, but there is no provision within the agreement for a “higher bar” of acceptability such as some form or threshold of cross-community consent between so-called “nationalists” and “unionists”.
One might expect, in the abstract and in a very “broad brush” way, that people voting for avowedly nationalist or unionist parties in Northern Ireland are more likely to vote for or against Irish unity in any referendum. The explanation, indeed justification, for encouraging greater focus recently on the look, feel and shape of Irish unity is twofold:
- In terms of percentages of voters in elections, the numbers voting for unionist parties have progressively declined in recent decades from an absolute majority to a plurality; while
- the numbers voting for nationalist parties have risen to become a more substantial minority to the point that they now stand only a few percentage points behind the combined unionist vote.
The other significant ingredient in the mix is the growth of the middle ground which is non-aligned on the constitutional issue of up to 20% of voters, principally represented by Alliance. Less significant but not irrelevant in muddying the waters is the increased size of the immigrant population (around 6%) in Northern Ireland who are certainly neither nationalist nor unionist in outlook by birth whatever about adoption.
If there are “Micks” who already believe a positive referendum result is in the bag today, they are ignoring the succession of independent polls on the unity issue indicating firmly to the contrary — as well as the current configuration of the electoral map. The latter is less adverse than it was, but certainly not favourable.
Clearly the prospects for a successful “launch” of a united Ireland in the event of a successful referendum, would improve if it could be assured the support of a large rather than a narrow majority of voters in Northern Ireland and this prompts some level of onus on promoters of unity to maximise cross-community consensus in its favour. But there is no requirement for cross-community unanimity.
Equally clearly, the prospects of a referendum being successful in the first place depend on it being pitched not just to the already committed “base” but extending its support to include those only mildly attracted or at least open to the concept of Irish unity at least to some degree. The middle ground on the constitutional issue extends beyond the specific electoral middle ground to encompass “soft” nationalists and unionists who are some way open to being swayed either way, depending on the merits of the specific circumstances and package before them.
Second, I want to address Mr. Wilson Foster’s contention that the unity “debate” revolves entirely around the past rather than the future.
Some of this amounts to self-serving caricature. Certainly, home rule was largely Rome rule in the post-independence south which might fairly be described as having been a “cold house” for non-Catholics of all kinds — moreso for Protestantism than actual Protestants who came to independence with greater legacy wealth in money and land and who continued to enjoy privileged access to better employment in the professions, the banks and established companies like Guinness.
But the Catholic imprint and influence on today’s Ireland is almost entirely vestigial. The republic is not heaven on earth, not without its problems, but it is a bona fide secular, liberal society. End of story.
He is right too that there are differences between the “pasts” of the north and the south that cannot be moulded into a single, tranquil shared version of what might count as the past of an eventual united Ireland. These unerasable differences can generate disagreement, resentment and suspicion in both directions.
But then, within the past century, continental Europe endured two calamitous wars. Now, Ukraine apart, the continent enjoys an easy peace reinforced moreso than created by the existence of the European Union. Separately, the fabled “800 years of oppression” and the violent nature of the republic’s eventual rupture from the United Kingdom have left few lasting scars on the inter-island relationship. Indeed, what is remarkable in relation to the aftermath of our own independence and the end of the last world war in Europe is how quickly wounds healed.
The case for Irish unity is not, therefore, inherently hobbled by what has already gone before, but will stand or fall, in the round, on whether it offers the likelihood of a better life today and prospectively for people living on this island. It is a lot more about the future than the past.
But finally, what I find most remarkable about Mr. Wilson Foster’s piece is how tone deaf it is, entirely lacking in self-awareness, but saturated with self-absorption. “Whataboutery” easily becomes a dialogue of the deaf, a mode of argument better at reinforcing than defusing entrenched positions. But still, given the intensity of his pleas for sensitivity towards unionists and accusations of complacent triumphalism emerging among nationalists, we should remember some important facts.
Northern Ireland did not somehow emerge “naturally” as a coherent and cohesive entity that just happened to have a majority of inhabitants who contingently favoured remaining in the United Kingdom. It was deliberately carved out to deliver the largest possible population and intrinsic viability within Ireland that would be assured of an inbuilt, enduring Protestant and unionist majority; i.e., unionist by identity not contingent choice. It might be added that nationalists who suddenly found themselves sundered from the rest of Ireland were not consulted at all beforehand and were treated as second-class citizens at best for the first fifty years of Northern Ireland’s existence during which, no doubt, Mr. Wilson Foster believes they should have been educating themselves to realise how fortunate they were to be part of so glorious a union. Even when the dam began to break, the dribble of concessions that brought eventual approximate parity of esteem in treatment were resisted as vigorously and withheld for as long as possible by unionists. If unionists have any regard at all for the project of “making a non-sectarian Northern Ireland work”, the DUP’s boycott of Stormont is precious poor evidence of it. And the threat of unionist violence if their wishes are thwarted, renewed with little subtlety by Mr. Wilson Foster himself, is today as it has been for over a century, an established component of the unionist playbook.
Unionists are entitled to feel sad, uncomfortable, possibly even annoyed at any talk of a possible road to Irish unity, but not, as Mr. Wilson Foster protests, therefore entitled to insist that any discussion of it at all should be stifled altogether for fear of causing undue offence.
Instead, Mr. Wilson Foster implies that nationalists should just zip any talk about Irish unity until that halcyon moment when a reasonably representative sample of unionism would sidle up to them out of nowhere and say: “you know this united Ireland business you sometimes used witter on about? We appreciate your keeping silent about it this last while, but we’d be open to hearing a bit more about it now.”
Well, no. That won’t do. We are all adults. Oppose a united Ireland if you want, but blow the very idea of talking about it out of the water? No, you can’t! If a referendum comes, everyone can vote as they want, but unionist permission is not required for consideration of one to be part of the political discourse.
