The View
Martin Mansergh
It used to be said that whenever the British came close to solving the Irish Question the Irish changed the question. The Good Friday Agreement addressed the causes of conflict in Northern Ireland, but now it is the British who have changed the question.
A border poll post-Brexit would not just be about Irish unity versus remaining in the UK. It would also be about whether a majority of people in Northern Ireland see their future inside or outside the European Union, taking into account the nature of any Brexit deal. Allowing the people to revisit a Brexit decision, that is not working out, would be a better outcome.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald had it right the first time, when she said a border poll would be premature until the outcome of Brexit negotiations is known. She had to beat a hasty retreat, and demand an immediate one, when her party’s northern mentors reacted negatively.
Irish unity
Insistence on Irish unity may pay electoral rewards, without ever advancing the actual objective. According to John Bew’s biography, Clement Attlee, British Labour leader and later Prime Minister, once dismissed party militancy, saying he was “sufficiently experienced in warfare to know that the frontal attack with a flourish of trumpets, heartening as it is, is not the best way to capture a position”. That is also the abiding lesson of the all-party Anti-Partition campaign in the late 1940s.
Republicans looking for an early border poll should be careful of what they wish for. To pre-empt the arrival of a Catholic majority, unionists could decide that it would be in their interest to have a border poll, expecting a clear majority for continuance of the Union, and then claiming this was a decision for a generation, even though the Agreement allows further polls at seven years’ intervals.
Experience elsewhere, in Quebec, Scotland and Catalonia, does not support the hope that a poll defeat builds momentum for ultimate victory. Holding a referendum with no majority for constitutional change would raise tensions needlessly, and could open a permanently discouraging Pandora’s box of difficulties and divisions even amongst nationalists.
In this area, contradictory opinion polls are quite unreliable. While the NI Secretary of State has independent discretion to call a border poll, one must be called if it appears likely that a majority in Northern Ireland wish to become part of a united Ireland.
There is criticism that in theory a united Ireland could come about on a very narrow majority of 50% + 1, though that does not deter Brexit being pushed through based on a narrow UK-wide majority. In reality, if opinion were that evenly divided, it would not satisfy the criterion of likelihood of change requiring the calling of a border poll.
Irish unity would take place in different circumstances from German unity. The German Democratic Republic imploded with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The danger was a mass migration from East to West Germany. The obstacle to German unity had always been Soviet military force. Defenders disputing that East Germany had been a criminal régime were few. In contrast, a united Ireland could not just be the Republic writ large.
Unionists accept that Northern Ireland was a cold house for Catholics, a metaphor implying that they should have found a warmer home elsewhere, but they will never accept it was illegitimate or that the Provisional IRA campaign to destroy it was legitimate. Any attempt to modify the Irish State’s unequivocal repudiation of that campaign by a future government or president would create a political storm.
Many advocates of Irish unity in the Republic mistakenly assume that all unionists require are material and symbolic reassurances that they can hold what they already have, such as the Commonwealth with the crown as its head, British citizenship, the substance of the National Health Service, and existing welfare benefits.
Suggestions that Irish unity will be part-financed by large-scale public sector ‘rationalisation’, ie redundancies, mainly in Northern Ireland, are anything but reassuring to either community. Northern Ireland living standards, slightly above those of the Republic, continue to be underwritten by an £11 billion subsidy from the rest of the UK. Irish unity, like German unity, would have substantial costs for the larger entity.
Pre-1914, Belfast played a role in global markets. How will Northern Ireland mainstream itself outside the EU? The Irish Government simply wishes to preserve the status quo of a frictionless border, an important part of the peace dividend. The EU fear that the British are trying to use the border as leverage to preserve the entire UK’s free access to the Single Market and Customs Union, while seeking competitive advantage by being able to shed existing EU obligations and make their own trade deals.
Religious factors, which played an emotive part in resistance to Home Rule 100 years ago, figure little in today’s debates. Substituted for the nearly extinct fear of Rome Rule is a ‘godlier than thou’ charge by a South Belfast rector that the Republic is now the least Christian part of the western world (Irish Times, July 17).
The gulf in attitudes and experience after 100 years of partition will not be easily bridged. Narrow gauge republicanism persists in traditional attitudes that show little instinct for accommodation.
How does a party reconcile the claim that the question of the Union Jack alongside the tricolour on top of Leinster House could be discussed, while one of its TDs presses for the statue of Prince Albert, patron of the sciences, to be removed from Leinster Lawn? It is deplorable that the new Garda Commissioner, Drew Harris, previously PSNI Deputy Chief Constable, was variously described as an outsider, a foreign candidate and had to defend his Irishness.
If Ireland is to be reintegrated, there will be many others, past and present, long written off for not conforming to nationalist paradigms of Irishness, including those who fought in two world wars, whose place in a new citadel will need to be guaranteed.