Recent violence in Belfast has underlined the fragility of the peace process. Photo: Jason Cairnduff The View
Many interesting books are being published around the centenary of partition and the border. The Irish civil war of 1922-23 – however painful at the time and long after – is now history. In his detailed, critical but also sympathetic book, A Difficult Birth: The Early Years of Northern Ireland 1920-25, Alan Parkinson concludes sadly: “Northern Ireland, on the eve of its centenary, is arguably as divided today as it was back at its conception”, a point underlined by recent street violence.
Thankfully, living conditions have vastly improved in the interim, politicians in different communities are managing to work together much of the time, and lethal politically-motivated violence is both rare and unwanted, though it is a mistake to think that there are no circumstances in which it could recur.
The causes of tension need to be reduced, and the rhetoric and fear-mongering toned down. The condition set out in the Good Friday Agreement for holding a border poll, viz. a judgment by the secretary of state that the people of the North would vote for constitutional change to join a united Ireland, is nowhere near satisfied. There is no basis for believing that if the vote is lost by a significant margin this will nonetheless advance the case for a united Ireland, or that a second vote would necessarily be held any time soon thereafter. Given the sometimes-erratic nature of opinion polls and their openness to manipulation, they should not be the only deciding factor on when a border poll should be held. The clearest indication of a desire for constitutional change would be a majority vote in the assembly.
Turmoil
There is a degree of turmoil about constitutional relations elsewhere in the United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland, it has always been emphasised that both the status quo and any change to it rest on the principle of consent. Scotland’s place in the union, on the other hand, is becoming potentially independent of the principle of consent, and the British government may be entirely unmoved even by clear evidence from elections in May that an independence referendum could be passed. It may well be a protracted period of time before a second referendum in Scotland is agreed with Westminster. There is no certainty as to the outcome. There is no assurance that even in the event of an independent Scottish dominion emerging this would sway unionists in Northern Ireland to detach themselves from a UK state remaining with 60 million people or that it would create some irresistible momentum for them to do so.
Support
A united Ireland also requires concurrent support from the electorate of the Republic under the Good Friday Agreement. This also cannot be taken for granted, irrespective of conditions. The Republic sees itself today as a successful independent small state that is politically stable. It is not divided in the way that Northern Ireland is. Most parties, including the Government parties, will not want to repeat the failed strategy of anti-partition campaigns by pressing for a premature border poll that would not fail to ratchet up potentially explosive tensions. Even should a government after the next election be formed on the basis that a top priority would be pressing the British for a border poll and mobilising Irish-American led US congressional support for this, the British would be quite entitled to refuse, as long as the condition of likely majority support in Northern Ireland for constitutional change is not satisfied.
There is still far too much of an assumption that unionists can be bullied, harassed, cajoled and derided into a united Ireland. The growing chorus of nationalist voices who claim that unity is now inevitable should examine critically why that often confident expectation was never realised in the past, and what is so fundamentally different now.
In the 19th Century, the Irish Catholic bishops in the main supported an evolutionary, reform-based approach, avoiding mass bloodshed, so that when the political revolution happened it was accompanied by relatively limited violence, whether compared with 1798 or the scale of what was happening elsewhere, post-World War I, in Central and Eastern Europe. The Good Friday Agreement removed many grievances of the nationalist community with wide-ranging reforms, albeit not the fundamental grievance of being prevented from joining an independent Irish state. In tandem with the EU single market it removed the physical border and allowed people to interact freely across the island. In particular, the North remains de facto part of the EU single market and customs union, while preserving full access to the UK single market.
Pragmatism
Similar pragmatism is required of unionists and loyalists, the same pragmatism that they showed when they supported the Good Friday Agreement and its follow-up arrangements. Will unionist leaders demand that rigorous policing apply to illegal and environmentally noxious bonfires with offensive slogans around July 12? If the union is to survive, Northern Ireland has to be shared, and can never again exclusively belong to one tradition.
Negotiated
Those who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement on the unionist side recognised in the immortal words of Guiseppe di Lampedusa in The Leopard, the novel about mid-19th Century Sicily: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Extravagant claims were made in 1985 about the fatal consequences for the union of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which did not come to pass. Similar claims about the protocol are just as wide of the mark. Unionism is unwise to rely on what elsewhere would be described as identity politics. Orchestrated rioting and attacks on the police do not attract much British sympathy. They also hold back the Northern Ireland economy, which longer term will undermine the union, while doing nothing to cure deprivation.
For everyone’s sake across the island, we should concentrate on trying cooperatively to develop the best of what we have, not pull it apart. Rebuilding after Covid-19 and Brexit will be no easy task. The focus should be on health and the economy, not on the mirage of imminent constitutional change.
