Fault Lines #2: A Nation Once Again?
The prospects and contradictions of a united Ireland
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
The so-called 'Decade of Centenaries' that has marked the Irish State’s official reckoning with the historic events that ultimately gave birth to it a century ago reaches its culmination in 2022.
Two weekends ago, the current government, comprising Fianna Fail and Fine Gael - the successors of the opposing sides to the Treaty that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State and resulting Civil War - commemorated the formal transfer of power from British forces at a low-key ceremony in Dublin Castle.
Ahead of us lie the most challenging phases of this collective public memory, with the onset of the Civil War and the most bitterly contested chapters in Ireland’s progress toward self-determination.
What brings these historical events into technicolour is the emergence as the most popular party in the country of Sinn Féin, a party that claims direct lineage from the independence period, but whose roots lie in subsequent political struggles in Northern Ireland.
While the party has participated in the official remembering, it has a fundamentally different perspective on the past than the ‘Civil War parties’ and is putting this at the centre of the political narrative it deploys to become the lead party of government in Dublin in the near future.
What is most arresting about this moment in Irish politics is that at precisely the time when ‘Civil War politics’ is said to have ended, with the rapprochement of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, a new front in Ireland’s confrontation with its unresolved past is opening up with implications for politics across these islands.
As far as Sinn Féin is concerned, the entire political system in the Republic is irredeemably partitionist having connived with the British to agree on the Treaty that formalised the independence of the 26 counties, and the subsequent Boundary Commission that copperfastened the place of the political entity now known as ‘Northern Ireland’ within the United Kingdom.
The cultural critic Leon Wieseltier once warned that nationalist politics grounded in collective memory can “destroy the empirical attitude that is necessary for the responsible use of power.” However, the political utility of Sinn Féin’s perspective on history is that it emboldens its grand narrative of the failings of the Republic and the political establishment that has ruled it since independence.
There is a throughline that runs from what Sinn Féin views as the betrayal over the Treaty all the way to the housing crisis that currently afflicts the Republic, and its common theme is a nation for which the ‘force of destiny’ has been postponed due to the conservative compromise that brought it forth.
It is a view of the Republic that is widely shared among the nationalist population in the North. Witness the recent controversy over the remarks of former civil rights leader Bernadette McAliskey that "the northern Catholic was and still is looked on by the southern state as not worth the trouble.”
Moments like these emphasise the fundamentally different public narrative between the North and the Republic. As this subsequent analysis by Darren Litter from Queens University in Belfast demonstrated, there was no historical basis for McAliskey’s claim, and yet the sense of abandonment and resentment persists:
Nonetheless, it is clear that a considerable majority of southerners were critical of the PIRA and wider republican violence and it is this, rather than blanket rejection, which forms the feeling of historical alienation among a certain northern cohort. As with most northern Catholics, the southern Irish could see the logic of the civil rights movement as a response to the situation faced by the minority there. But they could not see the proportion or moral justification in endlessly bombing and shooting British soldiers, and more especially policemen, civil servants, and members of the public. Prof Niall Ó Dochartaigh quotes poet Desmond Egan: "two wee girls were playing tig near a car… How many counties would you say are worth their scattered fingers?"
However, ambivalence remained the predominant response of public opinion in the Republic to the Troubles. As Brian Hanley notes in his excellent history of the period in the Republic, “people could and did hold very contrasting views about the North.”
At the height of the Troubles, this equivocation was captured in a 1979 Economic and Social Research Institute study on attitudes towards Northern Ireland in the Republic, co-authored by the late Richard Sinnott, which found that:
a plurality of respondents sympathise with the motives of the IRA…and a minority reject their motives. To repeat a point made in regard to attitude to IRA activities, these attitudes should be seen as an element of people’s approach to the Northern Ireland problem and assessed as such. Moreover, sympathy for motives may lead to an attitude of support for activities and, in so far as it does, it presents a problem for political and opinion leaders concerned to condemn IRA activity and diminish support for it.”
Sinn Féin strikes for power
Perhaps the most arresting factor in Sinn Féin’s rise to become the most popular party in the Republic is that support for a united Ireland is not a significant factor for voters. Instead, it is the bread and butter issues of public services, particularly housing, that are most salient.
A recent Ireland Thinks poll in the Sunday Independent illustrated this dramatically:
At the same time, public opinion in the Republic strongly supports a united Ireland, with nearly two-thirds of voters in favour in a recent poll for the Irish Times. However, there is very significant opposition to some of the likely compromises that would flow from this, particularly the prospect of a new flag, anthem and even having unionist politicians as part of the government in Dublin. The sense is of an electorate that aspires towards unity but hasn’t begun to grapple with the consequences.
Among the ironies of Brexit is that, despite being supported in Northern Ireland largely by unionist parties, it has made a united Ireland considerably more likely. The greater integration of the economies of the North and the Republic within the wider EU single market for goods and customs union and increasing divergence from the UK is already marked. While North-South political and institutional relationships remain suboptimal, the changing political economy of the island of Ireland post-Brexit is drawing the two political entities that comprise it closer together.
This convergence is reflected in recent polling in Northern Ireland, where a majority expects a referendum within the next decade, most notably among voters who are neither unionist nor nationalist.
With the imminent publication of a new census, which for the first time is likely to show a Catholic majority and Sinn Féin on course to emerge as the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections in May, is history inexorably moving in the direction of a united Ireland?
Contradictions
The paradox of the current situation is that the advent of a Sinn Féin-led government in both jurisdictions may in fact hinder the momentum towards a united Ireland.
To understand why it is important to untangle the process that would lead to a unification referendum. Irrespective of who is in government in either jurisdiction, the sole power to call a referendum lies with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who is free to do so at any time if they believe such a vote would result in a united Ireland.
If we assume that the majority of voters in the Republic that now say they support a united Ireland will vote this way in a referendum (not a trivial assumption), then the crucial swing vote for a border poll to succeed is among those in the North who see themselves as neither unionist nor nationalist. In the 2020 Northern Ireland Life and Times survey, this group was found to constitute the largest proportion of respondents (42%), and this includes people who would have considered themselves unionist or nationalist five years ago. This is the decisive group for a united Ireland, and they are growing all the time.
To the extent that this group has a core belief, it is a disdain for the narrow sectarianism of both unionism and nationalism. Conversely, they are attracted by the liberalism, pluralism and pro-Europeanism of the contemporary Republic. A Sinn Féin government in Dublin would challenge these perceptions such that a united Ireland may and not without good reason: the party is equivocal in its stances on Europe, liberalism and pluralism.
It is easy to forget that Sinn Féin opposed every European referendum in the Republic until its political interests aligned with EU membership after Brexit. The party’s commitment to pluralism is counteracted by its "50 per cent plus one" stance on a border poll. I have written elsewhere that SF is marching towards the centre in its economic policy. However, it continues to send mixed messages on the type of Ireland it envisages when in power.
Late last year, the party’s leading thinker, Eoin O’Broin gave an interview that should have gained more attention. In a lengthy elucidation of the party’s ideology and a rejection of liberalism, O’Broin took the opportunity to re-state what he calls the ‘left republican’ tradition. First articulated by anti-Treaty martyr Liam Mellows, for O’Broin it prioritises the ending of partition over the achievement of broader social outcomes:
The central debate… is there are two fundamental elements to the Left Republican project which one is the ending of partition and the achievement of national independence and the second is a democratic socialist republic. An Ireland of equals, an egalitarian economy and society, whatever language you use. And that you know, if you look at the evolution of modern Sinn Féin from that period of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, really the ideological underpinning of the party’s current project really rests with Liam Mellows.
And the idea is that those two things are important, but national independence is more important, and the socioeconomic dimension is at the service of the national. I think that becomes a little bit more integrated during the history of the party in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. That both are important, but we talk about a primary and a secondary, that you have to achieve national reunification to be able to achieve the ultimate objective of the party which is democratic socialism, that’s in the party’s constitution. Whichever way you cut that; you’re still not integrating the two fully. Either one is more important than the other or one comes first and the other after.
My strong view is if you want to achieve both you have to do it at the same time. You have to integrate fully at all times the national objectives and the social-economic objectives. And I suppose, what I was challenging the party to think about is really to move away from the Mellows formulation, which is one more important than the other, one before the other and integrate the two at all aspects and all moments of the party’s political advance.
Main proposals of Liam Mellows' document which he smuggled out of Mountjoy Jail shortly before his execution. Known as the 'Mellows Testament'. 9 proposals are shown on this sheet. Source: Irish Labour Party
While O’Broin’s rallying cry of a democratic socialist republic may be aimed largely at Sinn Féin’s base, it is unlikely that his message will go unheeded among unionists or neutrals. In advancing a political-economic model for a united Ireland for which there is no majority support, and which fails to recognise the economic constraints of EU and Euro membership, it is hard to see O’Broin’s intervention as evidence of the variety of political hubris that may lead a Sinn Féin government in Dublin to overreach in its pursuit of a united Ireland.
In the same way that the unionist parties supported Brexit in a quixotic and disastrous misreading of its implications for the union, Sinn Féin risks interpreting it’s likely coming to power in Dublin as an endorsement for a predetermined version of Irish unification, with equally detrimental consequences for national unity.