When does Ireland’s passionate support for Palestine spill over into anti-semitism?

Posted on Monday, 8 December, 2025 by andypollak

I should begin this blog with a declaration of interest. My father was a Czech Jew, a political refugee who arrived in Ireland in 1948, and my mother was an Ulster Presbyterian. So I am not a typical Irish person, far from it, and I am not writing on this occasion as an objective observer. Having said that, I have regularly stood behind a ‘Grandfathers for Justice for Palestine’ banner, as part of the Grandfathers against Racism group, protesting US support for the genocidal Israeli war in Gaza outside the American embassy in Dublin, and on pro-Palestine demonstrations.

However I found the latest, much commented upon issue of Dublin city councillors trying to ‘dename’ a small park and memorial in the Rathgar area of the city named after Chaim Herzog, the Belfast-born, Dublin-raised son of the chief rabbi of Ireland, and from 1983 to 1993 president of Israel, disturbing. The area is home to Ireland’s only Jewish primary and secondary schools (Stratford College), and many members of that small community in Dublin.

The city council’s cross-party commemorations committee had voted by nine votes to one to recommend to the council the removal of the Herzog name from the park. The only dissenting voice was the veteran, independent-minded Labour councillor Dermot Lacey. The name debate had begun in June, when a Sinn Fein councillor, Kourtney Kenny, submitted a motion to rename the park after a five year old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces last January along with six of her relatives.

The chief rabbi, Yoni Wieder, wrote: “To remove the name ‘Herzog’ from the park would be a shameful erasure of Irish-Jewish history and would send a painful message of isolation to a minority already experiencing rising hostilities.”1

Both the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin and the Tánaiste, Simon Harris, called for the proposal to be withdrawn. Mr Martin called it “divisive and wrong” and said it would “erase the distinctive and rich contribution to Irish life of the Jewish communities over many decades, including actual participation in the Irish War of Independence and the emerging state.” He said the move was “a denial of our history and will without any doubt be seen as anti-Semitic.”2

In the event, the council’s chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, announced that he would be withdrawing the item from the council’s agenda for its meeting last week and referring it back to the commemorations committee because the correct legislative procedures had not been followed, with “administrative mis-steps” in those procedures. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Ray McAdam of Fine Gael, said the council’s executive had “completely messed up” by allowing the item onto the agenda.

However the issue has not gone away, and it led to ructions at home and internationally, with Israeli and US politicians berating Dublin and Ireland for alleged anti-semitism. But was this really an example of Irish anti-semitism? Was it Ireland’s passionate support for Palestine and opposition to the Israeli government and army’s horrendous excesses in Gaza and the West Bank spilling over too far in that ugly direction? Former Tánaiste, Senator Michael McDowell, thought so. “Ireland has unfortunately a history of anti-Semitic subculture at social and, at one time, political levels,” he wrote in the Irish Times.3

He pointed, in particular, to Sinn Fein’s past record in this area. Mary Lou McDonald had delivered orations at the statue in Fairview Park to Sean Russell, who in 1940 travelled to Nazi Germany to seek help for the IRA in its campaign of violence in Britain and Northern Ireland. In the same year the IRA issued a statement hailing the Nazis as “friends and liberators of the Irish people” and the IRA publication, War News, welcomed the ‘cleansing fire’ of the Wehrmacht driving Jews from Europe.

However it wasn’t only the IRA. In 1946 the head of the Department of Justice, Thomas Coyne, issued a memorandum arguing against allowing 10 Jewish refugee families (around 40 people) into the country. He wrote: “Although the Jewish community in Ireland is only 3,907 persons, according to the 1946 census, there is a fairly strong anti-Semitic feeling throughout the country based, perhaps, on historical reasons, the fact that the Jews have remained a separate community within the community and have not permitted themselves to be assimilated, and that for their numbers they appear to have disproportionate wealth and influence.”4

Later that year, after chief rabbi Isaac Herzog – Chaim Herzog’s father – had interceded with him, the Taoiseach, Eamon De Valera, allowed 100 orphaned Jewish children, survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, to come to Ireland. However the Department of Justice continued to object, claiming that Jewish refugees “do not assimilate with our own people but remain a sort of colony of a worldwide Jewish community. This makes them a potential irritant in the body politic and has led to disastrous results from time to time in other countries.”

In 1978 Father Michael McGreil, in his landmark study Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland, concluded there was “a moderate degree of anti-Semitic prejudice in Dublin. The pattern of this prejudice is along classical lines, i.e. the negative monetary and religious myths are still believed by a significant percentage of Dublin adults.” Nearly 60% of those surveyed agreed that Jews were over-represented in the control of money matters. In a follow-up survey in 1996 McGreil found a relatively high level of prejudice towards Jews in more rural areas, with 20% of people regarding Jews as being responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.

In the past 30 years there has been little or no evidence of anti-Semitism in Ireland. But is it back in response to the genocide in Gaza? Certainly two Jewish school principals interviewed on RTE’s Liveline last week thought we were moving in that direction. Nathan Barrett of Stratford College felt that the proposal to dename Herzog Park, and anti-Semitic abuse more generally, had added to the Jewish community’s sense of vulnerability. “Students and young people feel they can’t express their identity when they leave the school,” he said. Simon Lewis, a thoughtful commentator on educational matters, recognised that Chaim Herzog was “part of the Zionist story of Israeli occupation.” However he went on: “The other side is it’s one of the very few places in Ireland that was named after someone who was Jewish. The action of removing a Jewish name is quite a big thing.”

This is dangerous territory. Removing Jewish names from signs, memorials and shopfronts was one of the things the Nazis did when they came to power in Germany. And as one friend put it, tongue only half in his cheek, why should we stop at Jewish names? What about all the English aristocratic oppressors whose names still adorn street signs all over Dublin?

The Irish left, with their fervent support for Palestine and antagonism to Zionism, may be particularly susceptible to the charge of anti-Semitism. There is a warning in how it infiltrated the British Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. When one looks at the Israeli government’s brutal apartheid-style repression of Palestinians in the West Bank and the monstrous racism of far right ministers like Bezalel Smotrich, with his belief that it is “just and moral” to starve two million Palestinians in Gaza, it is sometimes difficult not to sympathise with them.

There is a more Ireland-specific point here, of particular relevance as we move – as many of us hope – towards some kind of unity. It is about who is really Irish. Are Jewish-Irish people really Irish? James Joyce certainly thought so since he made the most famous Irishman in 20th century world literature, Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, a Jewish Irishman. Can the new immigrant Irish – the Africans, Indians, Brazilians, Poles, Ukrainians and others who have come to live among us – be really Irish? The people waving tricolours in working class areas of Dublin clearly don’t think so. Are the 800,000 Northern Protestants, the great majority of whom don’t even want to be citizens of an Irish state, really Irish? Or do many people in this republic, despite all the huge social changes of the past 30 years, still believe that to be really Irish, you have to be culturally (not theologically) Catholic and Gaelic, and maybe republican and anti-British into the bargain?

1 ‘Chief Rabbi: Move to erase Chaim Herzog’s name and history is cruel hammer blow’, Irish Times, 1 December

2 ‘Proposal to dename Herzog Park ‘divisive and wrong’, Taoiseach says’, Irish Times, 1 December

3 ‘Dublin city councillors, cop yourselves on’, 3 December

4 Dermot Keogh, Jews in 20th Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (Cork, 1998), p.222

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Republic of Ireland | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

A wise and balanced examination of unity by two of Ireland’s finest journalists

Posted on Wednesday, 12 November, 2025 by andypollak

Fintan O’Toole is the nearest thing Ireland gets to a public intellectual: a writer of erudition and intellect who tackles the political and cultural issues of the day and of the nation through a widely read column in a prestigious newspaper, in his case the Irish Times. Similarly, for my money, Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph is the finest journalist currently working in Northern Ireland. Neither of them can be easily pigeon-holed into the two traditional viewpoints of commentators, politicians and so many ordinary citizens on this island: nationalist or unionist.

They have recently come together to publish a fascinating and imaginatively crafted examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments for and against Irish unity, entitled simply For and Against a United Ireland. In this short 177 page paperback book, commissioned by the ARINS project, O’Toole and McBride each take on and explore the arguments from each camp. I would make this balanced and scrupulous treatment of the great existential issue of this island required reading for every Irish and Northern Irish sixth year school student and first year undergraduate (and their parents). This book, say the authors in their introduction, is “especially for the undecideds.”

In a jointly written postscript the authors come to their conclusions. These are: 1) a border poll is not imminent, “nor would it be wise to hold a referendum for a considerable period because even nationalist politicians are for now mostly engaging with the issue rhetorically.”

2) “Irish unity could work to create a settled, pluralist and prosperous island that is moving decisively beyond the bloody enmity of the past. That would require years of hard slog before a referendum and decades of difficult and for the most part terribly dull work after a vote for unity.”

3) Preparing the ground for a Border poll isn’t simply opening the way to Irish unity, as many unionists fear. “Much of what can be done to make a referendum meaningful – for example, sharing resources to create better health services on both sides of the border or boosting investment in public transport, education and green infrastructure – is well worth doing anyway. It makes life better for everyone, regardless of whether Northern Ireland ultimately opts to remain in the UK or join a united Ireland.”

4) The outcome of a Border poll “will be determined by the growing number of people who are open to persuasion. The open-minded will not be swayed by slogans or appeals to tribal solidarity. They will want good answers to hard questions. Both sides will have to be prepared to make arguments grounded on facts about the present and realistic projections about the future.” They point out that many of those who will go to the polls – including the 20% of people in the Republic and 10% of people in Northern Ireland who were born outside Ireland or the UK respectively – “will have identities that do not align themselves with traditional Green/Orange, Protestant/Catholic or British/Irish binaries. They will be looking not for historic vindication or vengeance, but for better futures for themselves and their children.”

On the way to these joint conclusions the two authors separately tackle the ‘for’ and ‘against’ positions. The arguments here are dense and this short blog can only give a flavour of them. Fintan O’Toole argues the case against unity by saying “unknown change” is currently what is on offer. He quotes the 2022 ARINS/Irish Times opinion survey that people in the Republic identified as their biggest concern “whether a united Ireland would be peaceful”.

“The threat of serious violence could be diminished if the shape of a unified Ireland were made clear in advance of a poll and, critically, if that shape were one in which those who wish to retain a British allegiance were reassured by generous concessions to their sense of identity. But there is no great reason to believe that people in the Republic are in general prepared to make those concessions.”

O’Toole says “there is an irreconcilable contradiction between between the way Southerners see a united Ireland – essentially a Greater 26 Counties – and the way it would have to function on the levels of both institutions and symbols.”

He quotes the economists John Fitzgerald and Edgar Morgenroth claiming that the cost of Ireland supporting the North after unity, when the costs of increased public sector wages and welfare rates are included, would rise to almost 10% of national income. This would require a dramatic increase in taxation and/or a major reduction in government expenditure. However a 2021 Irish Independent poll found that 54% of people said they would be unwilling to pay more taxes to fund a united Ireland.

He says the evidence suggests that one thing voters would expect before any border poll is a detailed health care plan for the whole island. However “if the Republic has been unable over many decades to integrate its own health service, how can we imagine it would be capable of amalgamating it with a service north of the border founded on very different ideological and organisational principles?” For example, before creating an all-island National Health Service – which is what people seem to want – the South would have to nationalise 10 powerful private hospital groups, some of them owned by Catholic religious orders.

He concludes by saying that it is “simply fanciful” to imagine that the South’s “creaking system” of housing, healthcare, childcare, public transport and infrastructure is “capable of managing, in addition, all the immense practical problems that unification would bring.” In this sense, “there is simply no evidence that most people in the South have given any real thought to what unification would mean.”

“Bluntly, unification – if it is not to be chaotic, costly and potentially violent – demands a much more robust and effective Southern state than the one that currently exists. When there is a more settled North and a stronger South, unification may become feasible. Before then, it must remain in the realm of vague possibilities.”

In his arguments in favour of unity, O’Toole says that “Northern Ireland was a product of the fusion of three forces: demographic, economic and political. It was made possible by the existence of a secure Protestant majority in the north-east of the island; the radical superiority of the Northern economy over its Southern counterpart; and the firm alliance between Ulster unionism and British conservatism. But the stark reality is that each of these three pillars has now crumbled.”

On demography, he says that in 1926 33.5% of the population of Northern Ireland were Catholic. By 2021, when religion and ‘upbringing’ are combined, 45.7% of the population were ‘Catholic’, compared to 43.5% who were ‘Protestant, Other Christian or Christian-related.’ So “the demographic ground has shifted irrevocably.”

On the economy, over the past century Northern Ireland has lost much of its industrial base, with manufacturing employment having fallen from 169,000 in 1970 to 89,000 in 2024. Conversely the South is now more industrial than the North. “By far the biggest part of its economy is in services, but industry nonetheless accounts for 19% of its workforce, compared with 11% in the North.”

In politics, he quotes the conservative Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Brooke’s carefully-crafted and mould-breaking 1990 speech indicating that “the British government has no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland.”

O’Toole concludes that “the case for a united Ireland is highly problematic – but only if we think of unification as an event rather than a process.” He says Northern Ireland’s separation from the United Kingdom would be “a consensual process of transferring sovereignty from one friendly state to another.” The UK would remain “centrally involved in a process it is pledged to facilitate. There would be a range of governmental actors – Dublin, London, Brussels and perhaps (depending on the long-term effects of the second Trump administration) Washington – working together to ease the process.”

He believes that “the great advantage of planning seriously for the possibility of a united Ireland is that most of what needs to be done to prepare for it is good for everyone whether unification happens or not”: strengthening cross-border trade; creating a fair and efficient health service, north and south; making the two welfare systems more effective at lifting people out of poverty, and ending the disproportionate religious control of education in both jurisdictions. “This is what will make a united Ireland attractive not just as an idea or aspiration, but as a process of tangible improvement in the daily lives of all who share the island.”

Citing opinion polls showing that unity is low on Southern voters’ list of priorities, and the comparable case of German unification, O’Toole makes the valid point that “most citizens in democracies do not spend a great deal of time thinking about abstract propositions…It is only when the proposition becomes real that most people will start to turn a general aspiration into a concrete decision. It is at that point that the ‘terms and conditions’ will come into play.”

Sam McBride’s arguments are not quite so forensic and statistic-driven as O’Toole’s. Arguing in favour of unity, he says that in 2025, “with Ireland economically prosperous and with the Catholic Church more powerless than at any time since the Act of Union, there is evidence of tangible change of the sort that means sharing this piece of earth without bloodshed [a favourite phrase of John Hume’s] is more possible than at any point since partition.”

He says that “a wise nationalist leadership would kill unionists with kindness…financial investment in unionist areas, gestures by nationalist leaders, and changing national symbols to show the seriousness of the commitment to a truly new dispensation.” He points out that “not only is Ireland a nation with a high regard for individual freedom, democracy and the rule of law, it is brimming with wealth. Whereas in 1974 amalgamation with the South would have meant poverty, now it means prosperity.”

He believes the threat of a violent loyalist backlash can be handled. UK intelligence agencies are known to have heavily infiltrated the loyalist paramilitaries. “If it is in Britain’s strategic interest to ensure a peaceful transfer of sovereignty, it should have a significant influence on how these organisations behave or at the very least have good intelligence on what they’re up to.”He also points out that any loyalist insurrection “would immediately transgress one of the prerequisites of a just war: it would have no chance of success.”

McBride’s arguments against unity are again based partly on the serious risk of violence and upheaval if a unity referendum is bungled:”a slim majority either way could be disastrous.””A united Ireland would not mean bolting Northern Ireland onto the Republic. It would mean dismantling both states and creating an entirely new country. To remake any state would be a major risk. But on an island whose soil is saturated with centuries of bloodshed and where hundreds of thousands of Northerners do not want such an outcome, it would be a gargantuan risk.”

He quotes the historian John Whyte observing that “for civil war to break out, it is not necessary for a majority of inhabitants to desire it. Quite small numbers of extremists on both sides can force a situation where, by reprisal and counter-reprisal, the peacefully inclined majority are obliged to seek protection from, and then give support to, the paramilitaries of their own community. This is how civil war began in Lebanon in 1975”. He also points out that the Republic’s defence forces are “farcically ill-equipped” to deal with any major outbreak of violence in the North.

Whereas nationalists continuously reassure unionists that their identities would be fully respected in a united Ireland, they ignore “the depth of anti-British sentiment that remains in Irish society”. McBride gives as examples of this the vandalisation and eventual abandonment of the wall in Glasnevin cemetery commemorating all those who died in the 1916 Rising, including British soldiers; and the abandonment by the Irish government of an event to mark the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police. [I would add the sectarian vitriol faced by Fine Gael’s Presbyterian candidate, Heather Humphreys, in the recent presidential election].

McBride also notes that the often suggested solution of inverting the Good Friday Agreement by maintaining Northern Ireland on a devolved basis while Dublin takes over the powers currently exercised by London, “would almost certainly be a mirage. It would mean keeping most of the bad bits of Northern Ireland [‘devolution has been shambolic’] while losing the key benefit – being part of a much larger UK.”

Much better for now, he argues, would be to “unite around making both parts of the island work, making the two parts of the island understand each other better, and leaving it to the wisdom of our descendants at some long-distant juncture to decade if a near-invisible border should be removed.”

“Once [in NI], unity was the only way to get rid of the worst excesses of unionist dominance. Now there is no dominance. It’s possible to have the best of both worlds: full access to the UK economically, professionally and practically, while being every bit as Irish as someone in Cork or Kerry.”

The authors’ final joint thought is a telling one. “The ultimate question in relation to unity will be whether, in a turbulent world, more people prefer the comforts of the familiar or believe that the challenges of the future can best be met in a transformed Ireland. While much of what will happen in the meantime is currently hard to imagine, this is one choice that we can control. We have been given the benefits of peace and time in which to consider this decision carefully. History trends to be sparing with those gifts.”

P.S. In a follow-up column in the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole writes of the extraordinary 238-page Department of Finance document called ‘Future Forty’, which maps the challenges the Irish State is likely to face between now and 2065. Extraordinary because it assumes that during that 40 year period “in all scenarios no change occurs to the current constitutional and political arrangements in both jurisdictions.”1

1 ‘The State is unified on not wanting to talk about unity’, Irish Times, 11 November

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Heather Humphreys’ big missed opportunity: to be the candidate of the whole Irish people

Posted on Thursday, 23 October, 2025 by andypollak

If the opinion polls are right, it looks as though Catherine Connolly will win tomorrow’s Irish presidential election by a distance. I believe Heather Humphreys missed a big opportunity: to take on some of John Hume’s mantle and put herself forward as the person who could begin to unite the Irish people, all the Irish people, including the Protestants of Northern Ireland.

Based on her record, Catherine Connolly has little or no interest in the North. She has expressed the daft hope that unity would come during her seven-year presidency. This is cloud cuckoo land stuff, meaningless except to keep her sponsors in Sinn Fein happy. Moderate unionists and the Northern centre ground – ground which Humphreys endlessly said she represented – want nothing to do with a Sinn Fein-led drive to a united Ireland, thus achieving the goal of the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence. My experience from talking to such people is that they believe if unity is to come, it will have to be a version carefully and painstakingly constructed by the centre parties in the Republic, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.

As a Monaghan Presbyterian (whose grandfather signed the Ulster Covenant), Humphreys would have been uniquely placed to reach out to Northern Protestants and unionists with a vision of a moderate, centre-led united Ireland. She would have been able to reach places and people even Hume could not have accessed. In one of her television appearances she said she had been talking to people in Newtownabbey, a unionist stronghold in Belfast’s northern suburbs. In contrast, when Connolly was asked who she had talked to in the North, she cited Ireland’s Future, the passionately (some might say fanatically) nationalist group lobbying for a Border poll that would lead to unity. I wonder if Connolly has ever had a serious conversation with a unionist in her life.

John Hume used to say that what was important was uniting Irish people rather than Irish territory. “The real division of Ireland is not a line on a map, but in the minds and hearts of its people”, he said. I believe Humphreys should have boldly made that her primary campaign message: that as president she, an Ulster Protestant, and certainly not Catherine Connolly, a far left republican from Galway, could be an important symbol of a ‘new Ireland’ that would genuinely embrace all the people of the island.

Heather Humphreys also calls herself an Irish republican. That fine journalist Sam McBride wrote in the Belfast Sunday Life earlier this month: “Few republicans would draw on the Presbyterian Church for inspiration, yet that is the well from which Fine Gael’s candidate Humphreys says she draws her republican inspiration. Her republicanism is that of Wolfe Tone, not the Wolfe Tones.”1

McBride reported that in 2016 Humphreys had travelled to Church House in Belfast, the headquarters of Irish Presbyterianism (the largest Protestant denomination in the North) to make a political speech as the Irish government minister responsible for overseeing the 1916 centenary celebrations (which it is widely acknowledged she did very successfully and even-handedly). She told the audience: ‘The very word ‘republican’ makes some of us uncomfortable, because of the way it has been manipulated and misused over the last 100 years. I have previously described myself as a proud Ulster woman, a Protestant and an Irish republican. When I speak of republicanism, I speak of it in its truest sense: equality, fraternity and liberty. Republicanism in its purest form is simply the right for everyone to have their say and the right to choose those who represent us – a principle upon which the Presbyterian Church is based.”

I heard nothing like those resounding (and potentially unifying) words from Humphreys during her presidential campaign. The cautious people in Fine Gael who were running that campaign were clearly too timid to allow her to start re-defining Irish republicanism (or rather going back to its roots) to make it fit for a new, harmonious all-island state. It might have been too radical for both that conservative party and the complacent, ‘north blind’ electorate of the 26-county republic. But wouldn’t it have livened up an extraordinarily dull election, notable for its total lack of big ideas? Wouldn’t it have made people here begin to think seriously about the most important challenge facing this country over the next 10-20 years?

Humphreys was a poor candidate – inarticulate and unsure of herself – and Fine Gael ran a poor campaign: whether in terms of posters put up, volunteers recruited or the smart use of social media. That made it easy for Catherine Connolly, who came across as a good debater with a warm and calm personality. Her informality, pacifism and left-wing views made her particularly attractive to younger people.

The fact that she was economical with the truth and showed both hypocrisy and extraordinarily poor judgement on a number of occasions did not seem to bother the electorate. She claimed she had paid for a dubious 2018 ‘fact finding’ trip to the murderous Assad dictatorship in Syria herself, but it became clear that it was the Irish taxpayer, through an allowance to cover her TD’s research expenses, who had actually financed it. She made an outrageous comparison between Germany re-arming because of the current threat from Russia and the Nazi regime re-arming in preparation for war in the 1930s. She employed an anti-peace process Éirigí member in the Dáil who had been sentenced to six years in jail for possessing arms and ammunition in 2014. She refused to admit until the second RTE candidates’ TV debate on Tuesday that she had represented the banks as a barrister in cases in which householders had been dispossessed, while continuing to attack the banks with her politician’s hat on. In Fintan O’Toole’s words: “Connolly has many questions to answer, and she dodges most of them.”

I believe Humphreys’ election would have sent an important signal to that small but growing group of Northern Protestants who might be open to considering Irish unity because of the perfidy and indifference of successive British governments. In the words of a leading lay Presbyterian in the Republic, Professor Sam McConkey of the Royal College of Surgeons, the election of a Monaghan Presbyterian would portray the Republic as “the very opposite” of “the Vatican-dominated theocracy” that dominated unionist thinking for much of the last century. “If Heather were to be the president of the Republic of Ireland, that would, I would say, make it more likely and easier to reach a peaceful transition over perhaps 10 or 20 years to achieve a united Ireland.”2

A Northern Protestant friend (and SDLP member) observed: “If Heather Humphreys wins it would be two fingers to the DUP, who would love her to lose so they can shout ‘anti-Protestant prejudice’ again.”

It has been deeply disappointing to me – a Northern Protestant who would dearly love to see a united Ireland in the medium-term – how little the North featured in either of those television debates, or in the campaign as a whole. Humphreys’ only passing mention of it on Tuesday was when she commended Linda Ervine’s work for the Irish language in east Belfast.

However, maybe Connolly’s election will reveal the real nature of the Southern electorate: almost entirely uninterested in the North, which is deemed irrelevant to the real issues that concern them, while holding to a kind of meaningless aspiration to unity as long as it doesn’t affect their own lives. As Professor McConkey, himself a Monaghan Protestant, observed, unity is “fairly low on people’s agenda.”

P.S.(1) Whoever is elected president tomorrow, they should take up a good idea from Professor Kevin Rafter, professor of political communication at Dublin City University. He doubts whether the new president could follow Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese in being “an honest broker in the promotion of North-South reconciliation” and “enhancing relations with Britain”, given the suspicions of the unionist community. “But she could convene a forum to examine the positives and negatives of unity for the Irish Republic itself, a debate that has not commenced.”3

P.S.(2) I have learned with sadness of the death of my friend and former colleague, Ed Moloney. I worked with Ed on a number of major Northern Ireland stories for the Irish Times in the 1980s, notably the behind the scenes efforts to end the 1981 Maze Prison hunger strike and the 1982 Kincora Boys Home revelations. We also co-authored a 1986 book on Ian Paisley. Ed was the most courageous, determined and meticulous investigative journalist I have ever known. He was one of the greats. It was a real privilege to have known and worked with him. 

1 ‘Presidential hopeful more Wolfe Tone than Wolfe Tones’, Sunday Life, 12 October

2 ‘United Ireland ‘easier’ under Humphreys, McConkey says, Irish Times, 29 September

3 ‘Four big issues that will sit in our next president’s in-tray’, Irish Times, 18 October

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Belfast is not Gaza: we should be grateful for our extraordinary and hard-won peace

Posted on Monday, 13 October, 2025 by andypollak

As I write, we are waiting for Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners to be released as part of the first phase of the miraculous peace agreement in Gaza brokered triumphantly by President Donald Trump. And I am reading a New York Times article 10 days ago by Megan K. Stack, a distinguished American journalist who has been a foreign correspondent in China, Russia, Afghanistan and the Middle East, comparing Gaza and Northern Ireland.

She begins with her impressions of the Northern Ireland Assembly. “There was First Minister Michelle O’Neill, the daughter of an Irish Republican Army member and the first Catholic to lead Northern Ireland, which was carved from the rest of the Irish island a century ago as a bastion of Protestant supremacy. The deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, is the daughter of a former Protestant paramilitary gun runner. In the back rows I spotted Gerry Kelly, a onetime IRA bomber of London’s Old Bailey criminal court, now a blazer-clad minister representing North Belfast.

“These politicians grew up in communities that battled each other bitterly for about 30 years before finally making peace in 1998. The conflict, euphemistically called the ‘Troubles’, still lingers uncomfortably close to the surface.

“Predictably, it was invoked in the debate, with the hard-line conservative Timothy Gaston [a distant cousin of mine] suggesting that Ms. O’Neill was a hypocrite for denouncing anti-immigrant violence. Hadn’t she claimed that there had been no alternative to the armed republican uprising of the ‘Troubles’? “I hear from people regularly who see that violence has worked for others in Northern Ireland,” Mr. Gaston said darkly.

“Odd as it sounds, I felt inspired watching this verbal sparring in the grand, gloomy hall of Stormont, the vast hilltop complex designed for a ‘Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state.’ This onetime monument to perpetual sectarian supremacy is now the seat of a government in which the communities share power.

“A pacified Belfast made a welcome contrast to the relentless carnage in Gaza, a place where I used to report. Here was a negotiated peace, unsteady though it may be. Northern Ireland is veined with frustrated hope and unsettled grievance, but it is also vivid proof that a dirty war fought around questions of identity can be channelled into a peaceful, albeit fraught, politics.

“There’s no perfect parallel between the two struggles, but it’s worth recalling that Northern Ireland’s conflict was also dismissed as unresolvable — too complicated, too tangled with religion, too sensitive to an important ally. The road to the Good Friday Agreement was crowded with frustrations, setbacks and perilous political gambles.

“Decades of furtive and fruitless talks preceded the agreement, and some of the hardest work came afterward, when sworn enemies suddenly had to govern together while insurgents clung to their hidden guns. Paramilitary disarmament was one of the last hard-won concessions of trust, not the first step. (I recall this whenever I see demands for Hamas to relinquish weapons immediately.)

“The lessons: Persist. Talk to people you despise. Bring international pressure, particularly from the United States. Don’t push for a military solution before attaining a political settlement; disarmament can wait.

“People in Northern Ireland had to work with others they considered murderers, terrorists or bigots and accepted a settlement that was nobody’s ideal. Peacetime politics is messy. Reconciliation remains elusive. But pretty much everyone I’ve ever spoken with in Northern Ireland, from any and every background, has one firm conviction in common: We are not going back.

“Here’s the truth: The kind of politics that bedevils places like Belfast and Jerusalem cuts deep, reaching into people’s hearts and guts, touching religion and inherited grievance, the things they tell their children, the way they imagine the world and themselves. All of that is extremely hard to face, and sometimes it’s easier to keep fighting. For those in a position of advantage, who have the most to lose once people start picking at politics, prolonging the war can feel safer than negotiating a peace.

“But nobody can fight forever. I am convinced that no military campaign will ever ensure Israel’s security. As in Northern Ireland, it will be a political resolution, hashed out by the people who have to live with the results, with full rights for every human being in the territory — or war will grind on, maybe lapse sometimes, but inevitably resume.

“The United States has done Israel no long-term favours by providing diplomatic impunity and a ceaseless flow of weapons. Palestinians are now enduring a degree of deadly dehumanization that utterly eclipses the violence of the ‘Troubles’. Their day of political reckoning has been delayed too long, and when it finally arrives, everyone will ask why it was so slow coming.”

Locals may say this is seeing present-day Northern Ireland through rose-tinted American spectacles, as the power-sharing government continues to fail to govern the province in any constructive way. That was certainly the view of SDLP leader Clare Hanna (my favourite Northern politician along with Alliance’s courageous Naomi Long) in her speech to her party’s annual conference earlier this month.

She highlighted how there was peace but not reconciliation, equality in law “but not all have the chance to succeed” and north-south structures “that are just going through the motions”.“Yes, we have power shared out – but no one can call it good government,” she said, pointing to marathon hospital waiting lists, a housing crisis and public services people can no longer rely on.“Our most precious natural resource [Lough Neagh] – polluted; a home for the GAA in Ulster – unbuilt; a safe A5 – stalled,” she said.“Confidence draining in politics; an executive that kicks big decisions into the long grass and that never seems far from collapse; in government, but not truly in power.”

The SDLP leader said discussion about constitutional change “won’t be put off any longer”.“A new Ireland is not just about removing a border. It can’t just be about reversing partition. It is about so much more… a time for real reconciliation; not just a photo-op, a handshake, a soundbite.”

She said the present Republic was not a utopia, but “more than almost any other country in the world it has shown a true capacity for transformation.” She understood that for many people such a big change as ending partition “feels daunting”.

She recognised that the growing potential for constitutional change also posed a challenge for the Irish government. “They can’t keep denying responsibility for planning for constitutional change. We’re not just a peace project to be managed and soothed.” She urged the Irish and British governments “to begin real planning” for an eventual Border poll. She said a ‘Ministry for a New Ireland’ in Dublin would “create a defined structure for all-island dialogue”.

The former Workers Party leader and Labour Party cabinet minister Proinsias de Rossa has a different view. In a message in response to my last blog on the Orange Order, he expressed concern that too many people in the Republic, under pressure from Sinn Fein, assume that Irish unity is imminent, with some going along with this for fear they may appear ‘anti-patriotic.’ “Worryingly, there are nationalist voices in Northern Ireland even saying that reconciliation will have to wait until ‘after unity’; that to accept that it comes first is to accept a ‘unionist veto’.

“In my view, having lived through the 30 years of Provo and Loyalist butchery, and having railed against such violence for all that time, it would not just be uncomfortable but deeply unsettling for society both north and south for two referendums to carry the day on territorial unity in the short to medium term. It could be equally unsettling if one (the Republic?) were to say no. So my advice to everyone is to tread softly.

“What form that unsettling would take is anyone’s guess, but I am constantly aware that those of us who thought we had found a peaceful way to bring an end to discrimination in Northern Ireland by demanding ‘British rights for British citizens’, came unstuck because we completely underestimated the forces we were unleashing. That is not an argument against the civil rights campaign; it’s an argument for caution in how we promote our legitimate desires for the future. In short, we must avoid taking unnecessary risks with the lives and livelihoods of our children and grandchildren for a purely imagined benefit, particularly as there is a safe route forward that threatens nobody – the Shared Island approach.

“I am not prepared to back demands for referendums in the short to medium term. I am quite willing to work for a shared island which for the foreseeable future leaves the constitutional framework, painfully arrived at, in place. In 25, 50 or 100 years time people will know whether or not it’s time to have, by agreement, a single jurisdiction on this island, but we will have got there without any bloodshed or hatred; and through peaceful progressive politics, hopefully, each corner of this island will be a good place to live.”

I imagine like many moderate nationalists, I find myself caught somewhere between Hanna and De Rossa. I’m not sure how long the rickety power-sharing arrangement between old enemies in the North can last. But I fear for what could happen if an ill-prepared early Border poll in favour of unity passes by the narrowest of margins. I don’t think we can wait 50 or 100 years for such a referendum. But 5-10 years is too short. We need much more time to get ready for this existential upheaval of the beautiful, now peaceful island we all call home.

A wise friend who was a leading Irish official involved in the negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement says Northern Ireland continues to be a difficult and deeply divided place that has to be managed by the two governments. “I do believe myself that as conflicts increase in our world – as they seem to be doing – the Good Friday Agreement, in all its messy complexity (and perhaps partly because of its messy complexity) will become more and more relevant as each year goes by.  In my view, there are no solutions in the short term to deep-seated historical conflicts like ours – only better means of managing them.  But the latter matters.  And saves lives.”

I agree. The important thing is that we should remain deeply grateful for our extraordinary and hard-won peace in Northern Ireland, and our priority must be to do nothing that could jeopardise it.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Orange Order is part of Ireland and will be part of a united Ireland – we need to build bridges to it, not demonise it

Posted on Monday, 29 September, 2025 by andypollak

The Mail on Sunday (Irish edition) is not everybody’s idea of a truth-telling newspaper (that’s an understatement). They had a front-page ‘exclusive’ earlier this month entitled ‘Humphreys Husband’s Secret Orange Order Past’ about the Fine Gael presidential candidate Heather Humphreys’ husband Eric’s’s alleged membership of the order some 50 years ago.1 It claimed the candidate, who is a Presbyterian, tried to “evade” questions about when precisely her husband may have been in the order, and “admitted” that she had attended Orange parades in Monaghan as a child. This was the moment “the wheels came off” her media appearance in her home county, it added.

In a follow-up opinion piece in the Irish Times2, UCD historian Edward Burke, who has written a well-reviewed book about the unionists of Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal during the War of Independence and afterwards, told the story of Heather Humpheys’ grandfather, a Ulster Volunteer Force section leader, shooting an IRA volunteer in the face during a raid on his house in Aghabog, near Humphreys’ home village of Drum, in 1920. He went on: “But what can associations a century or a century and a half ago tell us about a presidential candidate in 2025? Firstly, if we are to live in a ‘shared island’ that respects ‘green’,’orange’ and many other traditions and cultures, these so-called ‘gotcha’ moments in a Border county over alleged membership of the Orange Order decades ago should be self-evidently inappropriate.”

He added in a LinkedIn message: “We can’t have a situation in Ireland where we talk about respect for traditions, a ‘shared island’ – and then launch a witch-hunt against a presidential candidate because her husband may have belonged to one of those traditions.”

A week later, Mark Hennessy, the Ireland and Britain editor of the Irish Times, put the row into a wider context.3 He quoted Monaghan historian Noel Carney, who was born in 1953: “In the past, it was difficult to find a Protestant who wasn’t a member of the Orange Order.” Hennessy reported that “there are concerns in Monaghan – to say that it is a fear would be overstating it – that Humphreys’ Presbyterian background will be used against her to stoke division.”

He also quoted Angela Graham, a highly regarded Clones community worker, and a friend of Humphreys, who believed that she would “follow in the footsteps of those amazing women, the two Marys there before, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese.” If elected, as a Monaghan Presbyterian who is is favour of a united Ireland – “but only through working with people and bringing them together” (her words at her Monaghan campaign launch) – she would be able to offer a hand of friendship across the Border in a way that no other president has been able to do. “She’s lived it. She understands. It’s in her DNA. That’s what’s so important”, Graham says. “No other candidate will bring that. She has that unique ability to cross community divides. She wouldn’t just be talking the talk.”

The Belfast-based grand secretary of the Orange Order, Rev Mervyn Gibson, seemed to agree when he told the Irish Times: “Personally, I think Michael D Higgins has been horrendous for community relations. I’m looking for a president who will build on what Mary McAleese did to grow relationships with Northern Ireland.” The best that can be said about Higgins was that he had little interest in and knowledge of the North. The worst is that by refusing to attend a harmless ecumenical service of ‘hope and reflection’ in Armagh in 2021 to ‘mark’ partition and the foundation of Northern Ireland, he showed himself to be an old-fashioned nationalist republican, and thus abdicated the role of peacemaker which his two predecessors had so bravely and successfully espoused.

I am no lover of the Orange Order. As an exclusively Protestant and anti-Catholic organisation, it has more than its fair share of bigots. I would like to agree with the Presbyterian leader, Rev John Rogers, who told a meeting in Kerry in 1850: “Presbyterian Ulster is not Orange. Presbyterianism is incompatible with, and destructive of, Orangeism. Orangeism is Toryism, and the genius of Presbyterianism is utterly antagonistic to such a despotic creed.” Unfortunately in the 175 years since then, much of Presbyterian Ulster has become just that: right-wing, fundamentalist, separatist and Orange.

However, like it or not, the Orange Order is an Irish organisation. It is supported by scores of thousands of Northern Protestants, and particularly working class and rural Protestants. In many unionist rural areas the Orange hall is the equivalent of the GAA club in nationalist Ireland: it brings together people for local, community, cultural and charitable events. United Ireland or no united Ireland, it is going to continue in existence for many years to come. Indeed, if the North is voted into a united Ireland by a narrow majority in a Border poll, and the political unionism of the present unionist parties becomes meaningless as a result, the order may see a renaissance as the main standard-bearer of Ulster unionist culture (such as it is), comprising the order itself, its associated bodies the Royal Black Preceptory and the Apprentice Boys of Derry, the 12th July and other Orange parades, the marching bands that go along with those parades, and the bonfires which precede them.

And it has its more open-minded and pro-Irish aspects. The late Rev Brian Kennaway, a senior Orangeman, doubled for a while as president of the longstanding cross-border peace and reconciliation group, the Irish Association. Several Orange banners on show at 12th July parades feature slogans in the Irish language (notably ‘Ireland’s Heritage’ Loyal Orange Lodge in Belfast). The writer Ruth Dudley Edwards, in her 1999 book on Orangeism, recalls that at the turn of the 20th century there was a Donegal Gaeltacht-born County Grand Master of Belfast who taught Irish classes on the Falls Road. Its current leader, Mervyn Gibson, who can be seen at Shared Ireland events in Dublin, is a courteous and intelligent man. There is still a Dublin and Wicklow Orange lodge, although for obvious reasons it keeps its head well down.

The historian Felix Larkin points out that representatives of the Orange Order from both sides of the Border were welcomed to Áras an Uachtaráin during Mary McAleese’s presidency and she visited the Orange Hall at Barkey in County Cavan in 2008. “That is what ‘bridge-building’ across the communities on this island is all about, ” he wrote.4

Most people in the South are deeply prejudiced against the Orange Order, and see it, because of its history of anti-Catholicism, as an evil organisation (a mirror image of many unionists’ and loyalists’ view of the GAA, who believe that it is an evil organisation because many of its supporters backed the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence). A unionist acquaintance of mine, a decent man, recently recounted a conversation with friends in Galway who, when he told them he was an Orangeman, “looked at me as if I had been beamed down from Mars, as if I was some sort of alien.”

The Orange Order, unlike the IRA, never killed anybody in recent memory. And yet more and more people, particularly younger people, are coming to accept the IRA and Sinn Fein’s view, that such killing was necessary to bring about Irish unity. I would venture that some of the bitterest critics of the Orange Order are supporters of this view. Such hypocrisy is one of the less attractive characteristics of Irish attitudes.

We in the South need to get over our prejudices and do some more bridge-building to our Northern Protestant – and Orange – brethren, difficult though it may be. There was a lot of it going on in the 10-15 years after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the end of the ‘Troubles’, but it has gone backwards in recent years. There will be no genuine Irish unity without it.

1 The Irish Mail on Sunday, 14 September

2 ‘Humphreys family has nothing to explain or apologise for’, Irish Times, 16 September

3 ‘It was difficult to find a Protestant not in the Orange Order’, Irish Times, 20 September

4 Letters to the Editor, Irish Times, 17 September

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

A distinguished academic’s proposals for moving very carefully towards Irish unity

Posted on Wednesday, 17 September, 2025 by andypollak

Jennifer Todd is a distinguished academic. She is a former professor in UCD’s School of Politics and International Relations; former director of UCD’s Institute for British-Irish Studies, and currently a fellow at that university’s Geary Institute for Public Policy. She has been researching ethnicity, identity, conflict and Northern Ireland for more than 30 years.

19 years ago my first blog when I was director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies was based on a study of inter-generational attitudes in the border area by a team of political scientists and psychologists from UCD and Queen’s University Belfast led by Professor Todd.1 This concluded that British and Irish government and EU policy “to encourage cross-community and cross-border contact, is on exactly the right lines, and should be extended. This is the way in which lasting change can be provoked in enough individuals to percolate through entire communities.” They warned, however, that this would be a long-drawn out business and “it would be counter-productive to demand immediate and measurable political results from cross-community and cross-border initiatives.”

In a paper last year called ‘Irish policy making and planning for a possible future united Ireland’, Todd once again urged caution, even if it was based on cautious optimism.2 “Policy planning for a future united Ireland is foundational, difficult and dangerous, “she said. “At basis, it involves the Irish government providing a model of a united Ireland to be put to all the people of the island in concurrent referendums in each jurisdiction. If planners get it wrong – if for example there is a ‘yes’ vote for a model of united Ireland that no one really wants and which generates widespread disillusion – the consequences will be felt for decades.”

It is even more dangerous because of “global public disengagement from conventional forms of democracy, from expertise and from ‘change leaders”, she warned. Ordinary people’s views had to be taken into account, and most people in both jurisdictions wanted clarity on the type of united Ireland on offer before they vote. “Modelling a future united Ireland is a foundational task that potentially touches on all aspects of life, and that has deep, often unspoken, emotional resonances which differ in each jurisdiction.”

“The Irish government has the central role in putting forward a model of a united Ireland in a future referendum in each jurisdiction.” This is a particularly unusual kind of task. “Irish policy makers will have to outline the form of a new state (a future united Ireland), whose remit will cover the whole island and which must be acceptable not just to the citizens in the Irish state but also to those in Northern Ireland. They must have this model available at a time chosen by another state – the initiation of a referendum in Northern Ireland is the defined task of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – but the same question and model must be available for the referendum in Northern Ireland and the concurrent referendum in the Republic of Ireland.”

She said there is a “strong argument that a ‘process’ model is preferable whereby many decisions are made in a transition period after a positive vote for unity in each jurisdiction”. However she warned that the task for the Irish state – and its politicians and civil servants – is particularly difficult for at least four reasons:

First, the Irish government has responsibility without power. The Irish state is the only body that can credibly and legally design a model to go forward in a unity referendum and it will have to implement the voters’ decision. But some of the key decision-making citizens are in another jurisdiction, Northern Ireland.

Second, the issue is “exceptionally and existentially difficult. It touches on identity and loyalty as well as interest. It speaks to foundational assumptions about the political and social world. And it does so for different populations who have radically opposed perspectives and different paradigms of understanding of politics and society. Moreover, these differing perspectives were at the centre of group conflict in Northern Ireland. To open these opposing paradigms to discussion is necessary, because they frame judgements and even emotions. But this also threatens to retrigger group solidarity and conflict.”

Third, “the language of constitutional debate has provoked widespread disengagement, and silence, rather than reflection.” “Opinion polls and research have shown that around half of the population on the island wants to distance from traditional nationalist/unionist debates.”

“The issues are not only emotive, but those emotions have been silenced and thus not dealt with. Some try to avoid thinking about a possible future united Ireland because the issue seems to ensnare them in perspectives they do not much like but are unable to find a way out of. Their views are thus likely to swing widely, seemingly unpredictably.”  

She cited a recent focus group overseen by herself and fellow researchers, Joanne McEvoy of Aberdeen University and John Doyle of Dublin City University, made up of people who did not know how they might vote in a future unity referendum, to illustrate this volatility. Despite their uncertainty, “once issues about a future possible united Ireland were raised, they responded intuitively, emotionally and forcefully – when asked about changing the flag and anthem, they answered ‘No, no, no, no’. When asked about joining the Commonwealth, they said it was like ‘spitting on your ancestors’ graves for everything that they fought for’. Once they heard their own conversation, they pulled back: at the end of the 90 minute focus group, participants were saying ‘sure that’s never going to work’, ‘We have to be more open minded, ready for some change as well’… It was clear that they held contradictory views, and swung between them. Was this simply because they didn’t have a defined constitutional preference?”

Fourth, “this is a situation where people do not have accurate information about conditions in the other jurisdiction”. For example, “the cost of unity to the Irish state depends on negotiations with the UK, which have not yet happened. In this situation, misinformation and partial information is likely to be weaponised.”

However she cited one positive factor. “Although the planning task is very difficult, it is not yet immediate. Unlike the German government in 1989, the Irish government has a number of years – one might guess a decade – to accomplish it before a referendum happens.”

People’s preferences today are clearly deeply divided: Unionists differ from nationalists, Southern nationalists from Northern nationalists. “Learning from this, analysts attempt to find the highest common factor in the radically opposed views, the options that would be least bad, and that would maximise losers’ consent in a future referendum. Thus, for example, it has been argued that a devolved Northern Ireland under Irish sovereignty is the best option because it is least disturbing to Northern unionists. It also would have the benefit of minimally disturbing institutions and practices in the Republic. But there is a potential problem: this is a model of a united Ireland that no one really wants, one that is uninspiring as well as costly. It is very likely to lead to later disillusion.” 

“Are there ways to anticipate where people’s views might move in the future?” asked Todd. She came down in favour of ‘deliberation’ [the Republic’s Citizens’ Assemblies are examples of deliberative structures, where a random sample of citizens, alongside politicians, discuss and make recommendations on controversial issues]. However it should be deliberation that aims “to find points of commonality and convergence”, rather than “to arrive at an informed choice between pre-given options.”

“Moreover the deliberative net has to be cast very widely, going beyond representative sampling to look at many diverse clusters of the population whose perspectives, unease, and potential for change may be distinctive, prioritising access rather than representativeness, and inclusion of different perspectives, not just different social categories. And, since we do not yet know the issues at stake for participants, the deliberative method has to allow them – to the maximum degree possible – to set their own agenda of discussion, define their own priorities, and interrogate one another.”

Todd then outlined the findings of her team’s 2020-2024 research, based on interviews and focus groups with about 100 people, North and South, accessed through community associations. These were mainly women, migrants and young people because previous research had shown that they are the groups most disengaged from discussion on the constitutional question. In 2022 the researchers had held four in-person ‘deliberative cafes’ – small informal local deliberations of about three hours – with over 60 participants. Their participants were defined ‘transversally’, i.e. not as unionists or nationalists, but for example, as border women or gender activists. “They were very diverse, from all parts of the island, all religions and none, and with diverse political perspectives. Our method was to raise the broad issue of constitutional change and North-South relations and ask for their perceptions and priorities around the issues, so as to encourage their participation in defining the issues in debate.”

Their findings surprised them. First, they found “very substantive convergence” amongst the diverse participants on issues of process and values. Participants agreed that there should be conversations – not debates – about the issues, but starting from people’s organic experience, not from ideology. They agreed that as many people as possible should be involved. “They agreed that bread-and-butter socio-economic and rights’ issues were priorities, much more than the precise issues of institutional design. They agreed, for the most part, that time should be taken to get the picture right. Participation of these transversally defined groups increased convergence, and provided confidence that participatory discussion, properly organised, could be constructive.”

Women, in particular, argued for conversation rather than debate.They saw this as beginning with ‘pre-conversations’ which helped understand other perspectives and develop shared values, even if they have different preferences. Participants saw this as something that could take place locally – in local ‘knit and natter’ groups – networked together.

“Second, they were surprised that amongst the obstacles to participation, the constitutional discourse itself was most emphasised.” It was seen as ideological, rather than based on experience, “as provoking knee-jerk responses rather than engaging in thought, and as non-organic. The very terms ‘constitutional change’ and ‘Irish unity’ were criticised. This was a very immediate intuitive response by many – one gender activist said she felt that she had ‘rocked up to the wrong meeting’. On the other hand, the vast majority of our participants were concerned about the shape of a future society, interested in how others saw it and wanted to continue the discussion, but on terms that spoke to real experience.”

“Third, our participants emphasised issues of practical life – bread-and-butter issues and rights, not primarily identity and institutions. It wasn’t just the financial cost of unity, but the form of life that would result, and the changes to their lives, and those of their families. They wanted improvement – not just the end of barriers of religion in Northern Ireland, but the end of barriers of class in Dublin. In this sense, they wanted constitutional change that would be inspiring.”

This sharing of experience led to “clear and credible collective definitions of the shared problems – a step change from individual experience to convergent collective definition. This provides one criterion for judgement on policy initiatives and constitutional change. To put it crudely, any model of a united Ireland that did not alleviate present problems of cross-border healthcare would not be good enough.”

Todd and her long-time research partner, Professor Joanne McEvoy, would like to scale up these deliberations to include sessions with politicians and policy makers about how to remedy the problems raised by the people in the ‘deliberative cafes’ (“This builds accountability – the absence of which so frustrated our participants in earlier research – into the process.”) And a subsequent ‘constitutional’ session “where deliberation is structured around the construction of a constitutional model (either united Ireland or United Kingdom) that would help alleviate the problems.”

I know ARINS – the collaboration between the University of Notre Dame and the Royal Irish Academy – is already doing some of this kind of work, albeit with little unionist participation. However I would like to see the Irish universities, north and south, being more involved. A possible vehicle for this would be Universities Ireland – the network of 10 university presidents on the island – which is administered by the Centre for Cross Border Cooperation (formerly the Centre for Cross Border Studies). This is a body looking for a role. Funding and overseeing the kind of deeply serious research leading to clear policy recommendations on a possible ‘new Ireland’ that Professor Todd is leading would be an obvious candidate.

1 ‘Ignore the Cynics: Cooperation Works!’ A Note from the Next Door Neighbours, 6 September 2006

2 publicpolicy.ie/governance/irish-policy-making-and-planning-for-a-possible-future-united-ireland

Posted in General, Irish reunification | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Why did 20th century Irish governments make so many mistakes when dealing with the North and unity?

Posted on Wednesday, 27 August, 2025 by andypollak

Much of my summer reading this year has been 20th century Irish history, and the work of superb historians like Alvin Jackson, Paul Bew, Diarmaid Ferriter, Oliver MacDonagh and others. One thing that has struck me forcibly is how many mistakes were made by successive Irish governments during the fifty years after independence when dealing with the single largest and enduring block to Irish unity: the fierce opposition of Northern unionists.[A separate, even longer article could be written about the abandonment of Northern nationalists by the Free State and successive governments].

It started early. Alvin Jackson writes that “perhaps the supreme paradox of the reunification strategy was that Dublin sought an end of partition through consolidating the structures and attitudes that maintained it. When – as in early 1922 – the Belfast government was politically vulnerable and open to moderate concession on the constitutional question, the Dublin ministry, sensing blood, ruthlessly applied the principal of northern subordination to any cross-border deal. When, in early 1923, the Northern government was economically vulnerable, the Dublin ministry sought to reinforce the economic divide between the two territories. Reunification was admittedly never likely in the early twenties, but there were certainly junctures when perhaps critical cross-border institutions might have been put in place. These passed unattended, partly because of the Free State government’s untenable claims to absolute supremacy over its northern counterpart.”1

The most striking example of this was the Free State government’s refusal to have anything to do with a Council of Ireland, proposed in Westminster’s 1920 Government of Ireland Act. Edward Carson told the House of Commons in November of that year: “I am optimistic enough to believe that it is in this Council…that there is the germ of a united Ireland in future.” The Northern finance minister, H.M.Pollock, when asked in the following year about the “ultimate unity of the country”, replied: “Through the Council of Ireland – Yes. North and South would be brought into constant contact, and the possibilities of ultimate union are, on the whole, great.”2 That British proposal remained stillborn for the following 53 years, until it was resurrected as part of the abortive Sunningdale Agreement in 1974.

Ernest Blythe, a rare republican from a Northern Protestant background and a minister in the first Cumman na nGaedheal government, said there was no need for a full-time, permanent post in the Free State government for North-South cooperation. One consequence of this extraordinary short-sightedness was that there was no senior Dublin official responsible for and/or knowledgeable about Northern Ireland affairs for nearly 50 years, leading to ignorance, confusion and panic in the Irish cabinet when the ‘Troubles’ broke out there in the summer of 1969.

Oliver MacDonagh’s view was that “Britain’s ultimate objectives in the 1921 [Anglo-Irish] negotiations were to keep Ireland within the empire, and to maintain the system of imperial defence intact. The fate of the Ulster Protestants was a secondary concern…Thus in return for an oath of allegiance to the Crown, no larger measure of independence than dominionhood for the Irish Free State, and three naval bases, the British government was prepared to coerce Northern Ireland into either some form of union with the remainder of the island or the cession of (in all likelihood) something between 30 and 45% of its total territory” [through the ill-fated Boundary Commission]. MacDonagh concluded that any far-sighted British statesman should have seen that this would be preferable to storing up future trouble by keeping the six counties of Northern Ireland intact.3

During the debates on the Anglo-Irish Treaty in January 1922, it seems extraordinarily revealing of the already partitionist mindset of most TDs that less than 3% of speaking time was devoted to the North. Things had not improved by 1935, when Taoiseach Eamon de Valera admitted in the Dail in relation to ending partition, “we have no plan…by which we can inevitably bring about the union of this country.”4 Four years later, in a speech to the Seanad, he said he would not sacrifice 26 county sovereignty or the policy of gaelicisation for the possibility of unity.

In June 1940, with the German threat to Britain at its height, an emissary from British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, Malcolm McDonald, came to Dublin with an offer to De Valera. If the Free State joined the Allies and set up an All-Ireland Defence Council, Britain would immediately declare its acceptance of the principle of a united Ireland and create a North-South body to work out the practical details of such unity. De Valera and his cabinet rejected the proposal, sceptical about the British government’s ability to deliver the Unionists.

Northern premier James Craig may have angrily rejected such a proposal. But Henry Patterson writes that Basil Brooke, a future prime minister, had told his son that faced with the choice between the destruction of ‘western civilisation’ by the Nazis and Irish unification, he would have had to accept the latter. However De Valera’s preference for maintaining the neutrality of the 26-county state (a popular position in the country) and the unity of Fianna Fail, which would have split over any jettisoning of that neutrality, saw the end of “a historic opportunity to undermine partition.”5

Then in April 1949 came the South’s witless departure from the Commonwealth, nine months before India declared itself a republic and stayed in the Commonwealth. Predictably, this was followed by legislation in the Westminster parliament to consolidate Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom.

The implications of leaving the Commonwealth for further alienating the unionists didn’t seem to have occurred to Fine Gael Taoiseach John A.Costello or his external affairs minister Sean MacBride. British prime minister Clement Attlee concluded that “the government of Eire considered the cutting of the last links which united Eire to the British Commonwealth was a more important objective of policy than ending partition.”6 The ultimate irony was that 1949 also marked the launch of the Irish government’s hopeless international anti-partition campaign.

In 1959 the new Taoiseach, Sean Lemass – who would overturn the old nationalist taboos by seeking friendly relations with the Northern unionist government – told the British ambassador that “a great number of mistakes have been made here in relation to Northern Ireland.” In 1967 the Committee on the Constitution recommended the replacement of Article 3 of the Irish Constitution with the more conciliatory wording: “The Irish nation hereby proclaims its firm will that its territory be re-united in harmony and brotherly affection between all Irishmen.” (Women were not considered!) This was not well received by the ruling Fianna Fail party and no action was taken on it. 31 years and three and a half thousand deaths in the North later, an almost identical wording was voted into the Constitution by the Irish electorate, following the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Are we done with Irish governments making grave errors in their Northern policies? I fear not. I fear that some Sinn Fein-led government in the near future will pile pressure on the British government to hold a premature, ill-prepared Border poll on unity. And people in the South need to actually want unity with the difficult Northerners, something I have doubts about after more than 50 years of conversations with Southern friends and colleagues. I believe that not much has changed since Frank McDermot, a rare independent TD who argued in the 1930s for persuading rather than coercing the unionists, said “the question of curing the evil of partition is our own job and nobody else’s job. If we are to undertake it, the first essential is that we should be in earnest about it, that we shall really want the reunion of Ireland on a voluntary basis.”7

1 Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798-1998: War, Peace and Beyond, p.277

2 Paul Bew, Ireland: the Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, p.

3 Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: Two Centuries of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1780-1980, p.136

4 Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘De Valera’s Long Shadow’, Irish Times Weekend, 23 August

5 Henry Patterson, Ireland since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p.58

6 Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, p.455

7 Clare O’Halloran, Partition and the Limits of Irish Nationalism, p.165

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

‘The hate is starting to feel like a storm’ – when they start beating Indian immigrants, I am ashamed to be Irish

Posted on Wednesday, 6 August, 2025 by andypollak

For the past fortnight I have been ashamed to be Irish. The savage beating and humiliation of an Indian IT worker – only three weeks in this country – by a teenage gang in Tallaght provoked a series of messages from other people from the Indian sub-continent who had suffered similar attacks at the hands of young Irish people.

As the son of a father who was a political refugee and an Irish mother, perhaps this affects me more deeply than many 100% born and bred native Irish people. Although probably not: I imagine (and hope) that the great majority of Irish people would have reacted to that attack, like me, with the same emotions: disgust, alarm and compassion. It is a profoundly depressing and frightening development in a country that prides itself on its friendliness, inclusivity and anti-imperialist history. We were shocked at the attacks on Roma and other immigrant families in Ballymena in June, but comforted ourselves with the complacent thought that such racist hatred and violence was the work of bigoted loyalists and could never happen here. Like hell it couldn’t!

There were shocking online images of the victim dripping with blood and walking the streets with bare legs (his assailants had torn his trousers off). He kept saying: “I came here to make a living and live in peace. I was just walking to my place of worship. What wrong have I done, why me?” Videos of the bloodied man were quickly put up, alongside claims by a so-called ‘journalist’ that he had been acting inappropriately around children before the attack. The gardai said this was a blatant untruth.1

Below is a heart-breaking letter put up on LinkedIn by the distinguished Cork-based Pakistani-born community activist, Fahmeda Naheed.

LETTER FROM AN INDIAN NURSE IN IRELAND – WHY WE’RE LEAVING

I don’t usually write things like this.
But today, I feel like I have to.
Not just for myself, but for my wife, my children, my friends, and that little Indian girl I saw being attacked yesterday.

We came to Ireland with dreams — not big ones.
We didn’t want luxury or fame.
Just a peaceful life.
Honest work.
A little respect.

My wife and I are both nurses. Like so many others, we left behind our families, our childhood homes, everything we knew — to come here and help. To work hard. To live quietly. To make a better future.

But now?

We’re planning to leave.

And we’re not the only ones.

In our circle alone, around 30 to 35 Indian nurses are talking seriously about quitting their jobs — some are applying to Australia, some going back to India. Even doctors are being targeted now. You might’ve seen it in the news. Or maybe not.

But we see it.

We feel it.

We live it.

Yesterday, I saw something that broke me.
A 8-year-old Indian girl, surrounded by a group of Irish boys and girls, maybe 15 or 16 years old.
They were pushing her. Bullying and laughing.
For no reason. Just because she looked different.
I helped her escape. They ran.
And I stood there shaking, wondering…

What kind of place is this becoming?

We came to Ireland to save lives — and now we’re scared to walk home after a shift.

We kept going during COVID.
We missed weddings and funerals back home to stay here and work.
We followed every law, paid every tax, waited for every visa.
We believed this was a country of kindness.

And now?

Now we’re afraid for our children.

Afraid to send them to school.

Afraid they’ll be treated like less than human — just because of their skin, their accent, their food, their culture.

We know not everyone here is like this.
We’ve met wonderful Irish people. Some have become like family.
But that kindness is starting to feel like a whisper…
…and the hate is starting to feel like a storm.

I don’t want to write this letter. I want to stay hopeful.
But hope starts to fade when you see that even an 8-year-old brown girl can be treated like she doesn’t belong.

To Ireland, please listen:

If we leave, it’s not because we don’t love this country.
It’s because this country stopped loving us back.

If you lose your nurses, your doctors, your care workers — don’t ask ‘why.’

You already know why.

We didn’t leave because of money.
We left because we’re tired of being afraid.
Tired of being ignored.
Tired of watching silence win.

There’s still time. But not much.
This isn’t about politics anymore. It’s about basic human decency.

If this letter reaches even one person who didn’t understand before — then it’s worth writing.

Immigration to Europe – and therefore Ireland – from the countries of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America is here to stay. Migration has rocketed worldwide, driven by warfare, climate change, rapid population growth in lower-income countries, advertising of opportunities on the Internet and the relative ease of travel. The demand for workers in the rich countries of Europe has also risen, as their populations fall well below the replacement rate at which population levels are stable. As a result, more and more countries are becoming dependent on migrant labour to sustain shrinking and ageing workforces.

A newly prosperous Ireland, with a falling birthrate, is part of this phenomenon. There are nearly 18,500 registered nurses and midwives here from the Indian sub-continent, nearly one fifth of the total. As somebody who has been visiting elderly relatives and friends in care homes in recent years, I can attest to the huge dependence of that sector on Indian and other developing world care workers. India has one of the world’s most developed IT sectors, and the man who was attacked in Tallaght is one of thousands who have come to work in our tech firms. My house was recently retrofitted and redecorated by an extraordinarily hard working and efficient team of builders from Romania and Brazil.

“As the competition for skilled workers heats up, many countries will have to move from grudging acceptance of economic migration to active efforts to recruit, causing more concerns about social and cultural change. How rich states manage this tension will be a key political dynamic in the coming decades”, wrote Sam Freedman in last weekend’s Observer.2

These people are the ‘new Irish’. We need them in our economy. Do we ‘old Irish’ welcome, respect and include them as equal and cherished fellow members of our society or do we marginalise, demonise and drive them out? That is the stark choice we face in the coming years.

PS David Atherton is the ‘journalist’ who claimed falsely that “a migrant was caught exposing himself to children. He is covered in blood after being taught some manners.” He writes for the right-wing website Muck Rack. Avoid anything written by this man. He is a liar and a hatemonger. He besmirches the usually honourable profession of journalism of which I was a member for many years.

1 ‘He kept saying: What wrong have I done? Why me? An Indian man is left stripped and bloodied on an Irish street’, Irish Times, 26 July

2 ‘The Truth about migrant workers: demonised but in demand, and few of us can live without them’, The Observer, 3 August

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Republic of Ireland | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Is it fanciful to imagine that Donegal might serve as a model for a harmonious united Ireland?

Posted on Thursday, 24 July, 2025 by andypollak

Is it totally fanciful to imagine that Donegal might serve as a model for a harmonious united Ireland? I have just returned after a week’s cycling in that beautiful northernmost county, where this unlikely notion was among my passing thoughts as I rode through interminable rain showers and occasional glimpses of sun across its high bogs and mountain passes, past its mighty cliffs and gorgeous beaches.

Donegal has a bit of everything from all parts of these islands. We stayed a night in Malin village, on the road to Malin Head, and were struck by its English-style village green and cosy encircling cottages, built in the mid-18th century by George Harvey, a Plantation landlord who owned a large estate of 10,000 acres .

The Scottish influence is very ancient. As early as the 6th century, St Colmcille founded a famous monastery on the island of Iona. When the O’Donnell chiefs ruled Donegal in the four centuries before the Flight of the Earls, their military might was based on ‘gallowglasses’, mercenary soldiers from the Scottish islands. With the establishment of cheap steamboat services to Scotland in the early 19th century, up to 25,000 men and women from the county’s poorer areas were travelling every year to the work as farm labourers, most of them in the Scottish lowlands, well into the 20th century. The musical and cultural links are still there, and a form of Ulster-Scots is still spoken in the Laggan district of east Donegal.

And of course Donegal is the most Irish of counties. In the 2022 census, nearly 60,000 people said they could speak Irish (up almost 2,400 on the 2012 census), although only 11,600 (20%) said they could speak it very well and nearly 19,000 (32%) said they could speak it well. The county contains numerous Gaeltacht areas, including Gweedore, the Rosses, Cloughaneely, Glencolmcille and surroundings, and the islands of Arranmore, Tory and Inishbofin. It is also rich in music, theatre and storytelling, with internationally celebrated playwrights like Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness, fiddlers like Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh (also a singer) and Tommy Peoples, the singers Enya and Daniel O’Donnell, the guitarist Rory Gallagher, and bands like Clannad and Altan.

Although 77% of the population in the 1992 census identified as Catholic, there are also small but active Church of Ireland and Presbyterian congregations scattered throughout the county. As somebody from a Presbyterian background, I was intrigued to see a small whitewashed Presbyterian church on the road to Malin Head, making it the northernmost Presbyterian church in Ireland. The Presbyterian Church in Donegal town is clearly a lively and outward looking congregation, with links to church initiatives in Liberia, Senegal and Uganda and the usual wide range of Presbyterian activities, from bowls to bible study, hospital visits to Boys Brigade.

Then there is the annual Orange Order march at Rossnowlagh, near Bundoran, which takes place a week before the ‘Twelfth’ in Northern Ireland, and is attended by thousands of Orangemen and women from Donegal, Cavan, Leitrim, Monaghan and the North. It is the largest Orange march in the Republic and in recent decades has been an unthreatening and friendly occasion with intrigued Catholic locals among the spectators (although it was suspended for eight years during the worst of the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s). There are also marches in Raphoe, Manorcunningham, Newtowncunningham and St Johnston in east Donegal.

In that area there is a large Protestant enclave, and the culture of Orange halls, pipe bands and highland dancing classes reflects this. In the early 1970s there were sectarian incidents and threats against local Protestants, arson attacks against Orange Halls and even two nights of rioting in St Johnston in July 1972. But since the end of the ‘Troubles’ relations between the religious communities here have been generally relaxed and cordial. We are very far from the 1934 petition in this area, in which nearly 7,400 Protestants called for it to be incorporated into Northern Ireland. Most people here, and particularly younger people, are happy to be citizens of the newly liberal and prosperous Republic of Ireland (even if quite a lot of them still support the Northern Ireland football team!).

Every October there is a festival in Ballybofey and Stranorlar to celebrate Frances Browne, the largely forgotten 19th century blind poet and novelist from Stranorlar, best known for her collection of children’s stories, Granny’s Wonderful Chair. It is unique in that it features writers in Irish, English and Ulster-Scots, all three languages still spoken in the Finn Valley in east Donegal.

I don’t want to be accused of being a ‘Pollyanna’. The county returns two Sinn Féin TDs to Dáil Eireann. I know that there are many unreconstructed republicans who are proud of having sheltered ‘on the run’ IRA volunteers. During the ‘Troubles’ IRA men lived undisturbed by the Irish authorities in caravans in Lifford and ventured across the border to bomb and kill. On the other hand, I know of DUP politicians who happily spend their holidays in Donegal, with friends and relatives who are about as far from those republicans as one can get. Then there are the peacemakers: the late Fine Gael TD Paddy Harte from Raphoe was one, joining with the late Derry UDA leader Glen Barr to set up the Messines Peace Park in Belgium to remember the soldiers of the 16th Irish Division and 36th Ulster Division who fought and died side by side in the First World War.

There are darker sides of relations between settler and native in Donegal, as elsewhere. One of the highlights of my cycle trip was a visit to Glenveagh Castle and National Park, on a particularly rain-sodden day. This is a wondrous, hidden, mountainy place. The castle, built by Captain John George Adair, a Scots-Irish businessman from County Laois, between 1867 and 1873, and inhabited by its last American owner, Henry McIlhenny until the early 1980s, is beautifully maintained, giving a real glimpse of how the other 0.1% of the population lived in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The visitor centre, with its splendid café, is a model of its kind and a real refuge on a torrential day; the nice ladies at the reception desk even allowed me and my cycling companion, David Ward, to dry our soaking clothes in a back room.

‘Black Jack’ Adair was one of Ireland’s most notorious 19th century landlords. He had made his fortune buying up estates bankrupt after the great Irish Famine. He purchased Glenveagh and neighbouring Gartan (where Colmcille was born) in 1859, amassing an estate of 28,000 acres. Rows with his tenants over shooting rights and trespassing sheep led to the murder of his Scottish steward in 1861. On 3 April of that year Adair, helped by a large force of RIC constables, evicted 44 families, comprising 244 men, women and children, leaving them to wander the roads, to seek shelter in Letterkenny workhouse or eventually – for some of the younger ones – to emigrate to Australia. These were the infamous Derryveagh evictions. As a result of them, he cleared 11,600 acres of mountainous land adjacent to what is now Glenveagh National Park. Some claimed the evictions were part of Adair’s cruel effort to beautify the land around the castle and improve its view. His ambition was to create an estate and castle that surpassed Balmoral, Queen Victoria’s Scottish retreat.

Despite being a genuinely bad man, Adair prospered. He moved to New York where he set up a brokerage firm to place British loans in America at higher interest rates than those in Britain. In 1869 he married a wealthy American heiress and eight years later established the first cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle (the ‘sticking up’ bit in the far north of that state) in Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the USA, which had been cleared a few years earlier of the Commanche native people. He died in 1885, aged 62.

Further south, I took a short detour to Glenties to hear my daughter Sorcha, the Irish Times journalist, chair a session at the McGill summer school on ‘Fractured Communities’, featuring a sometimes fiery debate between two strong and articulate women, the Indian-Northern Irish broadcaster and performer Lata Sharma and the SDLP leader Claire Hannah.

However Donegal doesn’t strike me as a fractured community, unlike Northern Ireland. In the last century Catholics and Protestants might have lived largely parallel lives. Today people may worship in different churches (the not insignificant number who still worship). But they get on, they are good neighbours, even friends – I believe that is as much as we can ever hope for if and when this island is ever re-united in some form. And good neighbourliness is not a bad outcome to aim for in this imperfect world. Paddy Harte Jr, the former chair of the International Fund for Ireland, says: “Donegal’s geo-political position, with 93% of its land border shared with Northern Ireland, meant that people inevitably felt a responsibility to learn to live together – a measure of this is how they successfully navigated the tensions brought about by the NI ‘Troubles.”

Seamus Mallon always used to long for ‘a shared home place’ (the title of the memoir I helped him write) in Northern Ireland. Maybe that is what Donegal has now become. Donegal Protestants and Catholics will be shouting together for Michael Murphy and the Donegal football team when they face Kerry in the all-Ireland final at Croke Park this weekend. Just as they shouted together for Burtonport-born Packie Bonner when his save put the Republic of Ireland through to the quarter finals of the World Cup in Italy 35 years ago. Sport uniting people in their shared home place: that should be happiness and togetherness enough for the moment.

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism, Republic of Ireland, The island environment | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

We need to take a hard look at the Irish ‘Revolution’ and its relevance today if we’re contemplating unity

Posted on Tuesday, 8 July, 2025 by andypollak

One of the recurring themes of this blog is that the people and politicians of the Republic are utterly unprepared for the arrival of around 800,000 Northern Protestants and unionists into a united Ireland, and must do some hard thinking about what changes to their 26-county nationalist structures and symbols are needed if that eventuality is going to happen relatively harmoniously in the not too distant future.

Four years ago I wrote: “Guaranteeing unionists their British ties and identity in a post-unity scenario will be extremely challenging to the complacent nationalism of the present-day Republic (where in many circles ‘unionist’ is a dirty word). But it may be the only way of bringing a significant element of unionism on board. And it is very far from the unitary state Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail have traditionally been wedded to. It seems to me to involve a constitutional system somewhere along the spectrum between federalism and confederalism, with a key continuing role for the British government. In any case, these are the kind of ultra-complex arrangements – as nuanced as anything in the Good Friday Agreement – which we need to begin to discuss in this republic.

“In fact, there appears to be zero discussion here about the crucial issue of what happens to the unionists at the end of the Union as we have known it. Instead, we in the Republic sail blithely into an unexamined future with a brainless consensus that in the end the good guys of Irish nationalism will win out over the Northern bigots and stooges of British imperialism, and then we will live together happily ever after in harmonious unity.”1

One of the extremely difficult things we may have to do is to revisit the pieties of the so-called ‘revolutionary’ period between 1916 and 1923, with its total ignoring of the unionists. This is ‘holy grail’ territory for many people in the South, to be touched at your peril. This was clear in the debate in recent weeks about the development of the General Post Office site in O’Connell Street, the headquarters of the 1916 Easter Rising. Aontú called it “sacred ground” and Sinn Fein insisted that the government, which is proposing mixed commercial and cultural use for the site, had “turned its face against the preservation of our revolutionary history.”

Last year saw the publication an important ‘revisionist’ book which should have made at least some of us look at the ‘revolutionary’ period with new, more critical eyes. It was Confronting the Irish Past: The 1912-1923 Decade in Light of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement by Séamus Murphy, an Irish Jesuit priest and philosopher at Loyola University in Chicago. Unfortunately it was almost completely ignored by Irish newspaper and magazine book editors and reviewers (its exorbitant price didn’t help its circulation either).

This is a very rich, dense and iconoclastic book and I can only give a flavour of it in this short blog. Murphy believes the 1998 Agreement is “potentially the most important political event in 20th century Irish history.” Potentially because it is much too early to judge whether it has actually transformed relations between unionists and nationalists (the signs after 27 years are not good). Murphy argues that: “Such transformation requires the two communities to change their interpretations of the past, including the 1912-23 period.”

He goes on to make three claims about that period: a) “the [1916] Rising and War of Independence distracted attention from the primary problem that had stalled the implementation of Home Rule for several years, namely unionist resistance; b) the nationalist resort to arms exacerbated the unionist sense of being under siege and made partition more likely and more bitter. In consequence, it seems that c) Ireland experienced both a political step forward, with the advent of self-governance north and south, and a political step backwards, with the derailing of political activity by civil conflicts and exacerbation of intercommunal division.”

The 1912-1914 Home Rule crisis meant that no longer was nationalism’s primary challenge to “wrest power from Britain” (Home Rule was on the statute book, albeit postponed until the end of the First World War), but how to relate politically to the Protestant and unionist communities “so as to get their consent to being governed mainly by Catholics.” The 1916 Proclamation wrongly dismissed unionist opposition to Home Rule as something “artificially created by the British Government”, and “the Rising amounted to a denial that the unionist challenge even existed.”

Murphy believes hindsight “enables us to say that the long-term consequences of the 1916 Rising were largely bad.” He stresses that “the 1916 leaders are not responsible for what the Provisional IRA did between 1970 and 1998, but for the disruption of the Home Rule process and exacerbating the division between unionist and nationalist Ireland…The so-called War of Independence, while formally directed against British rule, in practice was a war against other Irish people: RIC constables, constitutional nationalists and Protestants in the north.”

He goes on: “The so-called War of Independence was pointless, given that by January 1919, before it began at [the] Soloheadbeg [ambush], senior British politicians were informally letting the new majority nationalist party, Sinn Fein, know that dominion status for Southern Ireland could be on the table: just what the Treaty provided three years later.”

Thus the war “merely achieved the minor good of speeding up the process of gaining total independence from Britain, at the cost of widening the gap between the south and the north, making Irish unity more unlikely, and violently traumatising the people.”

Looking back from the perspective of the Good Friday Agreement, agreed by the leaders of the unionist, nationalist and republican communities, Murphy says the failure of both nationalists and unionists in the 1912-23 decade was “their refusal to recognise the political right of the other community to exist…The nationalist failure manifested as ignoring or dismissing the unionist reality, the unionist failure manifested as contempt for and fear of Catholics.”

He also stresses the “native versus settler dynamic” which is still a factor in Northern Ireland today. “Protestants were acutely aware of nationalists’ long memories of dispossession, and sensed the nationalist gut-conviction that they really had no right to be in Ireland. On the Catholic nationalist side, there was some willingness to tolerate their presence – on nationalist terms: if they wouldn’t agree to such terms, the attitude could be summed up as ‘the colonists could go back to where they came from.”

Too many of the new nationalist/republican leaders dismissed unionist resistance as unreal or unimportant. De Valera said in 1920 that unionist Ulster was “a thing of the mind only.” Murphy comments “it is easy to summarise Sinn Fein’s policy on unionism: it didn’t have one.” Most, if not all SF leaders, had this blinkered view of the North. Ernest Blythe, a rare republican from a Northern Protestant background, was one of the few who didn’t. He criticised the fantasy of the Dail’s declaration, at its first meeting in 1919, that an all-Ireland republic existed. He called this “the beginning of a persistent campaign of make-believe and self-deception…it had become obvious that an All-Ireland Republic was utterly unattainable without the consent of the opposing Northern Protestants.”

This self-deception continued for 50 years until the outbreak of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. “From 1922 to at least 1972, the official view of successive Irish governments was that unionists had no right to refuse to be part of a united independent Ireland and that Northern Ireland ought not to exist…In the anti-partition campaign around 1950, nationalist politicians travelled the world to present their case for territorial unification to bemused governments. Haranguing the outside world while ignoring unionists achieved only one thing: it confirmed unionists’ conviction that the nationalists were besieging them.”

The official Irish government view – and, it has to be said, the overwhelming popular view – remains that the foundation of the Irish state lay in the 1916 Rising and that “Home Rule constitutionalism was valueless, contributing nothing to the birth of the Irish state and the culture of democratic republicanism.” Home Rulers and the RIC are “excommunicated from nationalist community memory…if contemporary nationalism cannot recognise those groups, its promise to recognise unionism lacks credibility.”

In parallel with this make-believe by Irish governments, “after 1922 the nationalist/unionist divide was worse, with no hope of its resolution. The alleged success of arms in the 1916-22 period has given a cultural hegemony to the armed force tradition that it did not previously have.”

Murphy urges nationalists and unionists to “acknowledge the other tradition as part of Irish society with a right to exist and be respected, even if they might wish the other tradition did not exist. That would be demanding enough for many nationalists and unionists.” He believes that “finding peace in mutual toleration is the modest limited goal to set. Speaking as if all differences can be dissolved is to engage in fantasy, which hinders the goal of live-and-let-live policy.”

“At least up to the 1970s, southern nationalists held that, while Protestants as such were welcome, unionists did not belong; that to claim to be both Irish and British was self-contradictory; and that being a unionist was at least misguided, if not morally wrong. Up to the 1970s, the unionist conviction was that Catholics were socially backward and did not fit in Northern Ireland, since they refused to own it, and hence could never be trusted as equal citizens. Education to counter those stereotypes is slow but has had some effect.”

During the Decade of Centenaries the Fine Gael-led government strongly rejected Sinn Fein claims that the Provisional IRA were the direct descendants of the old War of Independence IRA, and thus their use of violence to complete the unfinished business of Irish freedom and unity was legitimate. Seamus Murphy disagrees: “Government insistence that the foundation of the state lies in the actions of a violent and explicitly non-democratic minority in 1916 is its bowing to the ideological supremacy of the IRA tradition, and accepting its hegemony. That fact is not changed merely by the IRA ceasing operations.” He accuses Irish governments of commemorating violent events, but “neglecting the political and constitutional achievements and the peace-makers.”

He also objects to the “aura of romance and glory” talk of the ‘Irish Revolution’ conveys (quite apart from the fact that it was an extraordinarily conservative ‘revolution’ with little social change dimension). “Commemoration along revolutionary lines can be neither inclusive nor reconciliatory. Endorsing certain kinds of political killing as revolutionary and therefore justified is inconsistent with the 1998 Agreement’s commitment to compromise and recognition of the other: inherently non-revolutionary values…Commemoration should promote ‘justice, equality, parity of esteem, tolerance, a better understanding of other groups, and (to the extent possible) healing of memories.”

He is also strongly critical of memorials to republican and loyalist paramilitaries that glorify them without mentioning their victims; this inflicts “a second symbolic death” on those victims. He contrasts this with efforts to mutually recognise the suffering – murder, maiming and trauma – inflicted across the sectarian divide. He singles out the “great work” of David McKittrick and other journalists in their book, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles, which he says should be easily and cheaply available, but in fact is scandalously out of print.

Murphy finishes by asking a key question: “Does the way in which a particular historical event or figure is remembered and commemorated benefit or harm contemporary society’s cultural and political life?” His answer is that only when the events of 1912-23 are evaluated against such values as peace, democracy, pluralism, tolerance, recognition of the other, development of an identity to be proud of, and respect for the rule of law (in essence, the values of the Good Friday Agreement) “have we made serious progress in coming to terms with, confronting and adapting our history for the needs of the living.”

Murphy is a passionate advocate for the Good Friday Agreement, with its purposes of “political reconciliation, enough acceptance and mutual recognition between nationalists, unionists and others so that a live-and-let-live political community can be built.” He believes its philosophy clashes with both the 1912 Ulster Covenant and the 1916 Proclamation, both of which “implicitly rejected the identity, existence and rights of the other community” and thus are “implicated in the violence of that decade and of subsequent decades up to 1998.” There was no recognition in either of these foundational documents that two distinct, even opposed traditions existed on this island and both sides had to accept the other tradition’s right to be such a distinct community. The 1998 Agreement “represents a long-belated rejection of the resort to arms of unionists and nationalists against each other. If that resort was wrong in the 1970-98 period, it must have been wrong in the 1912-23 period.”

He says that Pearse and his fellow cultural nationalists’ “blood-soil-spirit view held that a country in principle could not contain two national identities, since a nation’s identity, land and sovereignty formed an indissoluble unity. No wonder unionists felt there would be no room for them.” He recalls the “almost apocalyptic expression of their terror of being absorbed into the rising cultural nationalism which had no place for their culture.” The Good Friday Agreement “expresses a diametrically opposed view: one can choose one’s identity, and self-identify as Irish, British or both – in effect, whatever one pleases.”

This Northern-born Protestant is proud to be Irish (while understanding some unionist fears about becoming a smallish minority in a nationalist united Ireland). In politics I like how a friend, a distinguished lawyer, chooses to describe himself as a “left-wing, peace-loving Redmondite”. I don’t think the majority of people in this republic are going to heed Seamus Murphy and me for one second when it comes to their hallowed ‘revolutionary’ period. But a few outspoken deviants are always a healthy sign in a democracy.

1 ‘My single transferable blog: the people of the South are not ready for reunification,’ 1 November 2021

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Republic of Ireland | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments