2 Irelands together

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

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