2 Irelands together

Why Shared Island, not ‘Brits out’, is the way forward for Ireland

Posted on Sunday, 14 June, 2026 by andypollak

I have just come out from two and a half weeks in hospital, which means I haven’t closely followed the anti-immigration riots in Belfast, except to feel – as someone from a Northern Protestant background – horrified and ashamed once again that members of my community were in the forefront of that explosion of racism and violence. I will return to this difficult topic in a forthcoming blog.

The 2025 annual report of the Shared Island initiative was launched last month to the usual deafening silence from the media. This pioneering cross-border cooperation programme, initiated by Taoiseach Micheal Martin six years ago, has so far allocated €600 million (over €100 million on new projects last year) and is committed to spending two billion euro by 2035.

At the 2026 Fianna Fail Ard Fheis, also last month, Martin called Shared Island “the most consequential north-south initiative ever taken by an Irish government”. It has provided a major addition to the EU Peace and INTERREG programmes that funded so many cross-border projects in the first two decades of the century.

Martin said it is not about “reheating well-worn and comfortable rhetoric” (on RTE he was tougher, criticising the “empty rhetoric which we’ve had for nearly 100 years” – he should have inserted the adjective ‘nationalist’ into both statements). He went on: “It’s about the much harder, perhaps more uncomfortable, and certainly more important work of building the physical, societal, educational and person-to-person connections that we need if we are ever to achieve the goal of bringing people together and achieving agreement on now we are going to share our island.” He pointed out that all-island trade is now at a record high of €17 billion per year.

The Taoiseach is absolutely right. He also quoted Sean Lemass saying: “When people begin to work together it’s a habit that will grow.” I saw that with my own eyes when running the Centre for Cross Border Studies (now the Centre for Cross Border Cooperation) for 14 years up to 2013. I saw teachers and health workers and civil servants and university academics and spatial planners – including many from a unionist background – learning to work together in all-Ireland networks that we helped to bring together.

Intelligent people on both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland should welcome Shared Island: nationalists because it is a sensible way to build support for eventual unification among non-nationalists who can be won over by the economic, financial and social generosity of the Dublin government; and unionists because it’s a major ‘no strings attached’ funding source at a time when both UK Treasury and EU funding are drying up or threatening to dry up. It is accompanied by genuine efforts by Dublin to understand and help unionist communities. Strong loyalists I talk to are full of praise for Department of Foreign Affairs officials who help their projects with funding and advice.

Of course there is considerable self-interest involved from the Irish government. As the Northern Ireland editor of the Belfast Telegraph, Sam McBride, puts it: “If Martin isn’t rushing to a Border poll, then he needs to show he’s doing something on the North.”

However he goes on: “Far more significant is the strategic element. A senior official close to the Taoiseach involved in deciding how the funds are spent once told me that the key test was constitutional neutrality: Would this make sense if there was a united Ireland, and would this make sense if there was never a united Ireland? An hourly train service between Dublin and Belfast clearly ticks both boxes. Put more simply, it’s just common sense.”¹ The 40% increase in passengers using the more frequent service is another win for common sense.

Look at some of the projects funded: an islandwide nature restoration and biodiversity programme; linked therapeutic centres for children with cancer and their families; a joint women’s entrepreneurship scheme; the North learning from the South’s superior DEIS programme for tackling educational under-achievement; an all-Ireland pollinator plan; a new teaching building for the University of Ulster campus in Derry; the overseas joint marketing of the Wild Atlantic Way and the Causeway Coast in the North; working together to restore peatlands in both jurisdictions (and in Scotland); co-centres for research and innovation on climate, biodiversity and water, and on sustainable food systems; electrical vehicle charging points at sports clubs across the island; a cross-border arts and cultural heritage programme. One could go on and on listing these unquestionably common sense projects.

We all have our favourite individual projects. As a Green Party member, I was delighted to see the Nature Farming Friendly Network in the North linking up with the marvellous Burrenbeo Trust in County Clare, led by the visionary environmentalist Brendan Dunford. There are some I would criticise. I have my doubts about spending €107 million on the Narrow Water bridge across Carlingford Lough when Newry has a perfectly good by-pass and beauty spots like Carlingford medieval town and the Cooley Mountains are already adequately served by road. On a much smaller scale, what is the North-South Shared Ireland Teacher Research Exchange (T-Rex) – an all-Ireland version of an existing Southern programme – going to do that the highly successful Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South (SCoTENS) hasn’t been doing for the past 24 years, completing literally hundreds of cross-border research projects in this area?

Which brings me to the International Centre for Local and Regional Development ICLRD). I was at the 20^th annual conference of this important all-Ireland network of planners in Dundalk last month. I heard the inaugural joint head of the North South Ministerial Council, Tim O’Connor, a former senior Department of Foreign Affairs official, call the ICLRD “a beacon of what we intended when we started this journey 28 years ago.” The former chair of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, Professor Peter Roberts, spoke of “the absolute necessity for ICLRD to continue to broker the many ‘difficult to grasp’ issues in planning on the island of Ireland.” And leading Belfast planner Diane Fitzsimons said that the ICLRD had “created the trust to bring people together from all levels of government, all professionals, planners and engineers,from all across the island.”

Building trust in order to come together to solve difficult issues on this island: isn’t that the largest part of what the Good Friday Agreement – or at least its ‘Strand Two’ North-South dimension – was all about? Yet I was amazed and disturbed to hear that ICLRD’s main university sponsors – Maynooth University and University of Ulster – may be contemplating withdrawing their funding from this highly innovative all-island network. What an extraordinarily foolish and short-sighted decision that would be.

The late Sir George Quigley, the visionary business leader who was behind both the Dublin-Belfast ‘economic corridor’ and ‘island of Ireland economy’ concepts in the 1990s, shortly before his death in 2013 praised the ICLRD’s work on the mapping of ‘functional territories’ throughout the island. He called this “a potentially exciting concept since, put at its simplest, it could hopefully be developed to provide guidance in an island context on what services should be put where, having regard to optimum catchment areas, thereby enhancing accessibility by ensuring that services are affordable, economically operated and effectively configured and managed to sustain high quality.” He urged governments to act on the ICLRD’s recommendations and “not to let a single idea that merits follow-up fall on stony ground.”²

Contrast that careful and practical, yet idealistic, scenario with the empty rhetoric demanding an utterly unplanned Border poll within the next five years from the likes of Sinn Fein and the nationalist lobby group Ireland’s Future. Shared Island is clearly part of the George Quigley/ICLRD frame of mind. Isn’t this one of the routes which will allow the people of this island one day to come together politically, having shown they can come together economically and socially?

As that wise woman, former Labour Party deputy leader Liz McManus, put it recently when praising Shared Island as the most sensible way forward: “I have this sense that here in the South, in the Republic, that very often people would like to see victory over the Northern unionists. And it’s as basic as that: ‘Ah, the last of the Brits, we’ll get them off the island…and I find that abhorrent.”³

So do I. Shared Island is a way to bring the people of Ireland together. It may be too slow – and it may not even work. But it’s hugely preferable to the old irredentist demand for ‘Brits Out’ (which effectively means ‘Northern unionists out’), which will lead us inevitably back to violence.

PS I was delighted to see that three friends (and one person I admired) were awarded Quiet Peacemaker Awards by the John and Pat Hume Foundation recently. They were Julitta Clancy of the Meath Peace Group; Paddy Harte, former chair of the International Fund for Ireland, and Colin Flynn of the asylum seeker and refugee support group, Places of Sanctuary Ireland (and Eamonn McCann, the civil rights activist, socialist and writer). In the foundation’s words, the award recognised “everyday peacemakers who, during the Troubles or today, quietly and effectively promoted peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.”

¹ ‘Hard cash, soft power: How Dublin’s millions for Northern Ireland managed to upset both unionists and nationalists’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 May

² Journal of Cross Border Studies in Ireland, Spring 2013, p.18

³ ‘There’s a bit of a buzz about being older: Liz McManus on ageing, life after politics and why she thinks Trump is a monster’, Irish Independent, 5 May

Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 2 Comments

Why aren’t more of our children being educated together in Northern Ireland (and Ireland)?

Posted on Thursday, 7 May, 2026 by andypollak

When foreign, and especially American, visitors come to Northern Ireland, they are amazed that one of the outcomes of our much-lauded peace process isn’t far more Catholic and Protestant children being educated together. The growth of the integrated education movement, which began with a group of idealistic parents setting up Lagan College in Belfast in 1981, has been slow. In 1998, the year of the Good Friday Agreement, there were 41 schools (24 primary and 17 post-primary) enrolling around 3 per cent of all pupils. 25 years later, in 2023, 70 schools (47 primary, 21 post-primary and two nursery schools) catered for 8 per cent of all pupils. There are around 1,100 schools of all types in the North.

The main problem is that it has been extremely difficult to open any new school in Northern Ireland in the past 20 years because falling birth rates have led to the closure of 200 schools. This has meant that most integrated schools in that period have been ‘transformed’ from existing schools, with quite a few of those seeking integrated status doing so in the face of imminent closure due to small numbers. Also all but one primary school have come from the state, largely Protestant ‘controlled’ sector, which has suffered most from falling birth rates.

Between 2000/1 and 2025/6 the proportion of Protestant pupils fell from 43% to 28%, the proportion of Catholics fell from 51% to 50% and the proportion of Others rose from 7% to 22%. The Others category includes other Christians, other faiths, and those who with no religion or who did not record their religion, but is probably mainly explained by the growth of secularism.

In an interesting Irish Times column last month, Newton Emerson wrote about 25 communities, mainly in rural areas west of the Bann, which are each served by a Catholic and a state de facto Protestant primary school.¹ They have to find a way of sharing one school, or risk losing both, a death knell for any small village.

He cited a strategy document from the Department of Education which looked ahead to 2033, the year in which Northern Ireland’s total population is expected to go into indefinite decline (even allowing for immigration). According to this document, primary and secondary school enrolment will have fallen by 20.5% and 9.5% respectively by that year (with a falling birth rate, the younger the pupils, the fewer of them there will be). “As a result, an extraordinary 40% of all schools in Northern Ireland will be unviable by 2033, up from a quarter today,” he wrote.

Tony Gallagher, emeritus professor of education at Queen’s University Belfast, and a noted authority on the North’s extraordinarily complex education system, does not disagree with this diagnosis, although he notes that Emerson’s analysis is based on the largest projected decline in numbers. Projected numbers for primary school pupils tend to be more variable as they depend on generations as yet unborn.

Gallagher says: “This generation of young people are the most liberal, tolerant and inclusive in Northern Ireland’s history. Some people would say that the single most important thing to do to solve Northern Ireland’s problems of sectarian division would be integrated education. I think this places an unfair and inappropriate burden on the shoulders of young people and teachers. Our societal divisions are political in nature, not educational, and the primary responsibility for solving these divisions lies with our politicians . Separate schools do not produce bigoted generations, but they can lead to friendship networks that keep many young people in community silos, so disrupting those processes can help.”

He says that integrated schools are one important way of achieving this goal, but progress on this has been slow and there are other routes that should be pursued as well. Nearly 20 years ago he and fellow Queen’s University academics came up with the idea of ‘shared education’. This involved two or more schools in an area – Protestant, Catholic and other – collaborating closely together, sharing teaching and learning and facilities, while retaining their own buildings and identities. Pilot shared education partnerships between 2007 and 2014 involved over 100 schools. In 2018 the Department of Education reported that “over 583 educational settings from across all sectors have engaged in delivery of Shared Education to more than 59,000 pupils.”

Biennial reports from the Department of Education to the Northern Ireland Assembly indicated that over 60 per cent of schools were involved in ‘shared education’ partnerships up to the Covid crisis. The reports highlighted the advantages of a wider curriculum, teachers learning together and evidence of increased mutual empathy and understanding among pupils coming together to study sensitive subjects like history. Of course during Covid movement of pupils between schools was obviously impossible. Gallagher contrasts the work of teachers in these shared schools, working collaboratively for the common good, with Northern Ireland’s politicians inability to do the same.

Gallagher also points to a third possible option involving ‘joint faith’ schools managed by two or more of the Churches together. Joint Catholic/Anglican schools already operate in England, Canada and Australia. He thinks the Churches should be challenged on why they haven’t pursued this option, pointing to their rhetoric that they are now open to children from all denominations. The evidence since the Good Friday Agreement indicates very little change in intake patterns.

Gallagher’s view is that as many different routes as possible should be pursued simultaneously to provide opportunities for young people from different communities to engage with one another, rather than putting all our eggs in the one integrated education basket. The idea of joint faith schools is not dissimilar to a proposal from an independent review of education which reported to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2023 and proposed ‘jointly-managed community schools’ with church involvement. This review proposed creating a network of 177 of these schools by 2031, educating one-fifth of all pupils. These are ambitious and radical ideas which a deeply conservative (and cash-strapped) society like Northern Ireland may not be ready for. Somewhat surprisingly, DUP Education Minister Paul Givan appears to have largely accepted them.

Gallagher, who went to Catholic schools himself, says that in unionist-run Northern Ireland they were “the only public spaces where Irish identity could be celebrated.” He expressed a concern that in some future united Ireland, even if the Catholic Church no longer controlled the schools, a unitary system would prioritise an Irish identity and provide little space or recognition for the identity of the Protestant, British minority.

Meanwhile in the Republic the progress of the multi-denominational Educate Together school movement has also slowed. There are currently 118 Educate Together schools (97 primary and 21 second level), out of a total of over 3,000 primary schools and 700 secondary schools. Nearly 90% of primary schools remain under the patronage (i.e. ownership and control) of the Catholic Church.

A recent Department of Education survey of 200,000 households found that 40% of parents with children in denominational primary schools would prefer that ethos to shift to a a multi-denominational one.² Given that, it is extraordinary that no new Educate Together school has opened in the past four years.

The main problem is with the transfer procedure. Under 2012 legislation brought in by a Labour education minister, Ruairi Quinn, if a denominational school is to ‘transfer’ or ‘divest’ to become multi-denominational (under Educate Together patronage), a school’s patron – in most primary schools the Catholic bishop – has to give his approval for the process. This has happened on very few occasions. In addition, parents who may not go to church but still feel an emotional connection with Catholicism, and want their children to continue to be prepared for holy communion in school (often by teachers who don’t go to Mass), are often opposed.

Partly because of this, Educate Together has concentrated on expanding by opening schools in areas of new housing, such as new Dublin suburbs. In these cases the Department of Education runs a process where potential school patrons apply to open a new school. Over the past 20 years these new schools have mostly been Educate Together schools along with Community National Schools managed by the state’s area Education and Training Boards.

The politicians in Dublin don’t want to be seen forcing Catholic schools into multi-denominationalism. For a local politician it’s a headache they can do without. And there are always right-wing ‘flag wavers’ who will complain that this is the latest example of ultra-liberalism and globalism.

“In a country where only a minority now practice religion, how can it make sense to educate children apart in religious-run schools?” asks one longstanding Educate Together activist. “And in an era when we’re talking about a new, united and harmonious Ireland, how can we expect that to work educationally when the schools are still 90% controlled by one church? How is that going to create a united nation?” He also stresses that migrant children must be in this mix. “It should not be about educating Catholics and Protestants together, but about educating all children together.”

¹‘Falling numbers compel schools to integrate or close’, Irish Times, 9 April

² ‘Many parents seeking shift of ethos in schools’, Irish Times, 7 April

Posted in General | Tagged education, history, ireland, Northern Ireland, religion | 1 Comment

The British identity of Northern unionists must be respected and protected in a new Ireland

Posted on Wednesday, 1 April, 2026 by andypollak

I’m going to return this month to the theme of my last blog on Northern Ireland’s continued existence in a new or united Ireland, as outlined by SDLP leader Clare Hanna in her essay in the recent publication What Northern Ireland Means to Me. She said then: “Fundamentally – and I think this is really important to say – Northern Ireland’s always going to exist. I think there’s a perception that in a new Ireland – whatever that looks like – that this group of people in this shared identity just dissolves.”

Given that unionist politicians refuse to engage in discussion about what they would demand if there was ever a Border Poll majority for unity – on the understandable basis that turkeys don’t discuss Christmas – nationalists and republicans often ask ‘What do unionists actually want in order to agree to become part of a united Ireland?’

What they want is actually quite straightforward: they want their British and Protestant identity and culture to be respected and protected in a future united state.This is particularly so for those urban working class and rural unionists for whom the Orange Order, parades, bands and bonfires are important (most middle class unionists care much less about these things). A young loyalist acquaintance of mine said recently that nationalists’ fear of loyalist violence – or maybe everyone’s fear of such violence – in the event of a narrow vote for unity in a Border poll could be largely assuaged by making legal and constitutional provision for such respect and protection. “That’s a real incentive for nationalists,” he said. “If they can do this properly, they’re not going to have to worry about loyalist violence.”

He cited a 1974 statement by the leadership of the Ulster Volunteer Force: “Our basic objective is to preserve our Protestant liberties and traditions and our British way of life. By that we don’t mean the preservation of the link with Britain (my italics), but of those traditions of religious and civil freedoms which have characterised British democracy. When we talk of the preservation of our Protestant traditions and liberties, we simply mean that we want to ensure that we are able to worship God in the manner of our choice and not according to the ordinance or dictate of any outside organisations such as the Catholic Church.”

Obviously, with the dramatic decline of the all-powerful 20th century Irish Catholic Church and the secularisation of contemporary Irish society, Irish Protestants now have complete freedom to worship, express themselves and live full and equal lives with their Catholic fellow-citizens. Therefore the challenge now is not religious but political. In political terms how can the present Republic, many of whose citizens share an instinctive anti-Britishness, assure the passionately pro-British Northern unionist citizens of a future all-Ireland republic that they will be treated with equality and respect?

There are many ways of doing this, but three possibles immediately come to mind. Change the flag; change the anthem; change the Constitution. The Irish tricolour, with its laudable message of peace between the green and orange traditions on this island, has been irredeemably sullied in the eyes of most Northern Protestants and unionists by its use on the coffins of and in parades to honour dead IRA men, regarded by them as murderers and terrorists.

‘Amhrán na bFiann’ is a militaristic and ultra-nationalistic 19th century dirge that should not be the national song of a renewed nation based on “harmony and friendship” (in the words of the post-1998 Article 3 of the Irish Constitution) between the opposing and formerly warring ‘tribes’ in Ireland. It is a little known fact that two competitions were held in 1924 and 1925 to try to find a new national anthem, but the standard of entries was so abysmal that the judges (including the poet W.B.Yeats) decided to stick with ‘The Soldier’s Song.’

The Constitution is an altogether more difficult matter. I suggest that one possible change might be to insert a clause recognising and pledging legally to protect the loyalty of a significant minority of the Irish people to the British monarch. Unfortunately, this would have to be put to the Southern electorate in a referendum. Would they pass it? Certainly not. Successive Irish Times/ARINS opinion polls have shown that over 70% of voters in the Republic would not support changing the flag or anthem. A clause recognising the passionate royalism of Northern unionists would be an impossible further step too far for the instinctive republicanism of the Southern electorate. It would be a brave and foolish Southern politician who would even suggest it.

Rejoining the Commonwealth is another suggestion that opinion polls show would be overwhelmingly rejected by the Southern electorate. My young loyalist acquaintance thinks such an action would represent a “massive gesture” of welcome for unionists. To say “No, absolutely not” would be an equally huge gesture of rejection.

Then there are the complex governmental structures that would be required to recognise both the togetherness and (in some respects) the continuing separateness of the two parts of Ireland in a united state. The eminent US-based political scientist Brendan O’Leary, in his 2022 book Making Sense of a United Ireland (required reading for anyone interest in this existential issue), is dismissive of the different types of federalism that might address the concerns of unionists.

There was the Sinn Féin Eire Nua proposal in the early 1970s to reconstitute the four historic provinces: Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster. He points out that neither elected republicans nor elected unionists in any party in Ireland are pushing to recreate the historic nine-county province of Ulster.

A new Ireland based on city-regions – in which Northern Ireland could remain a large city-region – is utterly impractical, says O’Leary. “Decomposing the North will be difficult enough without having to re-engineer the South at the same time.” He is similarly dismissive of the future cantonisation of Ireland along Swiss lines – the Helvetic Confederation is largely governed through 26 cantons and some 2,300 communes!

Despite the superficial attraction of a two-unit federation, with the North and the present Republic as the constituent units, O’Leary points to the extraordinarily poor record of two-unit federations internationally. “Think only of Pakistan and Czechoslovakia, and the failure to reunify Cyprus.”

He argues that international evidence suggests that “federations can only cope with genuinely deep communal divisions where there are many units in the federation, preventing domination by one unit, and where a party system develops which provides political linkages across internal regional boundaries.”

O’Leary is kinder to the proposal that Northern Ireland would have ‘home rule’ within a united Ireland, with the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive continuing with its present powers, although these would be granted by Ireland’s parliament rather than Westminster. This model would enable the North to persist with different educational, health and welfare state policies, and to keep its own police service and its own courts. “The continuing existence of Northern Ireland, albeit within a united Ireland, would recognise unionists’ local patriotism towards Northern Ireland, and facilitate numerous ways of enabling Northern Ireland to remain, or become, different from the rest of Ireland, all while being part of a sovereign, united Ireland.”¹

O’Leary then lists the difficulties of this model: particularly whether Northern deputies in the Irish parliament could vote on Southern matters and – more importantly – the efficiency losses caused by having two separate health, education, social security, policing systems, and so on. However he concludes that such difficulties would not be impossible to manage. “Such difficulties exist in all polities with what is called ‘asymmetric devolution’, such as the kingdoms of Spain and Denmark [with Greenland], and the United Kingdom.”

Why are these issues not discussed more in the Republic, outside the rarefied (if admirable) conference rooms of ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South) and the Royal Irish Academy? I have one modest suggestion. Why don’t the SDLP and Fianna Fail resurrect their short-lived alliance in order to come up with some serious proposal for an Irish unity which would go out of its way to respect and protect unionist culture and identity? I further suggest that they might involve Micheál Martin’s rather brilliant former adviser, Peter MacDonagh (a grand-nephew of the 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh), who went off to live in Prague over 20 years ago after he married a Czech woman. I understand that he is still available to do work for Fianna Fail.

Part of me (the County Antrim Protestant part?) agrees with Public Expenditure Minister, Jack Chambers, when he said in Tralee last month that the government’s Shared Island initiative should not be used to push the cause of unity. He said more than six years of efforts by Irish governments had gone into slowly building support for it and securing “broad and collective engagement,” but that would be put at risk if unionists suspected its motives. He said that “if everything was to be done in the context of a constitutional conversation, we lose people in the room at the very start.”

But the other part of me (the proud, if sometimes critical, Irish citizen part?) says that this conversation will have to start sooner or later and a really imaginative and generous proposal coming from Fianna Fail and the SDLP might go some way to kick-start it by persuading more unionists to engage.

PS Regular readers of this blog know that I have my favourite journalists, north and south, whom I quote regularly: people like Sam McBride, Alex Kane, Allison Morris, Pat Leahy and Fintan O’Toole. I would like to add Mark Hennessy, Ireland and Britain editor of the Irish Times, to that list. That paper’s coverage of Northern and Irish-British affairs has improved enormously thanks to his superb and prolific reports and analysis, including on recent topics as different as the abortive civil case by British IRA victims against Gerry Adams, fading trust between the parties in the Northern Ireland Executive, the views of UCD students on unity and whether the Irish Constitution is a barrier to that unity.

¹ Making Sense of a United Ireland, p. 135

²https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2026/03/24/shared-ireland-programme-cannot-be-used-to-push-cause-of-irish-unity-jack-chambers-says/?

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism, Republic of Ireland | Tagged ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 7 Comments

Northern Ireland will continue to exist in a new Ireland – SDLP leader

Posted on Monday, 2 March, 2026 by andypollak

A fortnight ago in Belfast’s Shankill Road I met four impressive young people who were deeply involved in their working-class, loyalist community: Stacey Graham, Adam Watters, Ryan McFarlane and Mark McCleave (ranging in age from 19 to 36). All of them work for Northern Ireland Alternatives, a highly successful restorative justice initiative developed and supported by former UVF and Red Hand Commando members, whose co-director is Debbie Watters, Adam’s mother. It has been estimated that NI Alternatives has prevented over 90% of likely paramilitary punishment attacks in recent years.

Graham is a community development worker specialising in community safety and police accountability, and ensuring that working class voices are heard in government agencies. Watters, a recent law graduate, works for BUILD Shankill, which lobbies and organises to develop vacant and derelict land in the Greater Shankill area. McFarlane works with young men at risk of involvement in crime. McCleave is heavily involved in community and cultural festivals and is also chair of a local flute band. Socially committed young community activists like these working their hearts out in one of Northern Ireland’s most deprived areas bodes well for the region’s future.

However when does anybody in the Republic hear or read about the sterling work of these remarkable young people and people like them to make Northern Ireland a safer, more peaceful and more reconciled place? Almost never. They are loyalists, and therefore of little interest to the great majority of southerners who have long ago made up their minds that loyalism is a bad, bigoted, ultra-British thing.

Loyalism is something to be sneered at down here. An example was the decision by a smart sub-editor last month to take a line from a Newton Emerson opinion article inside the Irish Times and splash it at the top of the front page: “A barman in Portadown once told me he had served pints of Harp, fresh off the Dundalk train, to two prominent loyalists plotting a boycott of Irish goods.” That’s loyalists for you, stupid as well as bigoted.

They wouldn’t admit it but I believe this is of a piece with much Southern opinion about the North: that it is, in former Sinn Fein agriculture minister and MP Michelle Gildernew’s words, “a shithole”. This atavistic republican attitude is a far cry from the “harmony and friendship” pledged in the reformed Article 3 of the Irish Constitution after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Northern Ireland is a complex and deeply divided place. But it is home to nearly two million people, many of whom love and are proud of it. I have been reading a little book called What Northern Ireland Means to Me, put together by Allan Leonard and Julia Paul of Shared Future News, an admirable online publication which provides news and stories on peacebuilding, reconciliation and diversity.

What Northern Ireland Means to Me brings together short contributions (along with some gorgeous photographs) from 26 people: moderate nationalists, moderate unionists and ‘others’. SDLP leader Clare Hanna says: “Fundamentally – and I think this is really important to say – Northern Ireland’s always going to exist. I think there’s a perception that in a new Ireland – whatever that looks like – that this group of people in this shared identity just dissolves. And that’s not going to happen in the same way, you know. If you meet anybody from Cork, they have a very strong Cork identity. Or if it’s somebody from Galway, there’s a Galway identity – that regional identity.

“As well as the fact that, in governance terms, there aren’t 25,000 civil servants and teachers and cops and everything ready to just, as soon as there’s a border poll, sweep in here and run the place. We have different governance infrastructures and we have a set of interdependent relationships with the island next door, and those things won’t just change. So I think Northern Ireland will persist and exist, with all the baggage that it has. But I think we will be in a different constitutional place and I think that transition begins now or is beginning now. It’s just how we do it in the most structured way and in the most gracious way that we can.”

Former Presbyterian moderator and Shankill Road minister, Norman Hamilton, speaks for many of the contributors when he says he loves Northern Ireland because “first and foremost, it’s home”; it’s the province where most of his family lives and is a beautiful place environmentally, never more than an hour from mountains and lakes and sea.

“Even though I’m a unionist, I’m a member of the SDLP Commission on a New Ireland, because my Christian identity is far more significant to me than political or cultural identity. I would love to see a commitment to good government emerging amongst the electorate and then being reflected in the way politics is done. It doesn’t seem to me that there is any hope of a good future for us, either north or south, if our politics is so contaminated by bitterness and aggression and polarisation and power seeking. So from my perspective, that is my heart’s desire. It’s what I pray for quite often – that a new generation of elected representatives, both at local and central level, would emerge, who really do want collectively to do good government for the benefit of everybody.”

“What I would say to people from a republican background, from a loyalist background, from a unionist background, from a nationalist background, is that we have to get Northern Ireland working as a political and economic and social entity, and that is the way forward, whatever the outcome,” says Derry-based writer Paul Gosling. “So, actually, for republicans, they are going to have to persuade people in the South that they want to have Northern Ireland as part of a united Ireland. So the way to do that is to make Northern Ireland work immediately as best as possible. And unionists should say to people in Britain: ‘Look, if you want us, we are going to be doing everything we can to make Northern Ireland work as a place.”

Former Ulster Unionist (and Progressive Unionist) Belfast city councillor and GP John Kyle, is “very hopeful for Northern Ireland. The story of Northern Ireland is remarkable because we’ve come through 30 years of civil conflict. Some terrible things happened in that, and yet we had the resilience and the character and the determination to end the war, to find some sort of way to make peace. Now that process is incomplete. But I think that there has been a transformation in Northern Ireland. It shows that people can reflect, can reach out to one another, can extend a measure of grace and forgiveness to one another, and can shape a future then together.”

East Belfast Irish language activist Linda Ervine, a Protestant, says: “I want to see change in Northern Ireland. I want to see an end to the flag waving, Green or Orange tribalism, and I do think that is slowly happening. I do think the middle ground is rising, but unfortunately the two extremes seem to be shouting louder, even though they’re getting smaller. And maybe it will be a united Ireland, or maybe it will still be a Northern Ireland. I don’t lose much sleep over it. To be honest, a referendum will come one day and people will vote, and I’m not really bothered one way or the other.

“I think the thing that would be an issue for me – it would be losing touch with the UK. You don’t mind being part of a united Ireland. But I don’t want to be part of a united Ireland that hates the UK. I would find that difficult.”

Lawyer and commentator Sarah Creighton talks about a “sense of being from lots of different places and you’ve ended up on this wee rock somewhere in the corner of the Irish Sea. My family’s here; we’ve lived here hundreds of years. A lot of my family would have come over from Scotland…And that connection with Scotland is interwoven into Ulster as well. I do feel quite a bit of a connection to my Scots heritage.

“My job is here. I love our sense of humour. I love the people. I love our food, love our culture. It’s a fantastic place. And I love the diversity of Northern Ireland that’s increasingly coming through in the past couple of years. I think we’re a very friendly place. I think we’re a very warm place. Now I think we’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of tackling racism and I think we can be a bit more welcoming to people from overseas…But overall I think we’re very good, decent people.”

Writer and journalist Malachi O’Doherty scoffs at people who say “Northern Ireland’s a third world country; it’s post-colonial; it’s a victim of oppression, it’s suffering apartheid. I’d say: ‘Would you ever go and catch yourselves on? Would you ever go and look at what apartheid was? Would you ever go and look at what life is like in a third world country?’

“There is a problem of deep sectarian division in the state. The potential for political players to irritate the fault line is still there. And the potential for people to respond to that irritation and seek opportunity to create mayhem through violence is still there. My generation, born into the trough, didn’t stop that happening in 1970 and the gorgeous, affable, well-intentioned young people of today might not hold it back the next time either…certainly we’ve got a political middle ground now which we didn’t have. There were moderate unionists and moderate nationalists in the past, but now there’s a very large section of society which refuses both those labels. The scale of that is new.”

Claire Mitchell is a writer from a Protestant background who is nationalist-inclined.”I love our diverse and various Protestant heritages, especially the radical and dissenting histories. And so many things I love about home. But at the same time I’m totally shaped by the conflict here and the brokenness of living in Northern Ireland, a place that was born out of violence and into violence We live every day with that kind of segregation and separation, and it seems sometimes like a daily struggle to fight for a positive future.”

However she emphasises that she has “no hostility to Northern Ireland. I’m happy to say the words; I do not bristle. It’s a practical reality right now that I totally accept. But my gaze, I think, is longer. You know, Northern Ireland, it’s been around 100 years; it’s not how we started. I don’t think it’s how we’re going to end up. And I think it’s really important to love and cherish the heritage of this part of the island whilst also embracing the change and the flux of it.”

Let’s leave the last word to a Northern Irish man from an immigrant background. Joseph Nawaz, writer and performer, has a working class Catholic mother and a Pakistani Muslim father and grew up in a predominantly Protestant neighbourhood. Both his parents “came from parts of the empire that were crudely carved up by the British…I think in many ways Northern Ireland is the last smouldering ember of that fractious empire that never quite went out. I think there’s a grand tragedy also to the idea of the fact that the one political group here that most wants to keep Northern Ireland existing seems to be doomed to be the one to undermine its legitimacy, time and time again. Brexit was obviously the most recent example of that.”

Posted in General | Tagged belfast, history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics, travel | 2 Comments

The people of the Republic need to talk about the changes they have to make before unity

Posted on Monday, 2 February, 2026 by andypollak

On the eve of Ireland’s presidential election in October Kevin Rafter, professor of political communication at Dublin City University, came up with a good idea. He urged the new president to “convene a forum to examine the positives and negatives of unity for the Irish Republic itself, a debate that has not commenced.”

I think it unlikely that President Catherine Connolly will displease her Sinn Fein backers by taking action on such an idea. Sinn Fein don’t want an open forum to discuss what significant changes are needed in the South to make the idea of unity more palatable to unionists; they want a Citizens Assembly with one outcome, unity, and nothing upsetting to their base in both jurisdictions (and to people in South generally): no changed flag, no changed anthem, no rejoining the Commonwealth, no new constitutional clause recognising the British identity of the unionist minority and offering them protection for their British and Orange culture. They don’t want a debate on people paying more taxes and receiving reduced public services in a united Ireland.

Take one of these items: rejoining the Commonwealth. 29 years ago President Mary Robinson, addressing the Merriman Summer School in County Clare, asked people to consider their reaction to the proposition that Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth. She stressed that she was not posing the question as a political issue, but in the context of Irish people’s continuing insecurity about their identity.

“I think it is a good way of assessing the insecurities that we still have after 75 years – the lack of a firm sense of ourselves, so that we cannot address that question without a great deal of hesitation and emotion and conflicting views and no clear lines of direction,” she said.

The very idea of rejoining the modern successor of the hated British empire we fought so hard to leave is an outrage to many people in the republic. When a group of ordinary women were interviewed by UCD politics professor Jennifer Todd recently about changing symbols like the flag and anthem to help bring about Irish unity, they responded “intuitively, emotionally and forcefully”, answering ‘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’. However 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.” Those two contradictory responses reveal both unchanging gut republicanism and a confused openness to the need for change.

Nearly three decades further on, and with the ‘Troubles’ in the North largely ended by the Good Friday Agreement, the possibility of re-joining the Commonwealth as a gesture that might make unionists look a little more kindly at a united Ireland is rarely even raised in discussions about unity in the Republic. In an ARINS/Irish Times opinion poll in December 2021, 71% of people said they would not accept rejoining the Commonwealth to help accommodate unionists in a ‘new’ Ireland. In the same poll 79% said they would not accept higher taxes; 79% less money for public services; 77% a new flag; and 72% a new anthem.

I had asked in an Irish Times column after President Robinson’s speech: “What price are we in the Republic prepared to pay for the beginning of lasting peace and harmony on this island? Not a very high price, I suspect. It’s a debate I’ve not heard yet so I don’t know. I wonder if people in the Republic feel they are so little part of the problem that they don’t have to make any sacrifices for peace. If that’s the majority opinion, let’s hear it. But at least let’s start a debate about what contribution, if any, the citizens of this Republic think they should make to the cause of peace in the North.” Replace ‘peace in the North’ with ‘Irish unity’ and you have the present situation.

Former SDLP leader Mark Durkan has a slightly different take on this. He said in an interview last year that successive Irish governments had made a mistake in not developing Article 3 of the post-1998 Constitution: “It is the firm will of the Irish Nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island.”

I believe it is that core phrase “in harmony and friendship” which particularly needs to be further developed. Durkan suggested that “perhaps the best way to take these matters forward would be if the Irish government did something like reconvene the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, or another body like it, but specifically with the idea of developing new understandings and appreciation in relation to Article 3.” He said that the 1994-1996 forum had allowed the parties and people involved to get away from fixed positions and to be creative and future-looking. Such a body could help to ensure that “thinking becomes less partisan, because it is shared, where it is informed and stimulated by other parties’ opinions and by expert opinion.” Civic unionists, if not political unionists, were part of that sharing, as they were in the New Ireland Forum in 1983-1984.

A new 26-county forum as suggested by Professor Rafter could examine other factors affecting opinion in the South on the unity issue. For example, has there been a new upsurge of nationalism in the republic that would make it increasingly difficult to sell major compromises on the flag, the anthem, Commonwealth membership, special arrangement for Northern unionists and so on? Is the renewed interest in the Irish language, especially among young people, evidence of that new nationalism? The huge success of the Irish-speaking, republican-inclined Belfast rap group Kneecap would suggest that it is. The big vote for President Catherine Connolly, with her passionate adherence to the language and to Irish neutrality, is another straw in the wind. During a recent discussion I had with Trinity College Dublin politics students, they agreed that there was a renewed pride in Irish identity among young people, and were uneasy about bringing “British colonisers” (i.e. Northern unionists) into a united Ireland.

Another issue that could be discussed in such a forum is the views on unity of the more than 20% of people in the Republic who are foreign born. “They 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,” wrote Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride in their recent book For and Against a United Ireland. Let us hear from their representatives at the proposed forum.

Of course, the issues facing the integration of Northern unionists into a ‘new Ireland’ in “harmony and friendship” can simply be ignored. I sometimes suspect that many people in the South believe that with the rapidly increasing population of the island, the unionist minority in a united Ireland will only be a little over 10%, and therefore there is no need for any major compromises to attract them in. They will just have to ‘like it or lump it’ if and when a Border poll delivers that unity.

These are all issues that are rarely discussed in the Republic, including in the media. Are they discussed on social media? I simply don’t know: I’m a man of a certain age who does not use social media very often. What I do know – and agree with – is what O’Toole and McBride recommend in their scrupulously balanced treatment of the pluses and minuses of unity: it would be unwise to hold a Border poll “for a considerable period because even nationalist politicians are for now mostly engaging with the issue rhetorically”.

Let us, the politicians and people of the Republic, use that period well by setting up a forum to discuss these existential issues, and – in doing so – begin to get the often complacent nationalists of the present republic used to the idea that they too will have to make compromises if the ‘new Ireland’ is going to be a harmonious and – as far as possible – an undivided society. To quote O’Toole and McBride again: 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 based on facts about the present and realistic projections about the future.” Let us hear those facts, arguments and projections in a new government-established forum in Dublin.

This article first appeared in the 500th issue of the Belfast magazine Fortnight. This independent magazine of politics and the arts has been published, with a couple of short breaks, since 1970. I was its editor from 1981 to 1985.

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Republic of Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, news, Northern Ireland, politics | 4 Comments

China, Venezuela, Minneapolis and the familiar small divisions of Northern Ireland

Posted on Tuesday, 13 January, 2026 by andypollak

I never thought I’d be quoting the state-run China Daily for an accurate picture of the sorry state of the world following the US government’s kidnap of autocratic Venezuelan president Nicholás Maduro. But here I go. “From fabricated charges to military strikes and regime change, the operation follows a familiar and deeply troubling script – one that reflects the logic of state piracy”, it said. “Sovereign governments are first delegitimised, then destroyed by force, after which foreign capital moves in to carve up natural resources. This behaviour drags the world back towards a barbaric colonial era of plunder, in open defiance of international law”.

“What the world is witnessing is not a ‘rules-based’ order, but colonial pillaging. Upholding sovereignty, equality and non-interference is not optional. It is the foundation of global stability – and it must be defended”. Will we see the unthinkable next, Europe being forced to mobilise to defend the Danish autonomous territory of Greenland from an invasion by the mad Trump’s America?

As Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, put it: “If the United States were to choose to attack another NATO country, then everything would come to an end. The international community as we know it, democratic rules of the game, NATO ,the world’s strongest defensive alliance – all that would collapse if one NATO country chose to attack another.”

Can Europe and the world stop this mendacious (he uttered 30,573 lies and misleading claims during his first term, according to the Washington Post) and megalomaniac US president, an amoral sociopath who does not know right from wrong and believes that the only constraint on his power is “my own morality, my own mind”? A man who is surrounded by genuinely wicked advisers and acolytes: men like Stephen Miller, who believes that “we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. That is the iron law of the world since the beginning of time”; and Steve Bannon, who has been organising and promoting far right and fascist parties all over Europe for more than a decade.

In my Dublin Unitarian church last Sunday, the academic and writer, Anthony Roche, read W.B. Yeats’ prophetic 1920 poem: ‘The Second Coming’. “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold./ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world./The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity./…And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

It is almost a relief to return from this terrifying international panorama to the familiar, humdrum divisions of Northern Ireland. Although even here the excesses of Trump’s savage legions intrude. Renée Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother of three who was shot dead by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent while trying to drive away from a confrontation with ICE in Minneapolis – and who was called a “domestic terrorist” by senior Trump officials – spent five summers as a teenager in Northern Ireland as part of Christian youth missions organised by the Presbyterian Church. The former minister of Saintfield Presbyterian Church in County Down, Rev James Hyndman, remembered her as “a lovely, kind, compassionate, quiet, creative girl, just a lovely, lovely girl.”

And so back to Northern Irish affairs. It is sometimes difficult for an outsider, even a passionately interested outsider, to know how bad – or not so bad – things are in that divided place. Leading journalists seem united in agreement that the place is failing. Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph noted that “logically, unionism’s central mission is quite simple: It needs to make Northern Ireland work. Despite the myriad failures of this place, it does work after a fashion. But far too many areas of public services are regressing. Were it not so cravenly populist, the DUP could be leading the debate on revenue-raising or cost-cutting by telling the public that if they want to clean up Lough Neagh, to be able to build houses, and to have better roads, then there must be either more taxes or cuts elsewhere.”¹

Alex Kane in the Irish News found that the relationship between the DUP and Sinn Fein on the Northern Ireland Executive is “immeasurably worse” than it was during the early years of the Paisley-Robinson-McGuinness executive. It is “blindingly obvious that all of nationalism is on what might be described as ‘Irish Unity Now’ territory, while the overwhelming majority of unionism has, to all intents and purposes, abandoned the idea that the assembly and executive can be relied upon to protect and promote the interests of the unionist communities.”²

Malachi O’Doherty in the Belfast Telegraph wrote that the DUP and Sinn Fein are “stuck together as in a tragically fractious arranged marriage, doomed to being unhappy together without the prospect of separation. And they are also doomed to being responsible for governing the region and to bearing the criticism for how badly that is done. This is an awful, pathetic position to be in.”³

The Pivotal think tank set out how badly Northern Ireland has been governed in sober language in its September 2025 report: “The Executive has promised much but avoided difficult choices about
policies, priorities and funding which are essential if real change is to be achieved. The public are yet to see tangible improvements in health waiting lists, GP access, affordable housing, policing, poverty and more. In fact, many of these areas have got worse over the past 18 months.⁴

“No real plans are in place to address some long-term challenges like wastewater infrastructure, productivity and poverty. There does not appear to be recognition that a step-change
is needed, and that continuing with current policies will only lead to further deterioration in outcomes. To this end, it is very concerning that the longer-term Investment Strategy, which was
due to sit alongside the Programme for Government, has still not been published.

“The absence of substantive plans is largely due to the Executive’s continued inability to reach collective agreement on difficult decisions, to work across departmental silos, and to be honest
with the public that choices are needed between different policy aims. Without a doubt Northern Ireland faces many difficult issues, but continuing with current policies will only lead to ever worsening outcomes.”

However despite the widespread impression that the power-sharing Executive is failing to govern the province effectively, relatively few voters want it scrapped. In his latest opinion poll last month, Professor Peter Shirlow, the director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University, asked if people would vote for a party that brought the Northern Ireland Assembly down before the next Assembly election in 2027. Sixty percent agreed that they would not vote for a party that collapsed the Assembly before that election. A mere 12% stated that they would.⁵

Among party voters 51.9% of Sinn Fein voters, 78.4% of SDLP voters, 55.5% of Ulster Unionist Party voters, 70.5% of Alliance voters and 32.8% of DUP voters stated they would not vote for a party that collapsed the Assembly before the 2027 election. Shirlow concluded that this “may suggest that Sinn Fein collapsing the Assembly would not embolden but instead probably undermine the pro-unity vote share.”

¹ ‘Unionism’s lost decade: How a flawed decision 10 years ago precipitated a collapse for the ideology which built Northern Ireland’, 6 December

² ‘In 2007 I had hope. Now I don’t think the parties give a toss about what chaos we’re in’, 31 December

³ ‘Sinn Fein and the DUP are trapped in a miserable marriage…and our sectarian politics won’t let them escape, 30 December

⁴https://www.pivotalpolicy.org/assets/files/publications/pivotal_tracker_2025_sept.pdf

⁵https://sluggerotoole.com/2025/12/17/beyond-the-headlines-northern-irelands-evolving-electorate-part-one/#more-110676666

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Northern Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 2 Comments

How will Ireland contribute to Europe’s defence if Ukraine falls back and Russia attacks?

Posted on Saturday, 27 December, 2025 by andypollak

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is my international political leader of 2025. I am amazed and humbled by how this small, slightly-built former actor and comedian has, with immense calm, courage and indefatigability, maintained his morale, and the morale of his embattled country, through a year of merciless battering by the Russian army, public humiliation and near-betrayal by Donald Trump and indecision by the European Union. On Christmas Eve he was unveiling the latest peace plan, featuring a demilitarised zone along frozen battle lines, with both Ukrainian and Russian armies withdrawing equal distances to facilitate this. Almost certainly Vladimir Putin will say ‘Nyet’ and will continue his army’s grinding advance in Donbas and murderous nightly bombardment of Ukraine’s cities and towns with hundreds of missiles and drones.

Following the EU’s latest ‘fudge’, declining to use Russian assets held in Belgium to fund the Kiev government (while offering a €90 billion loan), where does little Ireland stand in a potential confrontation between the EU and Russia over Ukraine? In a hard-hitting opinion piece earlier this month, the Irish Times‘ excellent political editor, Pat Leahy, wrote: “It seems increasingly likely that the question of Ukraine’s ultimate survival as a sovereign and free country will come down to what the EU decides to do.”¹

He went on: “I wonder how much help we can be.” A 2022 report from the government-appointed Commission on the Defence Forces concluded that Ireland was effectively defenceless on land, on sea and in the air.² In particular, the report said that Ireland, with its eight-aircraft Air Corps, had “no air defence of any significance.”

Leahy continued: “It is hard for EU allies to take Ireland seriously on security and defence matters. This is emphatically not because Ireland is a neutral country. Nobody minds that we are neutral. But they do mind that we are not contributing meaningfully to the EU’s defence. They do mind that we are not capable of defending ourselves. They do mind that we have to rely on the expensively maintained armed forces of other countries – including, principally, the British [the irony of that!] – to defend the critical European infrastructure that runs through our waters in the shape of transatlantic cables. And they really mind that while not doing any of this, we see fit to lecture others about ‘peace’.

“And they really, really mind that we do and don’t do all this while enjoying the fruits of the most prosperous economy in Europe, buoyed by tax revenues from the US companies whose lucrative data flows through those same cables.

“We love to tell ourselves that we are renowned the world over as a neutral country, a ‘voice for peace’, on the side of right, not might. There is some truth to this. We have valuable connections to the global South where our mostly non-colonial past, and our history of missionary activity, has some currency.

“But among EU governments and the people who make policy decisions in our part of the world, many see us as freeloaders who combine an ability to benefit from the EU with an unwillingness to do our fair share in defending it – whilst at the same time striking a pose as moral leaders.”

Leahy pointed out that “the EU has been the single most important policy of this country for the past half century.” Most Irish people would agree that the benefits of EU membership to this country have been enormous. But “now the character of the EU is changing in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ongoing Russian aggression aimed at EU members and the stepping back of the US from its traditional role as the guarantor of European security. Defence and security are becoming core parts of what the EU does.”

Is this “a dangerous fantasy of bushy-eyebrowed colonels in bunkers, bent on the ‘militarisation’ of the EU at the behest of the ‘military industrial complex”[in President Catherine Connolly’s words during her election campaign]? Ask the Poles, Leahy said, as they mobilise 10,000 soldiers to guard railways that were sabotaged last month? Ask the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians, targeted by Russian-sourced cyberattacks, drones and balloons around their airports? Ask the Germans, probably the European country most reluctant to contemplate a conflict with Russia, whose head of military intelligence told a parliamentary committee recently that Moscow “will not hesitate, if necessary, to engage in a direct military confrontation with NATO”. Ask the Ukrainians.

“All of this makes the world a more frightening place. Is an outright conflict between NATO – or at least the European members of NATO – and Russia now likely? Let’s hope not. But it looks more possible than at any time since the height of the Cold War. History teaches us that only strength deters menace. It all makes fretting about the triple lock seem faintly ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

And yet neutrality in general, and the triple lock in particular, were at the centre of Catherine Connolly’s highly successful presidential election campaign. [The triple lock means that any deployment of more than 12 Irish peacekeeping soldiers overseas must have the approval of the government, the Dáil and the UN Security Council, including, one must assume, its permanent members, the US, Russia and China. What kind of an independent foreign policy is that?]. We Irish people love our neutrality. And one can see this point of view, for who wants to be dragged into a war over a faraway Eastern European country of which we know little? (Where have we heard that before?) And anyway, didn’t we do our bit by taking in more than 120,000 Ukrainian refugees, around 80,000 of whom have remained?

The British historian of and commentator on Eastern Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, argues strongly that “it’s up to us Europeans to enable Ukraine to survive armed assault from Moscow and diplomatic betrayal from Washington. In doing so, we also defend ourselves.”³

He then lists reasons why the EU may not act militarily: the myth of Russian invincibility; learned helplessness after 80 years of depending on the US for European security; the bureaucratic slowness of the EU; acute competition for public money in often heavily indebted European states with ageing populations; and national egoisms that saw Belgium’s right-wing prime minister hold out against the seizure – on behalf of the EU – of Russian frozen assets in that country and their transfer to finance Kiev. He asks: “Will our diverse, complicated, self-doubting continent rise to this challenge?”

Speaking as a cussed northerner, it’s the tone of moral superiority adopted by those strongly in favour of Irish neutrality and non-involvement that often gets to me. Was it morally superior (as opposed to the pragmatism of a small nation less than 20 years after its war of independence against Britain) to be neutral in the Second World War when Britain was leading Europe’s democratic forces in the fight against Nazism? No. Was it morally superior to be both neutral and Catholic (and thus anti-Communist) during the Cold War, while sheltering under the US nuclear umbrella like the rest of Europe? No. So is it morally superior to refuse to have anything to do with an EU defence force when there is a warmongering Russian state on our common European doorstep? I would say no.

If we’re going to be Europeans – having joined an association of nations which in 50 years saw us move from being one of the continent’s poorest countries to one of its richest – we have to play our part, however small, in the defence of the common European home that has been so good for us and is now going through a difficult and dangerous time. At the very least, why don’t we take a lead by making a firm offer of 360 Irish soldiers (roughly the same number as we send to UNIFIL in Lebanon, whose mission will end at the end of next year) to a European ‘reassurance force’ to help guarantee and police any ceasefire in Ukraine? It’s a daunting prospect, and I am full of foreboding. But I believe it’s the right thing to do.

¹ ‘Fretting about the triple lock seems ridiculous now’, Irish Times, 6 December

² Conor Gallagher, ‘Who protects Irish skies? The secret air defence deal that dates back to the Cold War’, Irish Times, 8 May 2023

³ ‘Only Europe can save Ukraine from Putin and Trump – but will it?’, Guardian, 6 December

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Republic of Ireland | Tagged ireland, nato, politics, russia, ukraine, war | 4 Comments

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 gaza, history, ireland, israel, palestine, politics, zionism | 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

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 4 Comments

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

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 1 Comment

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