Nobody can deny that the installation of Michelle O’Neill as the first nationalist First Minister of Northern Ireland last Saturday was an historic moment. For a statelet that was set up over a century ago specifically to ensure that NI had an inbuilt unionist majority and thus to exclude it from the newly independent Irish state, to elect not only a nationalist, but an IRA-supporting republican woman as its leader, will be seen by most Northern nationalists as something of a miracle.

O’Neill was smart, gracious and stateswomanlike in her moment of victory. She avoided triumphalism and made no explicit mention of either Irish unity or a Border Poll in an inaugural address that focused on reconciliation and bread-and-butter issues. “I will serve everyone equally and be a First Minister for all,” she said. “Wherever we come from, whatever our aspirations, we can and must build our future together. We must make power-sharing work because collectively we are charged with leading and delivering for all our people, for every community.”

Not so her party leader, Mary Lou McDonald. A united Ireland, she said, was now “within touching distance.” My doubts about McDonald’s judgement (which I outlined in my last blog) are only confirmed. These are the words of a fantasist, an ultra-nationalist ideologue who doesn’t live in the real world. Does she really believe the long, hard grind – a work of many years, decades even – of persuading enough middle ground people and moderate unionists that unity is the answer to the North’s many problems, can be by-passed? Or was she just intent on goading unionists at their point of maximum sensitivity – kicking them when they had lost the First Minister’s post and their hopes of overturning the Windsor Framework and ending the Irish Sea ‘border’ were down (despite Jeffrey Donaldson’s claims to the contrary)?

Because I am not a working journalist these days, I usually turn to the two sharpest political commentators in Ireland – Pat Leahy of the Irish Times and Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph – for insightful analysis of key events. Leahy wondered what Mary Lou McDonald was up to with her provocative (but clearly considered) statement. Was it just the old republican adage that Northern Ireland can never be anything but a failed state and they were certainly not going to do anything to make it a successful one? Leahy thought not. He preferred the argument that at a time when Sinn Fein’s opinion poll figures are down in the Republic, and the party is on the back foot on issues like immigration, she was trying to reassure her base.

The problem is that Sinn Fein has two bases and thus two often conflicting messages (one aimed at people in the Republic who’ve never voted for them before): “that Sinn Fein will be a massive change in the government of the South, but also that it would not change things that voters like; that the Republic is a basket-case, misruled for 100 years, but that a Sinn Fein government would not change its economic model; that things under Sinn Fein will be simultaneously different and the same; that we will get both change and continuity”. It’s a tricky message to sell, he said.¹

McBride wrote that the deal negotiated by Jeffrey Donaldson with the British government was not what he claimed it to be. It was “better practically for Northern Ireland, and more constitutionally bearable for unionists, than the original Northern Ireland Protocol. If goodwill persists between Brussels and London, and if blind eyes are turned liberally to continued bureaucratic absurdities, then what has happened this week can work, after a fashion…

“But while the Irish Sea border has been softened, it unquestionably remains. For Jeffrey Donaldson to claim he’s swept away the sea border for goods which are staying in Northern Ireland is as palpably absurd as Donald Trump claiming he won the last US Presidential election… Donaldson should try moving a cherry tree from Leeds to Lisburn, or try moving any other commercial item between Birmingham and Ballymena on the same basis as Birmingham to Brighton.” The British government is still planning to “take direct powers at Westminster to direct NI bodies” in relation to checks on goods. And the continuation of the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over Northern Ireland – “not acceptable”, Donaldson has said in the past – will continue.²

Donaldson showed considerable political courage in facing down his opponents – both in the DUP and to the right of it – to get his deal through. However his party’s base – which largely supported the boycott of Stormont over the Irish Sea ‘border’ – will be uneasy and potentially rebellious if it is seen not to work. Jim Allister of Traditional Unionist Voice and that toxic little agitator, Jamie Bryson, will be working hard to stir up trouble for him.

Last Monday, a few hours before Donaldson faced his party faithful and successfully persuaded them to back his less than perfect deal with Whitehall, I had an interesting conversation with two Belfast businessmen. These were men of moderate views (Alliance and SDLP-inclined respectively), but they were frustrated and angry at what they saw as the DUP – a party which had received a quarter of the vote in the last Assembly election – forcing Northern Ireland into the freezer for the past two years. They were “sick of a minority party holding the whole society to ransom, sick of having to kowtow to the DUP because of their paranoia about the Irish Sea ‘border’ destroying their sense of the Union.”

They were worried that young people – and especially young unionist people – had lost faith in politics as it was conducted in Northern Ireland: “It’s very dangerous, they have no regard for politics or politicians here – they never see politics producing any positive results. If the DUP don’t go along with the social changes they think are important – things like equality, women’s rights and gay rights – they will just leave Northern Ireland. The DUP are going to have to come to terms with the liberal culture of a young, modern society.” One man said it was already happening: he knew at least one young gay member of that deeply conservative party.

In contrast, young nationalists could see that Sinn Fein got things done at constituency level (unlike the DUP) and believed the republican party was committed to equality and fairness. They would chant ‘Ooh, aah, Up the Ra’ at public events to give two fingers to the DUP in particular and the Northern political system in general.

The businessmen echoed Sam McBride in worrying that Northern Ireland’s infrastructure was falling apart: houses not being able to be put on the market because Northern Ireland Water can’t connect them to the mains; offshore wind companies not able to set up because of the sclerotic planning system; and major roads full of potholes (“Look at the dreadful state of the Sydenham by-pass, the road to Belfast City Airport – even in Africa they make sure they have a decent road to the airport”).

One cited the head of the Southern business and employers body IBEC, Danny McCoy, who has been forecasting for some time an island population of 10 million by 2050 (today the island’s population is seven million, with just under two million of these in Northern Ireland). This will be “a new Ireland in which our children will have a good future.” He said the challenge for the North would be to absorb around one million of these people.  “By 2050 there might be only 250,000 hard-line ‘traditional’ unionists left. It will be a very different place to Northern Ireland in the last century – if it is still in existence.”

There is no doubt that the plates are shifting in Northern Ireland. Last month I was talking to half a dozen people from broadly unionist backgrounds in Fermanagh, and all but one of them said they were no longer comfortable calling themselves British. The man who still called himself British said he was “a very, very, soft unionist.” However he stressed that he wouldn’t say ‘Yes’ to a united Ireland. “I’d want to know exactly what it is we’re looking at. I’d want to be informed, to be consulted. I wouldn’t want to be driven in at the end of an armalite or even surreptitiously coerced into it.”

We should be careful that we do not listen to young people exclusively (this is a man in his seventies talking!). In an Irish Times interview in December, that wise old owl, former Tánaiste and Irish Labour Party leader Dick Spring, warned that young people had no understanding of the 1969-1998 Troubles, and didn’t give them any thought.

He said it would take “an awful long time, as we see in other war zones, for people to recover from all those tragedies and the loss of loved ones down through the years. It has left a long, long memory bank for people, and people have to dig very deep if they are to overcome that and work with people who are, you know, responsible for, or supporting, that campaign of violence.”³ And that includes Michelle O’Neill.

¹ ‘McDonald and Sinn Fein have tricky message to sell’, Irish Times, 3 February

² ‘Despite the DUP’s Trumpian claims, this deal has embedded the sea border rather than removed it’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 February

3 ’Dick Spring interview: I don’t want to be lecturing young people’, Irish Times, 16 December