I am going to return to the theme of my last blog earlier this month: the need for a forum to discuss not the constitutional politics which continue to divide the people of this island, but the values – peace, democracy, equality, community, environmental sustainability, Christianity in all its forms, and European-ness – which the great majority of Irish people, north and south, have in common.

My belief in the need for an all-Ireland Forum on Common Values was only increased by reading the results of the latest Irish Times/ARINS opinion poll on constitutional options for this island earlier this month. The casual reader perusing the headlines on six days of lengthy articles – ‘Support of Irish unity growing in North, poll finds’; ‘Trends show rise in support for unity among Northern voters’; ‘Majorities in North and South favour planning for possibility of Irish unity’ – might assume that there had been significant changes in opinion in Northern Ireland favouring reunification.

However that is definitively not the case for the main group traditionally most hostile to reunification. What the headlines did not say is that the vast majority of Northern Protestants “remain strongly opposed to Irish unity, with 82% saying they would vote against it, and just 7% in favour.” In Northern Ireland overall, 48% of all respondents said they would vote against unity, while 34% say they would vote in favour. This latter figure is up from 27% in the first year of the survey in December 2021, this being “mainly accounted for by a sharp rise of Northern Catholics saying they would vote for a united Ireland”.¹

So there’s not much new there except that with the rise of Sinn Fein to become the largest party at Stormont – a body which still achieves very little in terms of good governance – and resignations, divisions and scandals on the unionist side, some less nationalistic Catholics are being persuaded by the unity argument.

On the Southern side there is little in these latest findings to indicate that people in the Republic are any more prepared to compromise on their comfortable existence and traditional nationalism to accommodate unionists in a ‘new Ireland’ than they were in the first such poll in December 2021. Then an astonishing 79% said would not accept higher taxes; 79% less money for public services; 77% a new flag; 72% a new anthem; and 71% re-joining the Commonwealth.

Three years of exhaustive Irish Times/ARINS polls only confirm me in my belief that this Republic is utterly unprepared to incorporate 700-800,000 alienated and betrayed Northern Protestants and unionists (because that is how many of them will feel) into its body politic. In the words of Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy, commenting on the necessity for a reunified Ireland to become a little bit more British to recognise the British identity of those Protestants and unionists in its constitutional arrangements and ‘national expression’: “Don’t like the sound of any of that? Don’t fancy a state that’s a bit more British? Figure that we fought a war to get rid of the British (two wars, the Provisional IRA might say) and to hell with the idea of changing the Irish identity of the Republic in order to accommodate unionists? That unionists can like it or lump it, and if they don’t like it, well, they know where the door is?” An Irish Times editorial put it equally bluntly when commenting on Southern Irish people’s reluctance to consider measures that might take account of the identities and concerns of unionists: “There remains a strong strain within Irish nationalism that sees unification in crudely assimilationist terms.”²

I believe such an attitude would be disastrous for a country which – in the words of the new Article 3 of the Constitution, inserted after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – has pledged that unity will come about through “harmony and friendship” to peacefully unite the people of the island “in all the diversity of their identities and traditions.”

Which is where I believe an all-island Forum on Common Values (an updated version of the 1994-1996 Forum on Peace and Reconciliation) comes in. Because I believe those common values – as listed in the opening paragraph of this blog – can provide a real foundation for the building of harmony and friendship on this island. Let us put aside for a few years the deep and enduring political divisions. While very few Northern Protestants want to see a united Ireland, many – perhaps most – of them would have no objection to a closer relationship with the now prosperous, economically dynamic and culturally liberal Republic.

The 1994-1996 Forum created the means to bring Sinn Fein in from the cold and to enable all the parties to find a way of engaging with each other.  The story is told that on the first day, when Gerry Adams entered Dublin Castle, Senator Gordon Wilson (who had lost his daughter in the IRA’s Enniskillen bombing) made a point of shaking his hand – showing Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and others the pathway for how to engage with that party.  

David Bolton, founder of the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation, which did important work with victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing (currently in the news as the heartbreaking testimonies of its victims and survivors, speaking at a long-delayed public inquiry, are making headlines), wrote to me recently to say how valuable he had found the 1994-1996 Forum. He said he had attended it on two occasions and got to know some of the staff well. But it was at the lunches “where the magic happened. People found themselves sitting alongside others whom they would never have a chance to meet – never mind have a conversation with.”

I am a member of the Unitarian Church in Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green, a liberal Presbyterian congregation with strong Northern connections which believes above all in freedom, reason and tolerance in matters of religion. We have recently been discussing whether a ‘new Ireland’ could come to mean an island where these core Unitarian values could flourish, whatever its constitutional status. A renewed commitment to freedom, reason and tolerance under Article 3 of the Constitution could surely help Irish people come together around the values of peace, democracy, equality, a strong sense of community, environmental sustainability, the Christian tradition in all its forms and even a sense of being European (since a majority in Northern Ireland voted against Brexit and it is still connected to the EU through the NI Protocol and the Windsor Framework)?

Here’s one example. Could an all-island Forum on Common Values bring together Orangemen and members of the GAA? For many in both these organisations, the other organisation is like the devil incarnate: exemplifying anti-Catholic bigotry and support for IRA violence respectively. Whereas in fact they have a lot in common, especially in rural areas, as important factors in community cohesion in a world where community values are often under threat. I have talked to the most senior officer of the Orange Order, Rev Mervyn Gibson, at a Shared Island Dialogue event in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. I’m sure he could be persuaded to speak on the cultural importance of the Orange Order at a Forum for Common Values. The president of the GAA, Jarlath Burns, an innovative and open-minded school principal from South Armagh, could be invited to respond.

The absence of mutual understanding and tolerance here is great. A Northern businessman of my acquaintance, a member of the Orange Order, recently recalled a TV programme he had seen about the great Irish rugby player, Brian O’Driscoll, visiting Northern Ireland. O’Driscoll had been “absolutely flummoxed” to witness people who carried the Union Jack on the 12^th of July and wore Orange collarettes supporting the Irish rugby team. “You could almost see the cogs in his brain going: ‘What’s going on here?” Yet for this man and a lot of his fellow Orangemen, this identification with two nations, two cultures on the island of Ireland, was completely normal. “Some people say ‘I’m British, and that’s it.’ Others are happy to say ‘I’m Irish and I’m British’, he said. “It was the funniest thing to see Brian O’Driscoll’s head nearly explode at the thought of this.” The same man recounted a conversation with friends in Galway who, when he told them he was an Orangeman, “looked at me as if I had been beamed down from Mars, as if I was some sort of alien.”

On the back of an envelope, I can list 30 prominent unionists of various kinds I would be confident would be prepared to voice their views at a Forum on Common Values. They range from politicians and former politicians like Mike Nesbitt, John Kyle and Brian Ervine; through community workers like Brian Dougherty and Jackie Redpath; prominent women like Dawn Purvis, Debbie Watters, Sarah Creighton and Alison Grundle; academics like Peter Shirlow and Paul Bew; former leading DUP members like Wallace Thompson and Sammy Douglas; and Presbyterian clerics like John Dunlop, Norman Hamilton and Leslie Carroll.

Maybe a university or a peace organisation like Glencree could be funded by the Irish government to organise an initial gathering of such a forum. The churches could play a key role. Some years ago I was approached by a Southern Irish university about organising a re-run of the 1992-1993 Opsahl ‘citizens inquiry’, which was on ways forward for Northern Ireland at a particularly despairing juncture (and which I coordinated), but this time on an all-island basis. In the end it came to nothing because the businessman offering money for such an initiative was not able to deliver. One of the Opsahl Commission’s key strengths was that it put no limit on what people making submissions to it could include: politics and the constitution, law and justice, economics, culture, religion, identity, education, the environment and whatever else people thought was important for the future of the North. The result was over 550 submissions representing the ideas of around 3,000 people. Some of these ideas found their way into the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Maybe I am a dreamer. Maybe my family background – a liberal Northern Presbyterian mother and a Czech socialist father – predisposes me to be too idealistic about the flexibility of that notoriously stubborn and often anti-Irish community, the Northern Ireland unionists. But when I look at the statement of beliefs in the back our Dublin Unitarian hymnbook, and I change one word, replacing ‘church’ with ‘country’, I see a perfect starting point for a discussion about common all-island values.

In his ‘Unthinkable’ column last week, the Irish Times journalist Joe Humphries suggested that the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, should draw inspiration from Ireland’s history of Christian scholarship when he visits President Donald Trump in Washington on St Patrick’s Day next month. “He should use the opportunity not to lecture Trump about his policies, but to speak about the shared Christian values underpinning Irish and American societies.”³

If we can talk to the mad Trump about shared Christian values, surely we can talk to Northern Protestants and unionists about the same thing!

¹ ‘Support for Irish unity growing in North, poll finds’, Irish Times, 7 February

² ‘So the North says No. But for how much longer?’, 8 February. ‘Slow shifts in debate on unity’, 11 February (editorial)

³ ‘Christianity is too important to be left to extremists’, 10 February