The world has been reeling in the past 10 days since President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance’s cruel two-handed public humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House. Even more shattering has been the realisation that NATO without its American security ‘umbrella’ is probably dead and the nations of Europe need to massively re-arm to take over from a newly isolationist US the role of keeping the continent (or at least its eastern European constituents) safe from Russian aggression. Are 80 years of post-Second World War peace and prosperity, culminating in the soft power marvel of the European Union, heading for the dustbin of history?

Where do little Ireland and tiny Northern Ireland fit into this emerging international turmoil? Maybe other small, self-obsessed countries are similar, but there is no doubt that we Irish people, north and south, often suffer from the illusion that we are the centre of the universe. Whether it is the Northern peace process and the Good Friday Agreement, or our recent Celtic Tiger Mark Two economic boom, our successful campaign to keep the Irish border invisible after Brexit, or our legion of brilliant actors, singers and writers, we believe we one of the greatest – if not the greatest – little country in the world.

Whatever about the Republic, Northern Ireland and its problems are categorically off the world’s radar. Those faraway days in the 1990s when American presidents, British prime ministers, European Commission heads, military leaders and police chiefs from Britain, the US, Canada and Finland, and past and future Finnish and South African presidents queued up to play a part in our peace process, are long gone. Nelson Mandela phoning David Trimble to help push him over the line leading to the Belfast Agreement is the stuff of ancient legend. The world has moved on to a much more dangerous and warlike place, and our little internecine divisions – which, thank God, nobody dies for any more – are of almost no interest.

I was at a conference in Belfast of the dialogue group Compass Points on legacy last week. The two main speakers were former BBC security correspondent Brian Rowan and Queen’s University law professor, Kieran McEvoy, along with a panel of republicans, loyalists, civil society actors, and victims and survivors. Most of them agreed that the British Government’s Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) was not working. This was mainly because not enough people were engaging with it, and it would experience extreme difficulty in getting information about past killings out of some of the key warring parties in the Northern ‘troubles’, notably the Government’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, and the IRA.

What they proposed instead was an independent international commission with powers to compel British intelligence agencies for their part to cooperate on establishing the truth of hundreds of killings during that conflict. In my humble opinion, this is cloud cuckoo land. In the middle of an international crisis over the war in Ukraine and the apparent need for Europe to become a military power, the idea that the British and Irish governments (let alone the US government) are going to scour the world for eminent people to sit an international commission of inquiry into events in Northern Ireland 40 and 50 years ago is utterly unrealistic.

And as ICRIR commissioner, Professor Brice Dixon (a former NI Human Rights Chief Commissioner), asked as part of his argument that the new legacy body was beginning to function: Is an international commission any more likely to get information out of an intelligence agency like MI5 than the present commission under former Northern Ireland Chief Justice, Sir Declan Morgan?

The Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework have shown how little the sovereign government of the UK cares about Northern Ireland these days when much bigger strategic issues – notably relationships with the EU and now the defence of Europe – are at stake. After last week’s meeting between Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Taoiseach Micheál Martin in Liverpool, the two governments issued a 38 paragraph joint statement on future cooperation. This featured cooperation in defence, maritime issues, energy, the economy, science, climate change, culture and the arts, sport and young people. One had to wait to paragraph 37 for a brief mention of Northern Ireland. 20 years ago there would have been almost nothing but Northern Ireland in such a statement!

In Dublin interest in the North is similarly low. The Tánaiste, Simon Harris, said during his first visit to Stormont in January that unity was not his priority and he did not expect a Border Poll during the five year term of the new Irish government. Taoiseach Micheál Martin has made it clear that his priority is to expand and develop his Shared Island initiative.

This did not stop the Belfast nationalist paper, the Irish News, trumpeting a story with the headline ‘Irish government begins work of costing out a united Ireland’.¹ This was apparently an unpublished report compiled by the Irish Department of Social Protection which looked at the impact of merging the two jurisdictions’ welfare systems in the event of unification. It concluded that the cost of applying the most generous welfare rates on both sides of the border would be nearly €22 billion a year above the taxes collected for social protection. There was no comment from the Irish News – or anywhere else – about whether this might present a giant disincentive for the government to pursue unity.

On a related note, I see that my favourite Northern journalist, Sam McBride, has dug out some 56 year old papers from the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy which show some interesting thinking by senior Irish government officials about unity at the outbreak of the ‘troubles’.² Among them is a confidential cable issued to Irish diplomats around the world in September 1969, asking for ideas, including ‘personal’ views about the way forward.

“The cable – from Hugh McCann, the most senior official in the Department for External Affairs (now the Department of Foreign Affairs) – appealed for ideas to alter policy on Northern Ireland. The responses included radical suggestions: ditching the flag and anthem, abandoning neutrality, and ending the Catholic Church’s pre-­eminent role in national life.

“Influential diplomat Eamonn ­Gallagher believed that ‘unionist moderates will see the need to get out of a steadily more untenable dead end; their only credible alternative is an accommodation with Dublin’, because they would be ‘squeezed from the right by a monstrous bigotry of their own creation’ which would mean they would have to ‘suppress definitively the Orange disease’ – language which would be offensive to many unionists.

“Yet he went on to say Dublin should ‘seriously examine constitutional and statutory provisions which repel ­Protestants and be prepared to get rid of them… a united Ireland is necessarily a plural society – our Constitution should reflect this and our statutes should never lose sight of this.’ He added that ending partition peacefully ‘presupposes in practice obtaining the large consent of the people of the North’.

“Eamonn Kennedy in Bonn advocated facing ‘hard realities which cannot be wished away’, one of which was that among northern Catholics there was a fear of unity due to ‘the real fall in living standards’ that would ensue. He said many Southerners ‘may not yet be prepared to carry the burdens reunification would imply’ and wondered: ‘Would our taxpayers be prepared to subsidise the North in the manner to which it is accustomed?’

“He said that for half a century, Dublin had followed policies ‘whose ultimate effect was the psychological heightening of the frontier’. A ‘realistic’ unity would mean ‘some kind of a federation in Ireland which will not be entirely Gaelic, or Catholic, in which the non-republican attitude of the majority in the North will have to be accommodated and in which the policy of neutrality may have to be abandoned in favour of participation in the defence of the West.”

“He also said the government should ‘take the IRA out of Irish politics,’ observing that ‘the IRA did little to help the ordinary citizen in his hour of need, but they did a great deal to strengthen the reactionary hand of the northern government.’

“T.J. Horan in Stockholm admitted he didn’t know a single unionist, and had ‘no direct knowledge of what these people think and how they feel’. He thought ‘the Six-County Orangeman’s or Protestant’s fear of us is real – as real as the Russians’ fear of the Germans. We must do something to dispel that.’…He said that since partition ‘we have done nothing to ‘woo’ the Six Counties. On the contrary, practically everything we have done has tended to widen the separation.’

“He added Dublin should ‘stop using the propaganda line that partition is the root of all these troubles. It is not… partition was already there, and has been there since the planters were settled… Before partition became an established constitutional fact, partition was already there in embryo. I think we should face this fact.”

“Con Cremin in New York suggested the Irish language’s official status need not extend to the entire island. An unnamed official in Madrid proposed consideration of NATO membership. A diplomat in Ottawa proposed a new flag and anthem, as ‘neither [in their present form] would be acceptable’ to unionists. An official in Buenos Aires suggested ‘inviting some prominent and ­liberal Northerner, like ­Captain ­[Terence] O’Neill, to be the next ­president of Ireland.’

“A diplomat in Washington suggested ‘a restricted area around Belfast having wide and substantial powers within in a 32-county democratic Republic’. He also suggested Dublin should set aside millions of pounds to pay unionist diehards to ‘make a fresh start in England or elsewhere’.

Those diplomats 56 years ago were often more realistic than many ordinary citizens of the Republic today. The latest Irish Times/ARINS opinion poll indicates that 58% of those polled agreed or strongly agreed that “consideration should be given to significant changes to the existing political institutions” in the Republic in the event of unity.³ This vague, aspirational formulation was in sharp contrast to the more specific question in the equivalent poll three years ago, which found that majorities of 71-79% were against paying more taxes, cutting public services, changing the flag and anthem, and re-joining the Commonwealth in return for unity.

As everyone knows, we do vague and aspirational well in this republic!

¹ Irish News, 2 March

² ‘The secret papers which reveal radical thinking’, Belfast Telegraph, 9 March

³ ‘Southern voters would consider changes to institutions in a united Ireland’, Irish Times, 7 March