I was at the fourth Shared Island Forum in Dublin Castle earlier this month when the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, gave one of those remarkably reconciling speeches that he is becoming known for. The former chief executive of Cooperation Ireland, Tony Kennedy, called it “the first post-nationalist speech I’ve heard from a Fianna Fail Taoiseach”. Martin is a rare Southern leader in that he has a deep interest in Northern Ireland. It was “the issue that first sparked my interest in politics as a young man, and it has been an enduring passion in all the years since,” he wrote recently in the magazine Studies.¹

Martin reaffirmed his commitment to the mission of the Good Friday Agreement, for everyone “in politics, civil society and in our communities – to strive in every practical way towards reconciliation of the different traditions of this island…It is that mission of reconciliation which is at the heart of the government’s Shared Island Initiative and of this Forum today.”

Martin said four years ago the government had, by launching Shared Island, begun “a new, whole-of-government policy:

• to put a sustained, strategic focus on the future of the whole island and how we build a reconciled future together;
• to ensure that, however the people may decide the island is constituted, it is the peaceful, thriving, contented home place that we all want it to be now at this time, and for our children and grandchildren;
• and to overcome the barriers to trust and understanding that endure, as communities recover from the terrible legacy of the Troubles.”

He outlined some of the challenges to achieving these ambitious goals: “Like, how, in real terms, we can be more accommodating of our different identities and traditions across this island – Irish, British, both, or neither? And, how we build up consensus on the future in ways that engage and have the trust of all, recognising our different, equally legitimate aspirations for the constitutional future, without being dominated or defined solely by these, when so much else unites us.”

He said that “Irishness – in all its variety – does not stop at the border, neither does Britishness – in all of its. Nor is there a county on this island that has not been shaped by both, and more besides. I believe there is a growing confidence, capacity and desire to give more space to our different traditions and viewpoints; and to recognise our connected heritage.”

In his Studies article he wrote: “Central to the progress it [Shared Island] has made is the fact that in its engagement with those communities and traditions, it meets them where they are, in terms of their objectives and outlook and identity. It doesn’t approach the task from a standpoint of where we think they should be.” The success of this approach was evidenced by the number of unionist-minded people in the audience at Dublin Castle.

Martin also announced a new project: a ‘Shared Home Place’ story-telling programme for communities all over Ireland “to engage with the past and contemporary heritage of our home places.” The name of the initiative had been borrowed, he said, from former SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon’s memoir of that title (which I co-wrote). He remembers visiting Mallon in 2019, shortly before his death, and the SDLP man asking “When are we going to realise we have to learn to share this place?”

He went on: “This participative, community initiative will be open to people across every town on this island; to build new connections and consensus on our place-based heritage. It will engage also with Irish communities in Britain and further afield, and with the contributions of Irish, Anglo-Irish and Ulster-Scots traditions across the island of Ireland – recognising how these are an integral part of the heritage of every county today and crucial to how we approach and build our future.”

This Shared Home Place project “will also recognise and include the greater ethnic and cultural diversity of the island now, which is a source of richness and strength in society.” He quoted the writer Lucy Caldwell, who is from a Belfast Protestant background, that we should “give credence to all versions of the Irish story…even and especially when they don’t accord with our own”.

I have long argued that if we are to move towards a harmonious all-Ireland society, the old version of the Irish story, and thus the old definition of Irishness – Catholic (now greatly diminished), Gaelic, Brit-hating, physical force supporting republicanism/nationalism – needs to be radically reformed and broadened to include Northern Protestants and unionists with their passionate attachment to Britain and its symbols (including the British monarchy). The 30 year campaign of violence of the Provisional IRA should be the last gasp of that discredited and divisive old-style Irishness.

This will be extremely difficult for many nationalists and republicans. As a woman friend of mine from a DUP family background, who now works for a peacebuilding organisation and is in favour of all-Ireland institutions, put it recently: “My fear is that we are still locked into sectarian ‘win or lose’ mindsets. The continuing challenge for all of us is to find ways to extend genuine sympathy for past wrongs and hurts beyond ‘our own’ and from there we can begin to widen out who we regard as ‘our own.’

I believe this is what the Taoiseach is trying to do through initiatives like the Shared Home Place project: trying to widen out who we regard as ‘our own’, including those who have a very different and even opposite version of the Irish story, i.e. most Northern Protestants and unionists. ‘Our own’ will also have to include the hundreds of thousands of immigrants – white, brown and black – who have come to live in Ireland in recent decades.

If contested identity is one huge challenge to movement towards Irish unity, benign economics represents a huge opportunity. Here the direction is unmistakeable: towards a unity based on the extraordinary progress and dynamism of the Republic’s economy and society over the past 30 years.

A new report, Comparative Analysis of Economies of Ireland and Northern Ireland, from the Dublin-based Economic and Social Research Institute (funded by the Irish government’s Shared Island Unit), shows that there are now major gaps in earnings, prosperity and nearly every measure of people’s health, education and well-being between the two Irish jurisdictions, and they are growing.

Hourly earnings were an extraordinary 36% higher in the Republic than in Northern Ireland in 2022. Household disposable income is 18.3% higher in the Republic. Ireland allocates a higher share of government expenditure to health (26.3% in Ireland compared to 17.3% in NI in 2022/23) and education (10.7% in Ireland compared to 9.5% in NI).

Life expectancy is another striking finding. In 2000 life expectancy in the Republic was about one year lower than in Britain and Northern Ireland, but they had converged by 2006. Today a child born in 2021 in the Republic can expect to live for 82.4 years, compared to 80.4 years in the North.

Infant mortality is another telling statistic. The rate at which infants are dying before their first birthday is now 4.8% in the North, compared to 2.8% in the Republic. Dr Gabriel Scally, the prominent Belfast-born, Bristol-based public health specialist, responded to these figures by saying: “Infant mortality is the most important indicator of the health of a population, because it’s really about the health of children in their first year of life. It is very much socially determined and extraordinarily sensitive to bad conditions: bad housing, poverty, neglect and poor health service provision. If infant mortality is doing anything other than going down, it’s an indicator that your society is going down.”

Education is another area where the Republic is away ahead of Northern Ireland. The number of children leaving school early in the North is three times higher than in the Republic (“two to three times” higher, the researchers say elsewhere in their report). Just a tenth of Northern school students earn post-secondary qualifications, compared with nearly a third in the Republic. Only 71% of 15–19 year olds in NI are still in education compared to 94% in Ireland.

Belfast school principal and Irish News columnist Chris Donnelly explains this by saying: “We have a model of post-primary education that provides a golden ticket to those who gain access to the grammar sector, which represents just over 40% of all children.” The other nearly 60% are ‘the rest’, and include those with academic and language difficulties and behavioural challenges. The result of designing an education system around the interests of the privileged grammar sector is that you end up with “a long tail of underachievement,” says Donnelly.²

The professor of education at Queen’s University Belfast, Tony Gallagher, points to the Republic’s Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) programme, which works hard to tackle educational disadvantage, as one factor in the South’s much better outcomes. DEIS identifies young people at risk and builds connections with them, thus providing “a really strong early warning system, which reduces the level of early school leaving. We’ve got nothing like that in Northern Ireland.”³

The ESRI’s message of Southern progress and Northern stagnation is getting through to middle class people in Northern Ireland. A Northern acquaintance of mine, a very successful professional man, put it like this recently: “I’ve been surprised in the last 3-5 years by the number of people from a unionist background who’ve said: ‘My views have changed. If there was a [Border poll] vote today, I would probably vote to stay in the Union. But for the first time in my life that is not something I could say I would do for evermore, and I would be open to something better. The things I hear are: England doesn’t care about us, and Ireland is a very successful country now. And actually I could see that we could do very well in the Ireland of today.”

Of course, the successful and globalised Ireland of today, with its dependence on US multinational pharma and IT companies in particular, is also an insecure Ireland. We are currently waiting with baited breath for President Trump’s announcement on putting tariffs on our vital pharma sector, with its huge tax take for the Irish exchequer.

[A word of warning about statistics. The ESRI researchers claim to rely on ” reliable measures of living standards that are not distorted by globalisation effects”, which because of Ireland’s extraordinarily generous tax incentives for multinational firms often are distorting. Earlier this month I heard Peter Shirlow, head of the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University, tell a surprised Dublin audience that Northern Ireland had the lowest child poverty rates in the UK. The following day the Belfast Telegraph reported the findings of a Queen’s University researcher that Belfast and Derry had more deprived areas than any other local authority in the UK].

CORRECTION and APOLOGY. According to a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, UK Poverty 2025, child poverty rates in the UK are as follows: 30% in England, 29% in Wales, 24% in Scotland and 23% in Northern Ireland. An apology is therefore due to Professor Peter Shirlow, who is correct in what he said in Dublin earlier this month.

¹ ‘Harnessing the Potential of the Good Friday Agreement: The Shared Island Initiative’, Studies, Spring 2025

² ‘Why does North lag South on public health and education?’, Irish Times, 18 April

³ ‘Why does North lag South on public health and education?