One of the recurring themes of this blog is that the people and politicians of the Republic are utterly unprepared for the arrival of around 800,000 Northern Protestants and unionists into a united Ireland, and must do some hard thinking about what changes to their 26-county nationalist structures and symbols are needed if that eventuality is going to happen relatively harmoniously in the not too distant future.
Four years ago I wrote: “Guaranteeing unionists their British ties and identity in a post-unity scenario will be extremely challenging to the complacent nationalism of the present-day Republic (where in many circles ‘unionist’ is a dirty word). But it may be the only way of bringing a significant element of unionism on board. And it is very far from the unitary state Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail have traditionally been wedded to. It seems to me to involve a constitutional system somewhere along the spectrum between federalism and confederalism, with a key continuing role for the British government. In any case, these are the kind of ultra-complex arrangements – as nuanced as anything in the Good Friday Agreement – which we need to begin to discuss in this republic.
“In fact, there appears to be zero discussion here about the crucial issue of what happens to the unionists at the end of the Union as we have known it. Instead, we in the Republic sail blithely into an unexamined future with a brainless consensus that in the end the good guys of Irish nationalism will win out over the Northern bigots and stooges of British imperialism, and then we will live together happily ever after in harmonious unity.”1
One of the extremely difficult things we may have to do is to revisit the pieties of the so-called ‘revolutionary’ period between 1916 and 1923, with its total ignoring of the unionists. This is ‘holy grail’ territory for many people in the South, to be touched at your peril. This was clear in the debate in recent weeks about the development of the General Post Office site in O’Connell Street, the headquarters of the 1916 Easter Rising. Aontú called it “sacred ground” and Sinn Fein insisted that the government, which is proposing mixed commercial and cultural use for the site, had “turned its face against the preservation of our revolutionary history.”
Last year saw the publication an important ‘revisionist’ book which should have made at least some of us look at the ‘revolutionary’ period with new, more critical eyes. It was Confronting the Irish Past: The 1912-1923 Decade in Light of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement by Séamus Murphy, an Irish Jesuit priest and philosopher at Loyola University in Chicago. Unfortunately it was almost completely ignored by Irish newspaper and magazine book editors and reviewers (its exorbitant price didn’t help its circulation either).
This is a very rich, dense and iconoclastic book and I can only give a flavour of it in this short blog. Murphy believes the 1998 Agreement is “potentially the most important political event in 20th century Irish history.” Potentially because it is much too early to judge whether it has actually transformed relations between unionists and nationalists (the signs after 27 years are not good). Murphy argues that: “Such transformation requires the two communities to change their interpretations of the past, including the 1912-23 period.”
He goes on to make three claims about that period: a) “the [1916] Rising and War of Independence distracted attention from the primary problem that had stalled the implementation of Home Rule for several years, namely unionist resistance; b) the nationalist resort to arms exacerbated the unionist sense of being under siege and made partition more likely and more bitter. In consequence, it seems that c) Ireland experienced both a political step forward, with the advent of self-governance north and south, and a political step backwards, with the derailing of political activity by civil conflicts and exacerbation of intercommunal division.”
The 1912-1914 Home Rule crisis meant that no longer was nationalism’s primary challenge to “wrest power from Britain” (Home Rule was on the statute book, albeit postponed until the end of the First World War), but how to relate politically to the Protestant and unionist communities “so as to get their consent to being governed mainly by Catholics.” The 1916 Proclamation wrongly dismissed unionist opposition to Home Rule as something “artificially created by the British Government”, and “the Rising amounted to a denial that the unionist challenge even existed.”
Murphy believes hindsight “enables us to say that the long-term consequences of the 1916 Rising were largely bad.” He stresses that “the 1916 leaders are not responsible for what the Provisional IRA did between 1970 and 1998, but for the disruption of the Home Rule process and exacerbating the division between unionist and nationalist Ireland…The so-called War of Independence, while formally directed against British rule, in practice was a war against other Irish people: RIC constables, constitutional nationalists and Protestants in the north.”
He goes on: “The so-called War of Independence was pointless, given that by January 1919, before it began at [the] Soloheadbeg [ambush], senior British politicians were informally letting the new majority nationalist party, Sinn Fein, know that dominion status for Southern Ireland could be on the table: just what the Treaty provided three years later.”
Thus the war “merely achieved the minor good of speeding up the process of gaining total independence from Britain, at the cost of widening the gap between the south and the north, making Irish unity more unlikely, and violently traumatising the people.”
Looking back from the perspective of the Good Friday Agreement, agreed by the leaders of the unionist, nationalist and republican communities, Murphy says the failure of both nationalists and unionists in the 1912-23 decade was “their refusal to recognise the political right of the other community to exist…The nationalist failure manifested as ignoring or dismissing the unionist reality, the unionist failure manifested as contempt for and fear of Catholics.”
He also stresses the “native versus settler dynamic” which is still a factor in Northern Ireland today. “Protestants were acutely aware of nationalists’ long memories of dispossession, and sensed the nationalist gut-conviction that they really had no right to be in Ireland. On the Catholic nationalist side, there was some willingness to tolerate their presence – on nationalist terms: if they wouldn’t agree to such terms, the attitude could be summed up as ‘the colonists could go back to where they came from.”
Too many of the new nationalist/republican leaders dismissed unionist resistance as unreal or unimportant. De Valera said in 1920 that unionist Ulster was “a thing of the mind only.” Murphy comments “it is easy to summarise Sinn Fein’s policy on unionism: it didn’t have one.” Most, if not all SF leaders, had this blinkered view of the North. Ernest Blythe, a rare republican from a Northern Protestant background, was one of the few who didn’t. He criticised the fantasy of the Dail’s declaration, at its first meeting in 1919, that an all-Ireland republic existed. He called this “the beginning of a persistent campaign of make-believe and self-deception…it had become obvious that an All-Ireland Republic was utterly unattainable without the consent of the opposing Northern Protestants.”
This self-deception continued for 50 years until the outbreak of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. “From 1922 to at least 1972, the official view of successive Irish governments was that unionists had no right to refuse to be part of a united independent Ireland and that Northern Ireland ought not to exist…In the anti-partition campaign around 1950, nationalist politicians travelled the world to present their case for territorial unification to bemused governments. Haranguing the outside world while ignoring unionists achieved only one thing: it confirmed unionists’ conviction that the nationalists were besieging them.”
The official Irish government view – and, it has to be said, the overwhelming popular view – remains that the foundation of the Irish state lay in the 1916 Rising and that “Home Rule constitutionalism was valueless, contributing nothing to the birth of the Irish state and the culture of democratic republicanism.” Home Rulers and the RIC are “excommunicated from nationalist community memory…if contemporary nationalism cannot recognise those groups, its promise to recognise unionism lacks credibility.”
In parallel with this make-believe by Irish governments, “after 1922 the nationalist/unionist divide was worse, with no hope of its resolution. The alleged success of arms in the 1916-22 period has given a cultural hegemony to the armed force tradition that it did not previously have.”
Murphy urges nationalists and unionists to “acknowledge the other tradition as part of Irish society with a right to exist and be respected, even if they might wish the other tradition did not exist. That would be demanding enough for many nationalists and unionists.” He believes that “finding peace in mutual toleration is the modest limited goal to set. Speaking as if all differences can be dissolved is to engage in fantasy, which hinders the goal of live-and-let-live policy.”
“At least up to the 1970s, southern nationalists held that, while Protestants as such were welcome, unionists did not belong; that to claim to be both Irish and British was self-contradictory; and that being a unionist was at least misguided, if not morally wrong. Up to the 1970s, the unionist conviction was that Catholics were socially backward and did not fit in Northern Ireland, since they refused to own it, and hence could never be trusted as equal citizens. Education to counter those stereotypes is slow but has had some effect.”
During the Decade of Centenaries the Fine Gael-led government strongly rejected Sinn Fein claims that the Provisional IRA were the direct descendants of the old War of Independence IRA, and thus their use of violence to complete the unfinished business of Irish freedom and unity was legitimate. Seamus Murphy disagrees: “Government insistence that the foundation of the state lies in the actions of a violent and explicitly non-democratic minority in 1916 is its bowing to the ideological supremacy of the IRA tradition, and accepting its hegemony. That fact is not changed merely by the IRA ceasing operations.” He accuses Irish governments of commemorating violent events, but “neglecting the political and constitutional achievements and the peace-makers.”
He also objects to the “aura of romance and glory” talk of the ‘Irish Revolution’ conveys (quite apart from the fact that it was an extraordinarily conservative ‘revolution’ with little social change dimension). “Commemoration along revolutionary lines can be neither inclusive nor reconciliatory. Endorsing certain kinds of political killing as revolutionary and therefore justified is inconsistent with the 1998 Agreement’s commitment to compromise and recognition of the other: inherently non-revolutionary values…Commemoration should promote ‘justice, equality, parity of esteem, tolerance, a better understanding of other groups, and (to the extent possible) healing of memories.”
He is also strongly critical of memorials to republican and loyalist paramilitaries that glorify them without mentioning their victims; this inflicts “a second symbolic death” on those victims. He contrasts this with efforts to mutually recognise the suffering – murder, maiming and trauma – inflicted across the sectarian divide. He singles out the “great work” of David McKittrick and other journalists in their book, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles, which he says should be easily and cheaply available, but in fact is scandalously out of print.
Murphy finishes by asking a key question: “Does the way in which a particular historical event or figure is remembered and commemorated benefit or harm contemporary society’s cultural and political life?” His answer is that only when the events of 1912-23 are evaluated against such values as peace, democracy, pluralism, tolerance, recognition of the other, development of an identity to be proud of, and respect for the rule of law (in essence, the values of the Good Friday Agreement) “have we made serious progress in coming to terms with, confronting and adapting our history for the needs of the living.”
Murphy is a passionate advocate for the Good Friday Agreement, with its purposes of “political reconciliation, enough acceptance and mutual recognition between nationalists, unionists and others so that a live-and-let-live political community can be built.” He believes its philosophy clashes with both the 1912 Ulster Covenant and the 1916 Proclamation, both of which “implicitly rejected the identity, existence and rights of the other community” and thus are “implicated in the violence of that decade and of subsequent decades up to 1998.” There was no recognition in either of these foundational documents that two distinct, even opposed traditions existed on this island and both sides had to accept the other tradition’s right to be such a distinct community. The 1998 Agreement “represents a long-belated rejection of the resort to arms of unionists and nationalists against each other. If that resort was wrong in the 1970-98 period, it must have been wrong in the 1912-23 period.”
He says that Pearse and his fellow cultural nationalists’ “blood-soil-spirit view held that a country in principle could not contain two national identities, since a nation’s identity, land and sovereignty formed an indissoluble unity. No wonder unionists felt there would be no room for them.” He recalls the “almost apocalyptic expression of their terror of being absorbed into the rising cultural nationalism which had no place for their culture.” The Good Friday Agreement “expresses a diametrically opposed view: one can choose one’s identity, and self-identify as Irish, British or both – in effect, whatever one pleases.”
This Northern-born Protestant is proud to be Irish (while understanding some unionist fears about becoming a smallish minority in a nationalist united Ireland). In politics I like how a friend, a distinguished lawyer, chooses to describe himself as a “left-wing, peace-loving Redmondite”. I don’t think the majority of people in this republic are going to heed Seamus Murphy and me for one second when it comes to their hallowed ‘revolutionary’ period. But a few outspoken deviants are always a healthy sign in a democracy.
1 ‘My single transferable blog: the people of the South are not ready for reunification,’ 1 November 2021
2 Irelands together 
Dear Andy,Thank you for yet another excellent, constructive and thoroughly respectful blog and, of course, for directing me to the recent publication of which I was, hitherto, unaware. My next task is to read the book!More power to you!+Alan Harper–Sent with GMX Mail app
Hi Andy, I remember as a student reading your biography of Paisley in the 1980s. It remains one of the most fascinating and well-written biographies I’ve ever read. There are some points in your article I’d like to respond to; especially on Redmond. I’m a Nordie Republican who grew up during the Troubles, and I thought you meantime might be intererested (or maybe not lol) in my take on the late Rev. Paisley, and my short musings on a logical structure for a new “this place”. I suspect though that, like the old ’70s post-punk song, it’d be “shot [down] by both sides”:
https://thebigmawn.blogspot.com/
https://vennland.blogspot.com/2021/02/uladhnua.html
Hi Andy,
I grew up in a Republican community, and I can tell you that reunification with the South was never seriously spoken about. Many Republicans and Nationalists don’t really care about Irish unity. That’s something that is not recognised within Unionism – there’s a lot of disguised Vanguardism in Republicanism – we don’t want to be ruled by anybody – and I’ll return to that.
A popular form of attack on the Easter Rising is its obvious lack of ‘electoral support’. While this is correct, it’s also farcical – imagine, if you will, the British authorities of the time standing around passively watching, while a DIY plebiscite asked folk to vote yea or nay to a violent uprising, lol. More seriously, ‘electoral support’ for impoverished revolutionaries would have been a de facto impossibility in 1916. The system was rigged so that voting rights were denied to the class of men who might have been inclined to support insurrection. Obviously, no women could vote. In fact, all of Ireland’s ‘democratically elected representatives’ of that period opposed giving women the vote. And all of this was in the context of a Union which itself had never been voted on by any Irish person. So much for ‘democracy’.
The other attack on 1916 was that it was simply un-necessary, as Britain was about to offer it up anyway. Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking heaped on self-serving factual inaccuracies. First, all that was being bandied about was home rule. That is, a puppet parliament inside the UK, a la Stormont. That is nothing to do with ‘independence’. Second, whatever progress had been made had been undone by violent events between 1912 and 1914, namely the Ulster Covenant, the Curragh military mutiny and the Larne gun-running. Even if you are naïve enough to believe that the world’s then most powerful Empire would have been prepared to surrender
its oldest colony without a fight, the practical reality was that by 1916, the very real threats of a British military mutiny and all-out civil war in Ulster had put the kybosh on the entire home rule idea anyway – though of course it suited London to dangle the home rule carrot at a time when it needed gullible Redmondite Irish cannon fodder.
The third attack on 1916 abominates the violence of 1916. In this, the 1916 guys are contrasted unfavourably with O’Connell, Parnell et al – and, invariably, with Redmond. While the point is valid in relation to e.g., O’Connell, Parnell et al, the
comparison falls apart in relation to Redmond. Redmond may not have believed in violence on the streets of Dublin, but he had no problems with violence abroad. Redmond’s so-called ‘non-violent’ and ‘constitutional’ strategy for obtaining Irish independence was to curry favour from Westminster by encouraging Irishmen to sign up to kill thousands of ‘Johnny-Foreigners’ on Britain’s behalf. In so doing, Redmond revealed himself to be not just a man as committed to violence as a means of bringing about political change as Pearse ever was, but a racist hypocrite to boot – seemingly, appalling levels of violence was (and remains) acceptable to Redmondites if it only involved slaughtering (and/or being slaughtered by) foreigners in far-off Gallipoli. There’s a level of middle-class racism there that, even today, is barely recognised.
excellent comment. Could you elaborate on your claim that northern nationalists are not really interested in reunification? All I ever hear is then complaining that patitionist governments in the south are not really interested in doing serious panning and preparatory work for a united Ireland.
My Comment.
It is possible to agree with almost every aspect of this historical analysis and still come to an almost diametrically opposed conclusion.
Firstly, to blame Irish nationalism for its descent into and subsequent justification/glorification of violence in the absence of the context of Imperialist violence is utterly ahistorical. We are talking about a period only two generations removed from the great Famine! The fantasy is to believe that all island independence could have been achieved without violence.
Secondly, Irish nationalism, for all its faults, has moved far beyond its origins, which were never so much revolutionary, as replacing one ruling elite with another. Political unionism, by way of contrast, has moved on hardly at all. This constant emphasis on how nationalism has to change to accommodate unionism completely ignores how unionism has to change in order to accommodate itself not to traditional nationalism, but to the realities of a very changed Irish and international environment. It is as if unionism can stand still and wait for the rest of the world to change to accommodate it!
At the back of this intransigence is an apparent and yet utterly insecure certainty of the rightness and indeed moral superiority of the unionist cause, when it was never more than a protestant elite seeking to secure the privileges it had managed to obtain under empire. Even now the unionist argument is largely about retaining the advantages of attachment to Britain, even as these become largely illusory and indeed damaging to “unionist” interests and the possibilities of unionists growing up to having a much larger say in sovereign matters.
Unionism has remained largely stunted by attachment to a no longer extant empire and has failed to adapt to a much changed world, never mind Ireland. Ireland has made that adaptation over the last 50 years with remarkable success. The burden of further adaptation is now on unionism, not modern Ireland, which rightly refuses to be dragged back into a bygone era. This blog does unionism no favours by allowing it to place all responsibility for further change on nationalism and particularly by emphasizing the most backwards looking aspects of nationalism to the exclusion of a radically new and different Ireland which is emerging.
This new Ireland, rightly, will have little truck with either old style nationalism or unionism and those unionists who imagine they can drag Ireland back to the last century are living in fantasy land. The disinterest which modern Ireland shows towards old style political unionism is entirely justified and appropriate and of a piece with its rejection of old-style nationalism. Come with us on a journey to a new Ireland, or we will simply ignore you is the message coming from Ireland. We are on this journey anyway, with or without you. Your choice.
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Frank
Thanks for this. Hard-hitting and forthright as always.
Three points: 1. You seem to be saying that contemporary Irish nationalism needs to make no concessions whatsoever to unionism to achieve a harmonious united Ireland. Unionists just have to ‘lump it’ as they are swallowed up into the marvellous new Ireland you outline. That is the way to more violence. 2. You clearly misunderstand present-day unionism. The past certainty of rightness and moral superiority has largely disappeared. Unionism in 2025 is fractured, confused, badly led and totally lacking in confidence. 3. You say the new Ireland will have no truck with old-style nationalism. And if Sinn Fein win the next election (which they are likely to do if the present government can’t deal with the housing crisis)? SF is old-style physical force nationalism in spades.
Kind regards
Andy
Andy J. Pollak 2 Palmerston Court, Palmerston Road, Rathmines, Dublin D06C4H0 Tel 00353-(0)1-4960918 Mob 00353-(0)85-8389716 Blog http://www.2irelands2gether.com
As always, you fall back on the threat of unionist violence as your closing argument, while being utterly condemnatory of nationalist violence which was, in reality, little more than a pathetic response to overwhelming imperial violence embedded in British rule. If nationalists were supposed to suck up British rule utterly nonviolently, why does the same logic not apply to unionists post a UI? Why Act as an apologist for violence which hasn’t even happened yet, and which may never happen without the encouragement of well meaning reconciliationists who insist that the world must meet backward looking unionists half way? What positive contribution has unionism to make to either Britain or a new Ireland? Unlike you you, I think northern protestants could make a huge contribution to developing a far more progressive and dynamic new Ireland without needing any discriminatory constitutional crutches to do so. You do unionism a disservice by basically claiming it cannot survive without it’s own quasi statelet, whether as part of Britain or Ireland. Instead of demanding what unionists should need, why not demonstrate what they could contribute? As it stands, based on your model, I would vote against a united Ireland, as it would drag Ireland back into the last century.
I suggest that the “new Ireland” must acknowledge that unionists have legitimate fears about cultural loss and political marginalization. A minority may respond with violence if they feel their identity is under threat.
The new Ireland should not frame unity as a “victory” for nationalism or a demand for unionists to simply “get on board or be left behind”. That would risk repeating the mistakes of the past and ignore the fractured, insecure state of modern unionism.
Change must include concrete guarantees and shared power, with constitutional protections, power-sharing structures, community-led dialogue at local and national levels to build trust and co-design solutions, and targeted economic and social investment.
We need to develop a new, pluralist Irish identity that explicitly includes unionist and British traditions as part of the national story—not as tolerated exceptions, but as valued strands.
“Come with us on a journey to a new Ireland, or we will simply ignore you” would repeat the nationalist approach of the early 1900s.
If the new Ireland aspires to be genuinely enlightened and progressive, it must reject an “imperialistic” or high-handed approach. It should place understanding, empathy and inclusivity at the heart of any united Ireland project.
In this spirit, the new Ireland could become a model for how diverse traditions can coexist and thrive together, demonstrating that true progress is measured not by the triumph of one group over another, but by the creation of a society in which all traditions are respected and every citizen feels at home.