2 Irelands together

My single transferable blog: the people of the South are not ready for reunification

Posted on Monday, 1 November, 2021 by andypollak

In his long and distinguished political career, John Hume many times gave what came to be known as his ‘single transferable speech’. He used to say that as a former teacher he realised that for even the smartest pupils, the repetition of key themes over and over again was the only way to get his young charges to take in and remember what he was teaching them. I believe there were actually two or three ‘single transferable’ Hume speeches, but the one I internalised was that any solution to the Northern Ireland imbroglio would have to have three ‘strands’: an internal Northern Irish strand, a North-South strand and a British-Irish strand. These three elements were to become the foundations of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

The message of my single transferable blog is much simpler: it is that the people of the present Republic haven’t even begun to think about what reunification means for them and therefore are about as far from ready for it as one can get. In the nearly 50 years I have lived mainly in Dublin I can’t recall a single well-informed conversation with the journalists, broadcasters, academics, teachers, voluntary sector workers and theatre people who make up my friendship group about what unity might entail for the politics, economics and culture of this jurisdiction. How would bringing in 900,000 largely alienated and contrarian unionists affect our concepts of Irish identity (including our dislike of their passionate Britishness), our nationalist historical myths, our 100-year-old political institutions, our public spending bills (and reluctance to have our taxes increased to cover them), our church-controlled education system, our creaking two-tier health service, and so on?

The Oireachtas rarely essays into this difficult territory (its Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, under Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein chairmen, have used it largely as a cheerleader for rather than hard-nosed examiner of unity); the media even less so. Academics – with the occasional exception of the excellent Institute for British-Irish Studies at UCD – have largely ignored how this jurisdiction, comfortable in the relative social and economic success of the past 30 years, might be forced to change if the unionists are going to be accommodated in any significant way.

Because if we are sincere about the revised Constitution’s pledge to unite the nation “in harmony and friendship” (as approved by over 94% of the electorate in the 1998 post-Good Friday Agreement referendum), there are going to have to be some very uncomfortable changes. I have been giving a talk over the past two years (sometimes courtesy of Zoom) in very different places – from a local history society in Belfast’s loyalist Shankill Road through a group of Irish-American lawyers in New York to a dinner of retired senior civil servants, diplomats and bankers in Dublin – about the kind of changes we may have to contemplate. The rest of this blog is taken largely from that single transferable speech.

Many nationalists and republicans probably imagine – if they think about it at all – that when demographics and the consequent rise in the nationalist vote in Northern Ireland eventually bring about a narrow majority for unity in a Border Poll, unionism as a philosophy on this island will just disappear. I have to disabuse them of this foolish and self-serving notion. Large numbers of unionists, if they are voted against their will into a united Ireland which they have struggled fanatically against for the past 140 years, will continue to withhold their allegiance from that Irish state and will continue to feel, behave and declare themselves as British. They will wave the Union flag; pledge their allegiance to the British monarchy; and reject Irish language and culture as nothing to do with them. They will be a sullen, alienated and potentially violent minority, just as the nationalists were in Northern Ireland. This is not a recipe for social peace and harmony.

I know this because I come from a half-unionist background; my mother came from a strongly Presbyterian and unionist family in County Antrim. The late Seamus Mallon knew it too. He lived his whole life in Markethill in south Armagh, a 90% Protestant village. As he wrote in his 2019 book, A Shared Home Place (which I co-authored), a 50% plus one vote for unity “will not give us the kind of agreed Ireland we seek…We need both communities in any future constitutional settlement to feel they belong to their common home place in an equal and mutually respectful way.” His preference was for “some kind of confederal arrangement because I believe unionists will find it very difficult to feel any sense of loyalty to a unitary Irish state.”

This is the huge challenge we face as Brexit, demography and electoral arithmetic in the North probably move us towards some form of unity. And with the DUP now in disarray after their disastrous hard-line Brexit stand, the advent of the difficult Protocol compromise, the chaos caused by the leadership upheavals earlier this year and the complete untrustworthiness of the present British government, a Border Poll on unity – urged on by Sinn Fein – may arrive sooner than we expect.

Which brings me to ‘Irish unionism’, a relatively widespread phenomenon a hundred years ago but very thin on the ground today. Could any significant element of unionism be prepared to countenance an all-Ireland accommodation if important elements of their British ethos and culture were to survive and flourish in that new state?

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.

Here are a few ‘against the consensus’ ideas to start this discussion. Firstly, we have to find some way of redefining Irish unionism as a positive good with a future role on this island, rather than an unloved relic of hated British rule in Ireland. We have to start embracing what is symbolically important to unionists – as we were starting to do during recent commemorations of Irish soldiers who had fought and died in the First World War.

Shared institutions and symbols will be important here. The Republic’s political parties, and that includes Sinn Fein, have rarely, if ever, spelled out what they are prepared to offer the unionists for the sake of unity in terms of inclusive institutions and symbols in a ‘new Ireland’. Here, I suggest, is an indicative list (meant to be thought-provoking): a power-sharing regional government and parliament to continue in Belfast with all the safeguards enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement (with only a few major powers such as foreign affairs, defence and some taxation now held by London being transferred to Dublin); Irish membership of the Commonwealth; the reactivation of the British Irish Council (set up under the Good Friday Agreement but largely unused) to bring together the British, Irish, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh governments with real cooperative powers and responsibilities in a number of key policy areas (for example, climate change); an agreement with London that a number of Northern politicians will continue to sit as British legislators in the House of Lords; an overhaul of the Irish Constitution to remove or tone down any remaining elements influenced by 1930s-style Catholicism and nationalism, and to include elements recognising the British identity of Northern unionists (for example, their loyalty to the British monarchy); a new flag (I suggest the symbols of the four Irish provinces, or more provocatively, the present tricolour with a small Union Jack inserted in the orange band, in the way Australia does with its flag); a new, non-militaristic national anthem (perhaps the all-Ireland rugby anthem Ireland’s Call); a new system of state education (including an end to compulsory Irish) and a new free, single-tier health service without Catholic Church involvement.

Will the people of the Republic of Ireland be able to stomach such radical changes? After a hundred years of independence I don’t believe so. But these are ways in which we can begin to persuade unionists that they are really wanted in the ‘new’ Ireland – and at the very least we need to start discussing their merits and demerits. At the moment the great majority of unionists don’t feel any identification with or fellow-feeling for the 26 county Irish state: for many – perhaps most – of them it remains a threatening foreign country. As that most liberal of men, former Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt, after defining himself as a ‘Brit’, puts it: “What I haven’t heard from nationalists is that ‘We want you in this new dispensation and here’s why…Somebody has to explain to me why we’ve gone from ‘Brits Out’ to ‘Brits In.’¹

We have to find some ways in which Irishness and unionism can comfortably co-exist. A good example of this is the sterling work of Linda Ervine (former UVF leader David Ervine’s sister-in-law) in the teaching and learning of Irish in loyalist East Belfast. She argues that the Irish language – linked as it is to Scots Gaelic and Welsh – can be a healing element in the British Isles.

We have to start carefully examining the kind of multi-cultural federations and confederations which seriously commit to co-existence (however difficult and inadequate) between people with clashing concepts of self-determination within the same constitutional polity. We could start by looking at the French and Flemish in Belgium, and English and French speakers in Canada.

Then there is the enormous financial cost of unity. In a 2019 paper, the distinguished economists John Fitzgerald and Edgar Morgenroth (among the few Southern economists, along with my friend John Bradley, to have seriously studied the Northern economy) concluded that because of the poor state of that economy and its heavy dependence on financial transfers from London, unification would be “exceptionally expensive” for the Republic.

“Irish unity, if it involved ending transfers to Northern Ireland, would produce a dramatic
fall in the standard of living there. Alternatively, unification where Ireland took over responsibility for the transfers to Northern Ireland, would necessitate a major cut in the standard of living in Ireland of 5% to 10% in order to allow Northern Ireland to maintain a standard of living between 10% and 20% above the Irish standard of living. Whatever form Irish unity took there would be a heavy economic cost for both Northern Ireland and Ireland.”² When did you last hear a serious public or media discussion about these alarming projections? The answer is never.

The lengthy discussion we need to have in the Republic about all these issues will be an extremely difficult one. To those who say that all the concessions are being made in the one direction, I would respond – echoing the respected Derry nationalist Denis Bradley – that we in the South have to be generous because it is we who are doing the wooing, and wooing a very reluctant swain.

Perhaps the most difficult discussion of all will be about the requirement – in a republic that cast off British rule after a war of independence a century ago – to talk about what kind of continuing British involvement in Ireland we can live with for the sake of the peace and harmony of the whole island. That, for many unionists, will be a sine qua non. For many republicans and nationalists it will be a huge step too far. And of course, this vital dimension will not work if the British, as they move out of the EU into their own strange post-imperial, post-European orbit, want nothing more to do with us.

¹ Seamus Mallon, A Shared Home Place, p.159

² The Northern Ireland Economy: Problems and Prospects. https://www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2019/tep0619.pdf

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Republic of Ireland | 5 Comments

My tribute to a group of mountaineering Irishmen (and a note about Micheal D.)

Posted on Monday, 11 October, 2021 by andypollak

For the past 48 years I have been hill-walking with a group of men – mainly Dubliners – the length and breadth of Ireland: mainly in Wicklow, but also in Kerry, Connemara, Mayo, Donegal, the Cooleys and the Mournes. I have also joined them in Snowdonia in Wales, the English Lake District and the Cairngorms in Scotland.

Last week we were in Connemara and Mayo, using the cosy and welcoming Leenane Hotel (costing an astonishingly reasonable €180 for three nights bed and breakfast with an excellent dinner) on the shore of Killary Harbour as our base. The highlight was a six hour walk in the crystal-clear after-rain sunshine from the remote Glenummera under the Sheefrey Hills, up a long ridge to Ben Creggan, across Ben Gorm and down to the famous Aasleagh Falls at the head of Killary. In the clear air at the top of Ben Gorm we could see all the way from Galway Bay and the Aran Islands in the south, across to the jagged line of the Twelve Bens and the impressive bulk of Mweelrea (Connacht’s highest mountain) in the west, and as far as Achill Island and Croagh Patrick in the north. On a light-filled day like that, to be in the mountains in the west of Ireland is to be as close to heaven as one can get on this earth. [Of course, this being the west of Ireland, the next morning a thousand varieties of pouring, pelting rain were dumped on us for 36 hours!]

And the ‘craic’ was good. To the casual observer in the hotel bar or restaurant, our group of 18 was just an ordinary cross-section of cheerful elderly men on a jaunt in the Irish wilderness. We were retired printers, engineers, salesmen, electricians, fitters, journalists, taxi-drivers, brewery workers, jewellers, geologists, school inspectors, semi-state company and supermarket managers, The talk round the dinner table was of creaking bodies and absent friends, of past days spent scrambling in the hills and nights spent drinking and carousing, with a few hair-raising tales and political arguments thrown in (the group represented the full gamut of Irish opinion, everything from ‘Redmondite’ to ultra-republican).

But this was no ordinary group of Irishmen. For this group have walked and climbed in most of the great mountain ranges of the world: the Himalayas, the Pamirs, the Andes, the Rockies, the Mountains of the Moon in Congo, Mount Kenya, the Urals, the Alps.

Paddy O’Leary is one of the finest Irish mountaineers of the modern age (as well as the author of the classic 2015 book on Irish mountaineering, ‘The Way that We Climbed’). For 20 years he was director of the Tiglin Adventure Centre in Wicklow. In the early 1990s he spent some months wandering in a mountainous region in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh which, because of its proximity to Chinese Tibet, had been closed to outsiders for about 35 years. He crossed high passes into valleys which had not seen a westerner in several generations, and joined in their various religious and harvest celebrations. He reconnoitred routes into mountains which would later be climbed by members of the Irish Mountaineering Club (including other members of our Connemara group). He was arrested for straying into a forbidden zone and had what he calls “the wonderful experience of horse-riding for two long days, while under relaxed arrest, across wild and lovely Ladakhi terrain not seen by outsiders since before the Second World War.”

Back in Ireland, he recalls a night-long walk in the Twelve Bens around 1955. “Having completed a long rock-climb late in the evening, four of us walked over several peaks including the range’s highest, Benbaun. The glorious sunsets were reflected in the myriad of lakes in Roundstone Bog and in the Atlantic. The moon was so bright we didn’t need torches. The midsummer’s night was so short that as we descended dawn broke.”

Dublin taxi-driver Liam Doyle twice went to the Venezuelan Andes in the mid-1990s to climb that country’s two highest peaks, Pico Humboldt (4,940 metres) and Pico Bolivar (4,978 metres), expeditions that were led by another pioneering Irish climber, Tony Kavanagh (who in the 1960s had climbed in the Cerro Torre region of the Patagonian Andes with legendary British climber Don Whillans). He has a vivid memory of the first of those climbs, setting out from their base camp in the pitch black of the small hours, slipping badly while crossing a rock face in the dark, and being saved by Noel McGarry’s (another of the Connemara group) ice axe. This was followed by an energy-sapping crossing of a glacier field with crampons and ropes under fierce morning sunlight.

Gerry Cairns was a member of the Ludlows folk music group in the late 1960s, before moving to Scotland and a career as a schools inspector. He walked and climbed in the Scottish Highlands for over 40 years before retiring back to Dublin. One of his strongest memories is of a rescue by a very courageous young man called Brian Dunne, a member of the famous Creagh Dhu climbing club.

In the winter of 1974 Cairns, Dunne, two experienced climbing friends and two novices, were trying to get out of the remote bothy at Knoydart because torrential rain had made the surrounding glen impassable. They climbed the 3000 foot ridge between Glen Pean and Glen an Lochan Eanaich, but met a ferocious gale at the top. Cairns was blown against rocks and fractured two ribs, and their compasses were spinning out of control because of the ridge’s magnetic field. They were forced down into Glen Dessarry where the main river was in terrifying spate. One of the novices, Eddie Daly, was swept away in the flood. Dunne, in full mountaineering gear including heavy boots, dived into the raging river and managed to drag him to the bank. As Daly kept fainting after his ordeal, they were forced to build a makeshift wall from rocks and to erect a shelter using a fly sheet propped up by a bush. During the night they had to retreat again as the adjoining burn burst its banks and started to sweep the shelter away. “I eventually walked out to safety wearing one boot and one tennis shoe. But if Brian Dunne hadn’t dived into that torrent, Eddie Daly would have been dead”, Cairns recalls.

My experience of high mountains is in the ‘ha’penny’ place when compared to my adventurous friends in the west. The highest mountain I have climbed was Popocatépetl (in 1978), the 5,426 metre snow-covered volcano 70 kilometres outside Mexico City. This not a difficult mountain – one is likely to be greeted at the top, having ascended with the full gear of crampons and ropes and ice-axes, by day trippers who have driven up the other side and parked a few hundred feet from the summit! In Europe I have climbed the Monte Rosa, on the Swiss-Italian border, another ‘easy’ mountain not requiring any great rock, snow or ice climbing skills (although at 4,634 metres it is the second highest peak in the Alps).

So that’s my short tribute to the company of men – they resolutely refuse to give their group a name – with whom I have spent many a happy hour over nearly half a century in the mountains of Ireland and further afield. Thanks for the company and the conversations and the adventures to Noel McGarry, Mick Behan, Joe Bent, Gareth Jones, Paddy O’Leary, Eddie Cody, Gabriel McCarrick, Gerry Cairns, Liam Doyle, Willie O’Brien, Derrig Monks, Con Woulfe, Sean Stevenson, George Mongey, Christy Greer, Gary Forde and John Casey (and some who have passed on, notably that lovely man Mick Slevin , who left us last November).

POSTSCRIPT: I was out of the country last month during the controversy over President Micheal D. Higgins’ declining of an invitation by the main church leaders to attend – along with the Queen – a “service of reflection and hope” in Armagh on 21st October “to mark the centenary of the partition of Ireland and the formation of Northern Ireland.” President Higgins objected that the title of the service “wasn’t a neutral statement politically.”

I felt I had little to add to the hundreds of thousands of words in the media on that issue. But now that the Government has announced that it will be represented at that service by the Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney and Chief Whip Jack Chambers, I have three thoughts.

Firstly, I was extremely disappointed at our President’s decision. I thought he should have been statesman enough to have compromised in a small way on his nationalist/republican beliefs in order to attend the service of ‘reflection and hope’ which was the church leaders’ carefully considered attempt to join together in remembrance of a very significant (and, many would say, very tragic) landmark in Irish history, and to look forward to a better and more reconciled country in the future. How are we going to begin to contemplate making the huge compromises needed for a harmonious united Ireland – in definitions of Irishness, governing ethos, political systems, health and education, flags and anthems and a host of other areas – if our President can’t even bring himself to attend a harmless ecumenical service?

As the respected Derry nationalist Denis Bradley put it: “The most transformative moments in Anglo/Irish and unionist/nationalist relationships have been when individuals and institutions have gone beyond the politically correct and the judicially safe.” Citing Albert Reynolds meeting loyalist paramilitary leaders and Martin McGuinness shaking hands with the Queen, he said these events were “the result of political astuteness that recognised the changing atmosphere that was demanding a more courageous leadership. The generosity that was shown was in tune with the prevailing winds.”¹

Secondly, his action has diminished what I would call the ‘reconciling space’ above tribal politics which was created by the presidencies of his two wise predecessors, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, not least by their invitations to all shades of Northern opinion to Áras an Uachtaráin every July (a custom which Michael D. has continued). Moderate unionists – as well as those of us who insist on believing in the possibility of reconciliation between unionists and nationalists on this island – will find it hard in the future to see President Higgins as anything other than a traditional old nationalist/republican whose credibility as a key symbol of reconciliation has been irrevocably damaged.

Thirdly, President Higgins’ supporters will say that his action was vindicated by the Irish Times opinion poll finding that 68% of people in the Republic supported his decision. I wonder if there was an overlap with the 82% who in the same poll opposed higher taxes on energy and fuel to help prevent the approaching climate change catastrophe.² Clearly, truth and wisdom are not found in opinion polls.

[I imagine that most of my mountaineering friends would disagree with the sentiments in this postscript. These are entirely my own opinions.]

¹ ‘President can and should attend service in Armagh’, Irish Times, 20 September

² ‘Poll reveals Higgins ‘right to decline’ invite to partition event, Irish Times, 8 October (and other opinion poll results)

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland, The island environment | 4 Comments

A brave exploration of the plight of Northern Protestants

Posted on Thursday, 9 September, 2021 by andypollak

Over the summer I have been reading Susan McKay’s new book, Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground. This is a brave and brilliant book. For those of us who have watched the decline and fall of the unionist monolith, and the resultant fear and confusion of many Protestant and unionist people, it is also a sad one. With the probability that some kind of Irish unity is approaching in the near to medium future – and because the great majority of people in the Republic are deeply ignorant about Northern Protestants and their problematic place in that future – it is also one that should be compulsory reading for anybody who is concerned for this island’s well-being.

Susan McKay is a self-confessed ‘Lundy’. Robert Lundy was the governor of Derry who wanted to open the gates and negotiate with the besieging Catholic forces of King James II in 1689, after they had been slammed shut by 13 Protestant apprentice boys. For traditional unionists, Lundy is a hate figure, a traitor whose effigy is burnt every year on 12^th July bonfires. McKay concludes her book with the words: “I am Northern Irish, my husband and children are Irish…I am reconciled to my Lundyism. There are a lot of us [this writer is another]. I enjoy the company and we are not planning to flee.”

As the likelihood of a Border Poll comes closer, a central question is how many of the 900,000 or so Northern unionists will flee in the event of a very narrow – and it will be very narrow – vote for unity. Former DUP leader Arlene Foster has said she will be one. Some of the Northern Protestants McKay talks to – particularly in working class housing estates and border areas – will certainly follow her to England or Scotland. They will become Britain’s pieds noirs: embittered and abandoned as they are forced out of their native province (which is how they will see it), and giving their support to the most reactionary and anti-Irish elements in British politics.

Others will come to terms with the new dispensation, however much they detest it; and if it means a united Ireland dominated by Sinn Fein, unrepentant apologists for the IRA who spent 30 years bombing and killing them, they will detest it even more. A few – perhaps more than a few – will accept it more willingly, and will try their best to make it work for everyone.

McKay has roamed Northern Ireland seeking out all these people, and many more. Her range of interviewees in a community not known for being courageously outspoken – especially to a Republic of Ireland-based writer – is extraordinary. She uncovers a rich tapestry of backgrounds and opinions in a people usually characterised – and often demonised – as narrow, intolerant and prejudiced.

Here is just a flavour of some of them: gay men from the Antrim glens and Belfast housing estates; a left-wing feminist from Ballymoney; the sister of Edgar Graham, the Queen’s University law lecturer murdered by the IRA in 1983; a young woman who runs an all-Ireland haulage business from Antrim town; the trade unionist and south-east Antrim community activist Mark Langhammer, and other youth and community workers in the impoverished estates of that loyalist heartland; a Northern Ireland international woman footballer; a mixed race former paramilitary from east Belfast; a Baptist pastor with a Malaysian husband who works on the Belfast ‘peace line’; the daughter of a man murdered by loyalist thugs on the Newtownards Road; Alan McBride, who lost his wife and father-in-law in the IRA’s 1993 bombing of a fish shop in Belfast’s Shankill Road; the Protestant Irish language activist Linda Ervine; former Progressive Unionist Party leader Dawn Purvis and activist Sophie Long; Protestant students who believe Queen’s University has become a ‘cold house’ for unionists, and Protestant students who don’t; South Down fishermen of all political viewpoints; a woman who was slandered by grammar school ‘rugby boys’ involved in gender-based bullying and sexual abuse; the son of a prison officer murdered by dissident Republicans in 2012; the sister of a man killed by the IRA in the 1976 Kingsmill massacre; a hard-line evangelical preacher and his South Armagh congregation; a Nigerian Church of Ireland woman rector on the Fermanagh-Donegal-Leitrim border; unionist politicians Sammy Wilson and Roy Beggs; novelists Jan Carson and Phil Harrison (both from ultra-Protestant evangelical backgrounds); poets Jean Bleakney and Scott McKendry; playwright Stacey Gregg. All human life is here.

McKay is a courageous and resolute researcher, not flinching from the most difficult and potentially dangerous encounters. In Bangor she tries to attend a ‘betrayal act’ (against the Northern Ireland Protocol) rally in an Orange hall but is aggressively shown the door. She joins a protest in Portrush against the closure of a Royal British Legion care and respite centre for ex-British soldiers. She tours places in South Armagh where Protestants had been murdered by the IRA in the company of the late Willie Frazer, a unionist hard-liner whose father had been one of them, who points out houses where he said the killers lived, calling them “nests of rats.” She goes into the hardest of hard loyalist estates and converses with an anonymous paramilitary who warns that any change in Northern Ireland’s constitutional status “would cause an eruption of violence equal to if not worse than that of the past.”

However she is also determined to paint Northern Protestants in all their complex and varied human colours, rather than scrunching them into the Orange straitjacket that is usually pinned on them. She discovers as many heroes as villains, as much bravery as bigotry. Many of her most impressive interviewees are women. Amy lives in a housing estate in a mid-Ulster town town with many flags. She understands only too well that poor Protestants are the “scum of the earth” in many people’s eyes, and that “nobody is interested in investing in young people from that background, even if they have brains…I can understand why young working-class Protestant men think no one gives a shit about them.”

She is a senior housing manager now and could move to a middle-class area, but chooses not to. As an intelligent, outspoken woman she is a target for threatening abuse on social media. “It’s not good for a woman to be seen to be doing well in loyalist communities. The men don’t like it.” But Amy is a fighter. She saw one of her keyboard warrior abusers working in a local filling station and openly challenged him: “Are you the wee fucker who has been targetting me online? Say it to my face. I’m standing here now. Come on.’ He near shit himself and he walked away into the garage.”

Amy was the only one in her family and friendship circle who had voted to remain in the EU. Why was that? “A border as high as you can get it and all the foreigners out. And no united Ireland. They just did what the DUP said, and sure now it has all backfired on the DUP. But round here if you don’t vote DUP you are an outcast.” She doesn’t “even want to think about a Border Poll. Oh my God, World War Three. I really do think loyalists are back in 1912 right now.”

Debbie Watters, who runs Northern Ireland Alternatives, a community-based restorative justice group, is another admirable woman. She comes from Tobermore in County Londonderry, in the shadow of the Sperrin Mountains. “Growing up in a village that was 99.9% Protestant has definitely shaped who I am…Overt sectarianism was the world that I grew up in. You know: ‘Don’t sell your land to a Catholic’, and even the awful ‘The only good Fenian is a dead Fenian” (although her family did not think or talk in that way).

Watters is one of those who are politically stranded by the fact that she is pro-union but not comfortable voting for any of the unionist parties. “For me the issues that are important are poverty, mental health, equality, human rights. If you look back to the whole trade union movement, which was very strong within working-class loyalism, I’m not sure how we’ve ended up here. Part of it is because republicans have seen human rights and equality as a platform, and unionists have sat back and allowed them to hijack it. They’re scared to use the narrative, in case they’re seen as being wishy-washy unionists…Negotiation, compromise, changing your point of view – all were seen as appeasement.”

“Republicanism and nationalism have seasoned politicians who have come from the grass roots”, she says. “What is missing within unionist politics is activism. We have politicians that know how to manoeuvre, but they are disconnected from the people. They go straight for the Orange card but the social issues have been neglected. The people who are disadvantaged by this vote unionist to keep republicans out. The quality of their life hasn’t truly changed since the Good Friday Agreement. They feel angry and abandoned. So they blame the agreement.”

She concludes: “I believe in the union. But if my sense of identity and my family’s sense of identity was respected, if I could live the same quality of life, if there was a health care system and an education system that I didn’t have to pay for outside of taxes, I think I could be quite relaxed about a united Ireland.”

Aadi, the half-West Indian former paramilitary from east Belfast, and clearly a thoughtful and intelligent man, sums up the views of many ordinary unionists who might not want to stay in a unified Ireland. “If there was a border poll and people voted to leave [the UK], I would accept it because that is democracy, but we would not be unionists any more and I would probably leave. I would either go to England or back home to the West Indies. I would be sad. For all the faults with Northern Ireland, and with Ireland as a whole, it’s a great country.”

However he notes that there is still an arrogance about unionism: “They don’t think that they have to explain their case…The minute you start questioning it, they pull up the drawbridge, or they say, oh, that guy doesn’t get it, he’s a Lundy…There’s not the same political development in unionist communities as there is in nationalist communities. There are the same issues – bad housing, bad education, bad job prospects, poor political parties, poor public services. But unionist communities always take the view that if you oppose those, you seem to be a traitor. So it’s difficult for them.”

Alan McBride, an open-minded man who now votes Alliance, calls himself “a romantic unionist – I just love being part of a group of islands that are so diverse and incredible.” Having experienced terrible trauma himself, he has worked unstintingly for many years on behalf of the victims of the Troubles and their families. But he runs the serious risk of being seen as another Lundy. “I am a pragmatist. And I mean, economically, I want to be able to have a house and a car and a job and a standard of living. And to be honest with you, those things matter more to me than the flag that’s flying above our country. And if, because of Brexit, Northern Ireland is not flourishing and the South is, why would you not want to be part of that? I absolutely would.”

Former Progressive Unionist Party leader Dawn Purvis has a darker view. She quotes the belief of her charismatic predecessor, the late David Ervine, that the DUP would be responsible for the break-up of the union. “And he is being proved right. He said the DUP couldn’t make Northern Ireland work because, in his words, the party just hated Taigs.”

An admirable young man who defies all the stereotypes is Stephen Donnan-Dalzell, who lives in one of the toughest housing estates in the Shankill Road area, works in a homeless hostel, has been an election candidate for the Alliance Party and is a gay man. His parents are ‘born again’ Christians. “I know the Orange state stripped away the rights, entitlements and expressions of identity of nationalists and republicans and Irishness here, and that was abhorrent and entirely wrong. But you can’t start a new Ireland by doing the same thing to working-class Protestants,” he says.

“My mum and dad worked in the RUC during the Troubles and lost friends and saw some horrific things. So I need to be more mindful, I think, of why they feel that they need to vote for the DUP…I’m thirty-one. I’m very lucky that I grew up in a time when the Troubles were coming to an end. One of my really good friends, she lives in London, and she is a die-hard republican from Armagh, a big GAA supporter. We’re both lefties. But certain conversations are uncomfortable because she doesn’t think there’s any such thing as a good soldier, or a member of the RUC that was a decent person. And when she says those things, she’s actually talking about my parents.

“You have to try to empathise. Like, there are people voting for the DUP on the Shankill estate who lost relatives in the Shankill bomb. It’s hard for people to look past the constitutional issue because it’s not just about their place in the union, or their place in a united Ireland. It’s about the people they buried, it’s about the things they have had to witness, it’s about the bodies they have pulled out of rubble. It’s really deeply personal. We haven’t recovered as a society from the mass trauma of the Troubles, and the health infrastructure is just not there to deal with that.”

Donnan-Dalzell encapsulates the view of many open-minded unionists when he says: “I just want to live in a place that thrives. I would prefer it to be within the EU, and I would prefer it to be within a United Kingdom, but whether we have a united Ireland or not, unless there is significant social change in how the most vulnerable are treated, it doesn’t make a difference.”

Many of McKay’s interviewees – particularly those with lower incomes – are sick of hearing endlessly about the constitutional question, and emphasise the importance of issues like poverty, mental health, integrated education and gender discrimination, all neglected as the DUP and Sinn Fein obsess over British sovereignty and the Irish border. Derry community worker Catherine Pollock, while stressing that as a democrat she will accept a majority vote for unity, goes on: “I don’t see much of a difference in Dublin or London. I think I’ll be poor no matter if the border’s there or not.”

Remembering atrocities is another perilous issue. Bloody Sunday in Derry, Ballymurphy in Belfast and Loughinisland in County Down have been endlessly commemorated and investigated, their victims championed and the British security forces involved excoriated. But when did anybody last make a TV programme or write an investigative article about the IRA’s attacks on the La Mon hotel, the village of Claudy, the workers at Kingsmill and Teebane returning from their places of employment, or the Enniskillen war memorial? The parents of sisters Joan Anderson and Margeret Veitch were killed in the 1987 Enniskillen bombing. Anderson says she has spent her life since “in just utter despair and crying.” Veitch says: “The British government has done nothing for us British citizens that lived in hell for thirty-five years. It was a slaughter match around Fermanagh and right around the border. Those twelve victims in Fermanagh are very bit as important as the Bloody Sunday victims.” 34 years on the families of those victims are still waiting for a satisfactory memorial to their loved ones, one containing “a clear statement that the IRA had murdered them.”

The poet Jean Bleakney comes from a Fermanagh family, although she grew up partly in Newry. She has terrible memories of what Newry was like for its Protestant minority in the early years of the Troubles. She showed McKay an opinion column in the nationalist Irish News which referred to how Protestant businesses had ‘disappeared’ from the town. One grocer’s shop, formerly owned by Robert Mitchell, was now the columnist’s favourite Chinese takeaway. What he didn’t say was that Mitchell, a 69-year-old Orangeman, had been shot by the IRA in front of his two elderly sisters in 1977. “Not a word about this. I just felt, dear God, our stories are just going to go unrecorded and forgotten.”

Playwright Stacey Gregg moves between Belfast, Dublin and London. “I feel uneasy when people mock working-class Protestants – it shows a poverty of empathy. There’s a flavour of condescension.” She is gay, a Belfast working-class girl who went to Cambridge University, an outsider, “a restless iconoclast”, drawn as a writer to what is “new, unsettled, shifting, out on the edge, or beyond it.” She thinks most of the North’s Protestant privilege is “essentially gone or going, but the residual entitlement remains, and can become brittle and defensive. I became aware that I’d inherited some of this, and part of going away was to dismantle it; yet in the same way I’m sensitive to power hierarchies because of my queer antennae, so this bizarre Protestant entitlement helps me understand why some behave as they do; how unless you are given the tools to identify and scrutinise, it can take root and solidify into something very unattractive.”

One suspects that Susan McKay empathises with Stacey Gregg. She too is an outsider: a left-wing woman from a Northern Protestant background living in the Republic, whose writings should have been educating us about the North in the Irish Times on a daily basis for many years. It is a tribute to McKay’s skills as a journalist and interviewer that in this fine book she wins the trust of members of a community that is notoriously untrusting and wary of outsiders, and as a result produces some startlingly honest and insightful testimonies. One wonders if Northern Catholics would be quite so outspoken and unsparing in their criticisms of their own people – I think not.

Her qualities as an observer and commentator are the key to her achievement in offering a uniquely illuminating glimpse into a much misunderstood, belittled and even reviled community. Her own Derry Protestant background helps, as does her flinty integrity (in one potentially hostile setting she is seen as “hard but fair”), which is much valued in the straight-talking Protestant North. Even her sparky (and occasionally spiky) feminism must have been useful for drawing out the testimonies of some of the impressive ‘ordinary’ women she talks to.

This book brings out the humanity and complexity of Northern Protestants in a way that is extremely rare. Traditional Irish republicans, for all their soft talk, have tended for a hundred years and more to dismiss these stubborn people, with their proud Protestantism and old-fashioned Britishness, as a lesser breed of human beings. They have overlooked and ignored them in a belief that they have no real agency in Irish history, which they see as a centuries-old struggle between the British imperialist overlord and Ireland’s noble anti-colonial fighters, a struggle which they believe they are now finally winning. McKay’s marvellously thought-provoking exploration is a necessary and powerful antidote to that simplistic view.

This is an edited version of a book review which appears in the September edition of ‘The Dublin Review of Books.’

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | 3 Comments

In praise of wise and moderate people of ideas

Posted on Wednesday, 1 September, 2021 by andypollak

In all my years in Northern Ireland, two of the wisest people I came across were a senior Irish diplomat and a Northern Irish business leader. The diplomat was Noel Dorr, ambassador to the UK in the 1980s, Secretary General of the Department of Foreign Affairs in the early 1990s and one of the architects of both the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement and the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. Even his sometimes adversarial counterparts in the British Foreign Office had to admit that Dorr was a diplomat of the highest international calibre.

The business leader was the late Sir George Quigley (he died in 2013), who headed several Northern Irish government departments before he went into business as chair of, successively, Bombardier Aerospace and the Ulster Bank. In 1992 Quigley proposed a Belfast-Dublin ‘economic corridor’ as the centrepiece of an ‘island of Ireland’ economy, both of which would serve as a cross-border economic zone modelled on those in Asia and North America, which saw countries with different political systems cooperating closely to address mutual economic and social needs.

Quigley saw himself from the tradition of outward-looking, cosmopolitan ‘New Light’ Presbyterians of the late 18th century, and thought deeply about the future of the island as a whole as well as his native province. He was a peacemaker, who oversaw the decommissioning of loyalist weapons. He was a sage and humane realist, warning that Ireland contained “too many dealers in ultimates, most of them so far spectacularly unsuccessful.” He believed that if there was ever a new constitutional configuration in Ireland, it should be a confederal one, so that “the final agreed Ireland would be a joint, equal venture between North and South, with each having its own governance structure, and with policies related to the powers to be specifically delegated to confederal level determined jointly by representatives from North and South.”

He urged his fellow Ulstermen and women “not to insist on agreeing on ultimate objectives. People with different ideas of what makes the world tick can work together on specific problems.” Quigley, like Dorr, was also an admirable human being: intellectually brilliant, but also courteous, thoughtful and kind.

However it is Noel Dorr’s ideas I want to focus on in this blog. In an Irish Times opinion piece last month – which that august organ deemed not important enough to put into the printed paper – he warned that talk of a Border Poll was premature “now and for the medium-term future.”¹

Speaking out of his belief in Wolfe Tone’s’s ideal of uniting “Protestant, Catholic and dissenter” in an independent Irish republic, he reminded readers of two conditions the Irish electorate had added to the Constitution in the May 1998 referendum in order to support the Good Friday Agreement.

“One is that Irish unity is to be achieved ‘in harmony and friendship’. It has to be said that the Assembly parties show little evidence in their day-to-day working relationships of the ‘partnership, equality and mutual respect’ they committed to in the Agreement. Is it likely that will change to harmony and friendship after an early Border Poll?

“We also added a second condition – that unity would depend on ‘the consent of a majority…in both jurisdictions. Taken together these conditions raise a question: will Ireland really be at peace with itself and united ‘in harmony and friendship’ if just over 50% in Northern Ireland vote for unity?”

He then cited the late Seamus Mallon’s argument for ‘parallel consent’ for unity by both unionist and nationalist communities. “For many his proposal goes too far. But the concern behind it was surely right. If not that, then another way must be found to avert the lasting alienation of outvoted and disgruntled unionists in an Ireland united through a simple headcount like that which created Northern Ireland a century ago.”

Dorr asked for some realism about what unity would entail. “If North and South did vote for Irish unity, what would follow? The Agreement is silent on that beyond envisaging that proposals would be ‘agreed with the government of Ireland.’ Clearly there would be a great deal to settle in implementing the decision. It would be dramatic for the UK; and traumatic for convinced unionists in Northern Ireland – just as a decision to rejoin the UK would be for nationalists here.

“But it would be nothing less than existential for this State. We would have to recast our institutions radically and – depending on what form unity takes – accept a substantial change in ethos to accommodate the unionist identity and ethos: as the New Ireland Forum Report in 1984 recognised, that ‘comprises a sense of Britishness, allied to their particular sense of Irishness’. It would probably not be the Ireland of Tone or Pearse. Are we ready for that?”

He said such a radical restructuring of Ireland, the UK and their future relationships would require close cooperation between the two governments and would be best done in stages. “One idea worth considering is that, if it happened, a date would be set – say 15, even 20 years ahead – on which it would take full effect. This could damp down opposition somewhat and make the transition less sharp and more gradual for those unionists who had voted against Irish unity.”

He suggested that during that implementation period “the two governments would exercise joint authority in Northern Ireland, while possibly retaining a devolved administration. There could be an all-Ireland constitutional convention comprising nominated or elected representatives, a George Mitchell-type outside chair and perhaps a requirement for ‘parallel consent’ or a weighted majority – if not in the convention, then in a subsequent all-island referendum on its proposals.

“Negotiations would be prolonged and probably difficult. If the aim were a two-part confederal Ireland, with a consultative role for the British government on unionist community issues analogous to that of the Irish government under the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, and a continuing right to be British or Irish or both, then unionists – and indeed nationalists – might find it easier to accept.”

In the meantime, he urged the politicians “to focus now on more generous cooperation within Northern Ireland’s power-sharing institutions so that, as intended, they reduce community tensions gradually and soften the starkness of the contention” between the clashing nationalist and unionist agendas for the future of the island.

I don’t know if one would call the commentator and economist David McWilliams’ voice a wise one. But it is widely recognised as an extremely smart one, with innovative ideas on a broad range of subjects. And unlike the great majority of Southern commentators, he actually knows Northern Ireland well (his wife is from a Northern Protestant background).

He too had an interesting (if visionary) idea about the island’s future in a recent Irish Times column: cantonise it into a confederation like Switzerland.² He pointed out that Swiss people use three languages: 62% speak Swiss-German; 23% French and 8% Italian. They come from three groups in terms of religion: 35.1% Catholic, 23.1% Protestant and 27.8% with no religious affiliation. He could also have added that the Swiss confederation of today emerged out of a civil war between largely Protestant and largely Catholic cantons in 1847.

“The Swiss have figured out a way to ensure that no ethnic group feels short-changed, dependent or unrepresentative. The key to Swiss success is localism, devolved decision-making and direct democracy, where each locality runs its own affairs, sets its own taxes and basically doesn’t annoy the people over in the next valley….

“The balance of political power in Switzerland is divvied up between the three Cs – the Confederation, the Cantons and the Communes, in descending order of size. The basic rule of Swiss government boils down to the principle of subsidiarity; in short, anything that can be done at a lower political level should not be done at a higher level.

“This rule is set out in the constitution. This prevents Germans making the rules for the French or the French making the rules for the Italians, and at a stroke diminishes the likelihood of inter-ethnic grievance. It’s not that the Swiss don’t recognise the potential for sectarian strife, they just don’t let it happen.

“The confederation handles issues of national importance and scale, such as national defence, foreign policy, customs and monetary policy, and nationwide legislation. Each of the country’s 26 cantons has equal status and sets budgetary matters, taxation, healthcare and the operation of the political system. At the local level, Switzerland’s 2,300 or so communes determine local taxation, planning, schools and hospitals.”

Could such a system work in Ireland? We certainly have enough localism in our politics here in the Republic. McWilliams says the Swiss model “would be far more palatable to the British people in the north-east of the island because in effect they could run their own affairs in a hyper-devolved Irish federation.”

“The Rangers-supporting unionist from Larne will be making decisions for himself and his community, as too will the GAA-obsessed nationalist from Ballina. Nobody will feel ruled by others, particularly those with whom they don’t share a cultural affinity.”

Maybe we need to search out and dust off Sinn Fein’s Eire Nua policy document of the late 1970s, which foresaw government devolved to the four provinces (in my book these would be Leinster, Munster, Connacht-Ulster and the present Northern Ireland). Or could we follow the Swiss example and radically devolve power to 35 local authorities (the 32 counties and the three major cities)?

This is revolutionary thinking, and we are certainly nowhere near ready for it. But it is new thinking. And new thinking is what is conspicuously lacking from any discussion about the future shape of Ireland at the moment, as Sinn Fein drives on to a unitary state through the narrowest of narrow victories in a Border Poll, and Fianna Fail – in the person of its wannabe future leader Jim O’Callaghan – makes occasional republican noises and comes up with the tiny mouse of guaranteed seats for the unionist minority in any future united Irish government.

One thing is certain: we in Ireland badly need more wise, clever, moderate people like Quigley, Dorr and McWilliams to give us some fresh ideas in a tired old debate.

¹ ‘Talk of a Border poll is premature’, 16th August

² ‘Swiss model the key to a successful united Ireland’, 21st August

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 5 Comments

A hill-walker’s return to the most beautiful county in Ireland

Posted on Monday, 16 August, 2021 by andypollak

It is surely no coincidence that I choose to take my Irish holidays in a place that is as far away from Northern Ireland as one can get. Kerry is simply the most beautiful and fascinating (and peaceful) county in Ireland, and for this lifelong hill-walker it is about as close as one gets to paradise on earth. In this I am at one with the greatest Kerryman of them all, Daniel O’Connell (see his idealised view of his home at Derrynane in Robert Havell’s painting in the National Gallery).

Earlier this month I returned to Kerry to complete the Kerry Way, which I walked for five days a year ago via the Black Valley, Glencar, Glenbeigh, Cahersiveen and Waterville.¹ This year I took the southern leg and walked for three days from Killarney to Caherdaniel, via Kenmare and Sneem. The first day took me in pouring rain along the spectacular Old Kenmare Road (not a road at all, but a cross between a cattle track and a rough and wild upland path), past Torc Mountain (the home of Ireland’s largest red deer herd), through the sylvan Esknamucky Glen and up to the bleak pass between Peakeen and Knockanaguish mountains. Until 1823 this was the main route linking Killarney to the sea. It was being tramped in the historic year of 1815 by British soldiers (up to 90,000 Irishmen served in the British Army during the Napoleonic wars) – there is even a graffiti from one of them on a rock in Esknamucky Glen: James Neill of the Tipperary Regiment.

Kenmare is a classic landlord town, with its distinctive triangular street plan. As you enter it from Gowlane on the Old Kenmare Road you pass a handsome if shabby residence which was once the Kenmare workhouse, described by the town’s medical officer in the famine year of 1847 as “an engine for producing disease and death.” In one July day in that year over 63% of the population of the Iveragh peninsula received famine rations (mainly porridge made from Indian meal).

These days Kenmare is a charming place, much frequented by the Dublin bourgeoisie (of which I am now one, although a little unusual in that I entered it on foot). It was developed by the absentee landlord, the Marquess of Lansdowne, in the 1770s when he instructed his agents to turn its two streets into four by crossing each other at an angle, with a triangular market place at its centre. I met my wife Doireann for dinner in the Lime Tree restaurant, which in the 1840s served as an office to hand out free passes to allow starving people to emigrate, mainly to North America (over 4,600 people received such papers in this building alone), before becoming a school for 110 years.

The following day I headed for Sneem, starting with an easy tramp up Gortamullin hill, which gives splendid views over the town, Kenmare Harbour and the Beara peninsula. I am a huge admirer of the people who designed and developed the 210 kilometre Kerry Way, which I count as one of the finest long distance walking routes in Europe. But something went wrong around Templenoe, west of Kenmare. Here it takes the walker on a six kilometre deviation around inland country roads, and then for two and a half kilometres, with no footpath, on a perilous perambulation along one of narrowest and fastest-driving tourist roads in Ireland, the N70. I assume that the long diversion is to avoid the Ring of Kerry golf club – a ‘must play’ course for wealthy American visitors, complete with plutocratic bungalow-style residences for them to rent. It was obviously easier to persuade local farmers to allow walkers across their land than the people who run upmarket golf clubs!

On the third day I walked from Sneem to Caherdaniel. Sneem is one of the prettiest villages in Ireland, beloved of President Charles de Gaulle, who chose it as his hideaway after his 1969 resignation following the ‘events’ of May 1968 in Paris and the loss of a referendum which was effectively a vote on his years in power. Another highly unusual aristocratic figure buried there in the Church of Ireland graveyard there is Gobnait Ní Bhrudair, born Albinia Broderick, the sister of the Earl of Midleton, leader of the Southern unionists during the War of Independence. In her middle age, Albinia trained as a nurse, became a fluent Irish speaker (changing her name into Irish), and joined Sinn Fein and Cumann na mBan (she was to become a Sinn Fein councillor on Kerry County Council). She was a fanatical anti-Treatyite during the Civil War and cycled all over Kerry in her blue nurse’s uniform to treat wounded republicans, until in May 1923 she was shot in the leg when she refused to stop at a Free State army roadblock. Despite her injuries, she joined a hunger strike of republican prisoners in Dublin until she was released. She was horrified by the poverty she saw in Cork and Kerry and her dream, never fully realised – despite starting a hospital in Caherdaniel during the 1910 smallpox epidemic – was to establish a hospital for the poor people of Iveragh.

Half way between Sneem and Caherdaniel, just off the Kerry Way, is the imposing Staigue Fort, a large circular rampart at the head of a river valley, built entirely of dry stone walls, whose date is uncertain but probably goes back at least 1600 years to the Iron Age. It may have been the defensive citadel of a petty king or tribal leader. Kerry is an archaeological treasure trove for such remains from the Bronze and Iron Ages (for example, the largest concentration of prehistoric rock art in Ireland is found close to the remote and dramatic Ballaghbeama Gap north of Sneem).

Maybe it is a false comfort, but as I proceed into my eighth decade on this earth, I am greatly comforted by these rich remnants of Irish people and civilisations who existed thousands of years before me. It is the same in the North, where in the words of the Ireland-loving Welsh archaeologist E. Estyn Evans, people from different origins learned to live and mix together with the result that Ulster had a “brilliant Bronze Age.” It makes me hope that – if global warming spares us – the small, if often bloody, colonial and sectarian conflicts of the past few hundred years will inevitably pass, and with good fortune and good leadership (the latter never a given!), we will one day come together peacefully as a somewhat united people on this most beautiful of islands.

Another thing I have come to believe is that it is simplistic and foolish to think that the British presence on the island (now personified by the Ulster Unionists) is the cause of all our ills. There are many English, Scottish and Welsh people who have contributed enormously to the well-being of Ireland. In my walks through Kerry I have come across the works of one of them, a remarkable Scotsman called Alexander Nimmo. Nimmo was an engineer who was charged in 1811-1812 with mapping Kerry and parts of Cork for the Bogs Commissioners, established by the British government to explore the practicality of draining and cultivating Irish bogs. Nimmo’s brilliant and detailed map of Iveragh has been described by the UCD geographer Arnold Horner as “arguably one of the most elegant ever produced for any part of Ireland.”

But Nimmo was not just a mapmaker. He was a designer and builder too. Among the Irish roads and buildings he surveyed and/or designed after his mapmaking in Kerry were roads in Connemara, Cork harbour and city quays, the village and harbour of Roundstone in County Galway, the harbour in Dunmore East in County Waterford, the Wellesley bridge and docks in Limerick, bridges at Poulaphouca in County Wicklow, fishing piers and harbours throughout Ireland (including at Cahersiveen, Ballinskelligs, Kenmare and Valentia), and the railway between Dublin and Dun Laoghaire.

So the next time you are driving the Ring of Kerry road from Glenbeigh to Foilmore, with the picturesque Kells Bay harbour below you and Drung Hill above, spare a thought for this virtuoso Scottish engineer – because he surveyed and designed that road over 200 years ago. It was to replace the old ‘butter road’ that rose to 850 feet along the shoulder of Drung Hill, which is now part of the Kerry Way (and which I walked last year). ²

¹ Walking the Kerry Way to happiness, 2 Irelands Together, August 2020

² The factual elements in this article are largely taken from a marvellous book called The Iveragh Peninsula: A Cultural Atlas of the Ring of Kerry, edited by John Crowley and John Sheehan (Cork University Press, 2009)

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland, The island environment | 3 Comments

Unionism is running out of both political and demographic road

Posted on Monday, 19 July, 2021 by andypollak

I should start by welcoming Sir Jeffrey Donaldson as the new leader of the DUP, following Edwin Poots’ brief and inglorious reign. Donaldson is the nearest that ultra-dogmatic party gets to a pragmatist: a courteous man from a modest County Down background who has spent a lifetime in politics, a skilled and practiced Westminster parliamentarian, and a supporter of north-south cooperation.

However he has some huge problems on his plate. As the excellent Belfast News Letter political editor Sam McBride pointed out earlier this month, the Northern Ireland Protocol will dominate next May’s Assembly election, when the DUP will seek a mandate to vote down the Irish Sea trade border when they get a say on it in 2024.¹ In line with this hard-line policy, in Donaldson’s first speech he said the Protocol was “a threat to the living standards of the people of Northern Ireland and to the constitutional integrity of the UK.”

But when he was asked by a journalist whether he was prepared to “pull down Stormont if the Northern Ireland Protocol is not removed”, he replied: “I would not use those words.”

McBride says that the EU has privately communicated to the DUP that it should be realistic in its demands. “Brussels has essentially said ‘Ask for how we can make the Protocol less obtrusive but don’t ask for it to be ditched because that won’t happen.” This EU policy of limited relaxation of the Irish Sea border saw Brussels u-turning to alter its own legislation in order to get around provisions in the Protocol which would have otherwise disrupted the flow of medicines from Britain to Northern Ireland.

The DUP leader’s dilemma is whether to play the only real card he has – collapsing Stormont to protest against the Protocol – or to calculate that it can only be mitigated rather than removed. If the latter, in McBride’s words: “Does he want his leadership to be defined by defeat in pressing for the unachievable or does he seek to quietly push this out of sight and focus on other issues? Unionist history suggests that he will either go in a hardline direction or lose his party.” And this is at a point when, following the resignation of North Down MLA Alex Easton (who said that within the DUP “there is no respect, discipline or decency”), we have now reached a hugely significant moment, with Sinn Fein as the largest party in the NI Assembly.

Because the deeper, demographic trends remain firmly against unionism. In a thoughtful essay in last month’s Dublin Review of Books² my friend, the Belfast-based social researcher Paul Nolan, pointed out that in the 2011 Northern Ireland census, for the first time since the foundation of the state, the Protestant population fell below 50% (coming in at 48%). That census showed that above the age of 40 Protestants were in a majority; below 40 the majority was Catholic. The 2011 school census was even starker: 50.8% of school students then were from a Catholic background, 37% from a Protestant background. “Those cultural identifications are likely to stay with these children as they move up the age ladder and join the electorate. This is the essential fact that has to be grasped when considering the future of politics in Northern Ireland.”

Other unpalatable facts for unionism are that only two out of Northern Ireland’s six counties (Antrim and Down) now have unionist majorities. Only one of the province’s four cities (Lisburn) has a unionist majority. The student populations of both the North’s universities have Catholic majorities.

However Nolan also points to two reasons why a Catholic majority is unlikely to emerge from this year’s census. “The first is that the Catholic birth rate has slowed and is now very close to that of the Protestant community. The second is that more and more people from both the Catholic and Protestant gene pools are moving beyond the two communal identities and self-designating as ‘neither/nor’ or as ‘Others’.” That “will keep the Catholic population below 50%.”

He then cites an obscure document called the Labour Force Religion Study, issued by the NI Executive Office. The latest 2019 study showed that of the numbers aged 16-64 (i.e. those in the workforce), Catholics were 43%, Protestants 38% and Others 18%.

He warns that the relatively new four way split among the communities in the North – Catholic, Protestant, Others and minority ethnic groups – makes predicting the arithmetic of future censuses much more complicated than the simple Protestant/Catholic split that has traditionally dominated public discourse on the subject. “If we are going to simplify, then the 40/40/20 formulation best captures the movement away from a simple binary…The core reality is that no one community is going to be in the majority, if the term majority is taken to mean more than 50%. We are moving to a situation of three communities: Protestants, Catholics and Others. The exact percentage shares of the pie are anyone’s guess, but 40/40/20 is likely to be too neat: the Protestant community is likely to be shown to be smaller in size than the Catholic community. When that realisation sinks in, there is likely to be a sense of existential threat to the community that, one hundred years ago, had a state created that was designed to make it a majority forever.”

Nolan then traces the demographic changes through to the political arithmetic. After the May 2017 Assembly election unionism became a minority in that regional parliament for the first time, with the DUP, the Ulster Unionists and Traditional Unionist Voice winning only 45.7% of the vote and 40 out of 90 Assembly seats. In the two elections in 2019 – European and Westminister – unionism’s vote flatlined around 43%. The most recent Lucid Talk opinion poll in January 2021 showed it dropping further to 41%.

A century ago Edward Carson set out a path for unionism at the birth of the Northern Ireland state when he advised the new government in Belfast to show that “the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from a Protestant majority.” Wise words, says Nolan, which were completely ignored. “An historic opportunity for a reset came after the Good Friday Agreement, when the Catholic middle class embraced the new dispensation, one which would see them accepting UK governmental structures in exchange for the right to fully express their sense of Irish identity. They were never going to embrace Orange culture, but they were content to live as British citizens. Peter Robinson grasped that if there was never again going to be a unionist majority, there could still be a pro-Union majority. The strategically wise thing to do was to keep middle class Catholics on board; instead members of the DUP seemed to go out of their way to antagonise them with mockery of the Irish language, funding of loyalist paramilitaries, refusal to enact an Irish Language Act and, when in government, a display of majoritarian swagger reminiscent of the Brookeborough era.”

And then came Brexit, and they simply didn’t understand the implications for little Northern Ireland of being hard-line Brexiteers. Theresa May’s attempts to keep the whole of the UK inside the same arrangements were rejected in favour of “striking an uber-British pose” alongside the Tory Party’s Brexit-obsessed European Research Group.

The Protocol isn’t about trading concerns or access to markets, which the rest of the people in Britain and Ireland think it is. For the unionists it is, rather, “an existential issue about identity, about being fully British.”

This branding of the problem of the Protocol as a unionist constitutional concern has had the “entirely predictable effect of uniting all non-unionists in a single block. This has been the pattern with all issues in recent years, particularly those to do with the cultural wars – abortion, same sex marriage, the Irish language – and a form of polarisation has evolved which leaves unionism at one pole and everyone else at the opposite one. It is an unwise approach. The opinions of your opponents can perhaps be disregarded when you are a majority, but not when you are a minority. And actually the problem for unionism is worse than that. If it appears to be standing on an ice floe that is shrinking beneath its feet, that’s because there is a growing number of post-unionist Protestants, particularly in the younger age groups, who have a broad identification with Britain as a liberal, secular state, but are alienated by the ethnic forms and rituals of loyalist culture and no longer identify with the unionist parties.”

Nolan ends with a stern warning. “The onus of proof has always been on unionists to prove Northern Ireland is not a ‘failed state’. Unionism has to show that Northern Ireland can work. Tearing down the institutions will not help. Tearing down the institutions when the whole future of the UK is under discussion, and when unionism is on its way to becoming a minority culture, is suicidal.

“The crisis of unionism at present may be fixed on the narrow issue of the Protocol. The argument of this essay is that it must be recognised that this problem has roots that go much deeper and implications that go much wider. One hundred years ago a new state was created because of the fears that unionists in the north-east of Ireland had about becoming a minority in an independent state. At this point, with a census under way, unionists will have to contend with becoming a minority in the state that was created for them. That will require deeper thinking and wiser leadership than we have seen so far.”

¹ ‘Sir Jeffrey Donaldson may want compromise on the Irish Sea border, but the DUP might not’, News Letter, 3 July 2021

² ‘Running out of Road’, Dublin Review of Books, June 2021

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | 1 Comment

One of these years we in the Republic may have to face a difficult choice between equality and peace

Posted on Wednesday, 23 June, 2021 by andypollak

Readers looking for insights into the recent turmoil surrounding the DUP will have to wait until that storm subsides before I essay some impressions. In my last blog, I said I would return to the weighty and thought-provoking report from the team of academics led by University College London’s Constitution Unit on the mechanisms and procedures for a future Irish unity referendum.¹ Earlier this month there was an interesting online debate on its findings involving a panel including several people whose views I greatly respect, notably Professor John Coakley, emeritus Professor of Politics at UCD and Avila Kilmurray, former director of the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust and founding member of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition.

Coakley said the UCL report was entirely right to insist that “the mechanism of decision-making by majority vote on this issue needs to be respected. It categorically rules out the requirement of any kind of super-majority, describing it as a clear breach of the Good Friday Agreement, which was unequivocal that the threshold in a referendum on the unification question in Northern Ireland would be a simple majority, 50% plus one of those casting a valid ballot.”

The report “unambiguously corrects” the interpretation of politicians like Leo Varadkar, Bertie Ahern and the late Seamus Mallon, who had suggested such a weighted majority in order to bring as many unionists as possible on board for unity. “It is hard to imagine that Sinn Fein would ever have signed up to the Good Friday Agreement without this provision,” said Coakley. “In effect, in 1998 Sinn Fein compromised on a crucial component of Irish nationalist ideology. It conceded that the counting unit in a referendum would not be whole of Ireland where nationalists could outvote unionists, but the two jurisdictions on the island, each of which would have a veto on unity.”

So those of us who worry deeply about a future Border Poll passing by the narrowest of majorities, relying on the almost complete support of the Northern nationalist community in the face of the even more complete opposition of the unionist community, will just have to pipe down. The legal position has been explained to us by some of the leading political scientists (including those I admire) and academic lawyers in the land, and the conversation on this aspect of an existentially epoch-changing vote must be now closed. I can only hope that is not the case.

To be fair, Coakley went on to say that it would be vital for a detailed blueprint of what Irish unity might look to be drawn up before any vote. “It would be a big mistake to rush into a vote on unity before that had been done. It is hard to over-estimate the amount of work needed to draw up such a blueprint. Even a sketch of what Irish unity might look like would be enormously demanding.” He warned, in particular, about the financial implications (although he also referred to a recent Irish Times article by Dublin City University political scientist John Doyle, in which explained his belief that the British subvention could be as low as €2.8 billion, compared to the nearly €10 billion usually cited²); the numerous thorny cultural issues (including flags and anthems, state rituals and symbols, commemorative ceremonies and historical myths) and, most importantly, the constitutional and institutional design of any new state. He stressed that all these questions would have be to be addressed before any Border Poll.

Avila Kilmurray, a Southerner who has made a significant contribution to the civic and political life of Northern Ireland in her more than 45 years there, is always a rock of good sense. She made a number of important points about a future referendum. She regretted the absence of a Charter of Rights for the whole island, promised by the Good Friday Agreement, but not delivered, because it would have been important in the ultra-sensitive period surrounding a referendum. She emphasised the importance of a broader process of deliberative democracy to involve ordinary people, so as “to take the discussion out from the purely party political into broader society – that’s where you’ll get the unexpected reactions.”

That process should be about far more than just the Border question, which would immediately put people “back into their respective boxes; it should be about health and education and welfare and gender and ‘What type of society are we signing up to?” There was a group in the North, around 20% of the population, many of them under 35, who were fed up with the constant talk of Border Polls and wanted answers to this fundamental question. And she said it was her experience that within unionism there was a whole spectrum of views on the unity issue: ranging from those who would say “if it happens, we’ll pack our bags and leave” to those who say “if at the end of the day it’s happening, it’s acceptable.”

She was strongly critical of that community’s political leadership, stressed that a proper internal discussion within unionism needed to be given more space, and praised the work of Professor Peter Shirlow of the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University for his promotion of a debate with multiple voices (why wasn’t he invited to join the University College London group?). “There needs to be a degree of positive thinking about the benefits of Northern Ireland remaining within the UK to balance the arguments in our binary choice scenario.” There was a growing ‘civic unionism’ in the North which sought “a more liberal, progressive society. Where are they going to find that? They look at what’s being created in England and don’t find that particularly attractive.”

Turning to the Republic, she believed much more work needed to be done to explore the implications of constitutional change, with academic initiatives accompanied by more inclusive and open-ended discussions involving ordinary citizens. “I am acutely aware of the level of disengagement in the South, that Northern Ireland is viewed there as cantankerous, disruptive and even embarrassing – probably the same reaction as you’d get in Surrey.”

There is a lot of talk about ‘process’ in the UCL report. In a lecture in March, the researcher who wrote the background paper that formed the starting point for this project, former senior Northern Ireland Office official Alan Whysall, said its report was “essentially about the process for getting to a united Ireland, if that is the wish in polls north and south, and for deciding what it should look like.” He went on: “The group’s work was mainly focused on suggesting processes before, during and after border polls, that would give the best chance of stability in the new state, if that was the choice, and through transition to it – the ‘how you get there bit.”

Unfortunately, it is the process which is a large part of the problem, and not one (in this writer’s opinion) that the report comes up with any clear or obviously workable solutions to deal with. Another member of this month’s panel, Belfast solicitor and unionist-minded commentator Sarah Creighton, quoted the east Belfast community worker and former DUP assembly member, Sammy Douglas, as telling author Susan McKay (for her recent book Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground): “I know a lot of people fear a united Ireland. But it is a bit like death. Most people don’t fear being dead, they fear the process of dying. Irish unity wouldn’t be as bad as the process of getting Irish unity. You could actually probably live quite peacefully in a united Ireland; it is just that the ten years of it becoming a united Ireland would probably be pretty awful.”

In the question and answer session, one searching question was asked by Rory Montgomery, the recently retired senior Irish diplomat who was a key member of the Department of Foreign Affairs teams which respectively negotiated the Good Friday Agreement and had an important input into the post-Brexit settlement with the UK. He asked the panel: “How do moderate nationalists, north and south, square the simple majority requirement of the Good Friday Agreement with strong public disquiet, as evidenced in opinion polls, about the idea of change effected by 50% plus one, which is at odds with the longstanding philosophy of persuasion and consensus?” The panel, which included the UCL referendum team’s chair, Dr Alan Renwick, had no answer to this.

In an Irish Times article last month Montgomery had answered his own question with three further questions.³ He wrote then: “For decades mainstream nationalism has emphasised the need for reconciliation and agreement with unionism as the basis for a new Ireland, and for those who favour a united Ireland to persuade those who do not.

“The [1993] Downing Street Declaration said ‘stability and well-being will not be found under any political system which is refused allegiance or rejected on grounds of identity by a significant minority of those governed by it.’ Recent opinion polls confirm that this anti-majoritarian philosophy of persuasion and agreement is widely shared.

“Under the Agreement a narrow majority could be achieved in favour of a united Ireland without a single self-defined unionist having been persuaded. Of course, as traditional unionist preponderance within Northern Ireland is already no more, and as the decisive votes either way would come from the growing middle ground, this would simply be the outworking of democracy.

“The prospect of a united Ireland being achieved in this way is, however, rightly a cause of concern. It seems to me that supporters of unity who feel like this essentially have three real options. To try to change the majority threshold – this was never canvassed in 1998 and is surely unlikely to win consensus. To follow [Seamus] Mallon and not vote for unity until a significant number of unionists are won over. But is there evidence that this would ever happen? Or, after winning a divisive referendum, to be generous and imaginative in trying to reconcile unionists to the new Ireland – recognising that this might fail.”

He concluded: “This issue does not have to be explicitly addressed now. But it is likely that sooner or later it will have to be.” I would put it in even starker terms. Sooner or later the politicians and people of the Republic may have to choose between insisting on the 50% plus one threshold laid down by the Good Friday Agreement – i.e. absolute equality of votes between those in favour of the union and those in favour of unity, probably leading to a fragile ‘united’ Ireland at some point in the future – or finding some beyond ingenious mechanism (probably based on one of the options outlined by Montgomery above) to ensure a peaceful and relatively harmonious ‘new Ireland’ by persuading a sufficient number of unionists to go along with it.

Such beyond ingenious mechanisms need to be seriously considered. In Alan Whysall’s words: “We ought to reflect imaginatively on hybrid constitutional forms that might better accommodate the different identities. That is, forms that on the one hand could be regarded as a fulfilment of Irish unity, Northern Ireland becoming part of an Irish union; and on the other, maintaining a British link. We do not need to get hung up on heavily dated conceptions of the nation state.

“And this reflection needs to take place in the context of potential constitutional change within the UK, which may see Scotland and even Wales cease to be part of the UK, with arrangements likely to be put in place for cooperation and coordination between them, possibly even structures of a confederal nature.”

¹Report of the Working Group on Unification Referendums on the island of Ireland

² ‘UK subvention is irrelevant to the debate on Irish unity’, 9 June 2021

³ ‘Questions Belfast Agreement raised remain to be answered’, 8 May 2021

Posted in General, Irish reunification | 2 Comments

A brilliantly reasoned but not balanced exploration of future Irish unity referendums

Posted on Friday, 4 June, 2021 by andypollak

With the division and probable implosion of the DUP following Edwin Poots’ brutal takeover from Arlene Foster, and opinion polls north and south showing Sinn Fein likely to lead the next governments in both jurisdictions, the momentous issue of a future Border Poll – or unity referendum – starts to loom larger. Many of us believe if this comes within the next decade it will lead to dangerous instability on the island, and even a return to violence in the North, but as concerned citizens we have to face into this alarming new reality and consider it with the seriousness it merits.

Last weekend I read a heavyweight 300 plus page report from a group of leading academics from Ireland and Britain under the auspices of University College London’s Constitution Unit with the collective title ‘Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland’. They emphasise that they are “focussed on technical and procedural questions. As a group, we take no view on whether holding such referendums would be desirable or not, or on what the outcomes should be if referendums were to be held.” They also emphasise their belief that such referendums, north and south, are not imminent, but stress it would be “highly unwise” for them to be called without “a clear plan [to be agreed by the two governments] for the processes of decision-making that would follow.” [I should say here that any phrases in square brackets in the middle of quotes are my own].

The report’s authors propose one relatively simple and two much more complex ‘configurations’ of unity referendums. Under the first, a detailed model for a united Ireland would be worked out in advance of the referendums. “This would be done on the initiative of the Irish government, but with the widest possible consultation throughout the island. If majorities in the referendums, north and south, opted for unification on the proposed model, the two governments would then work together on agreeing the terms of transfer of sovereignty.” However, the group believes that the British government would not support this version.

Under the second configuration, the referendums would be held “before detailed proposals for a united Ireland had been established. But two key matters would be agreed in advance, so that voters would would know what to expect. First, a process for working out detailed proposals for a united Ireland would be set out. Second, default arrangements for a united Ireland would be established, which would apply if voters opted for unification but revised arrangements for a united Ireland could not be agreed and approved” [in second referendums, north and south]. The authors say that one default option would be for Northern Ireland “to be absorbed into the Republic under the existing Constitution.”

“If majorities opted for unification, the transfer of sovereignty would not be immediate: detailed arrangements for the form of the united Ireland would be worked on first. Unification would occur either on the basis of an agreed model if one could be approved, or the default arrangements if there were no agreement on a new model or that model were not approved.” The group makes clear that there could be no going back on the fait accompli of unification, even if the proposed new model was not agreed or approved in a second round of referendums.

Under the third configuration, the referendums would again be held before detailed proposals for a united Ireland had been worked out and put before the people. But unlike in the previous version “the transfer of sovereignty would follow relatively soon after majority votes for unification [in the first referendums], and processes for developing the permanent form of a united Ireland would follow after that.”

“In advance of the [original] referendums, three matters would be agreed [between the governments]: the process for agreeing those detailed future arrangements; the interim arrangements that would apply after transfer of sovereignty, until any replacement arrangements were agreed and approved; and the default arrangements that would apply in the event that detailed future arrangements were not agreed and approved. The interim and default arrangements might well be the same.”

If this sounds complicated, that’s because it is. This is a report full of complexity and potential difficulties, a fact recognised by its authors. “There is no easy solution here”, they write. “The difficulty arises from the clash between the principle that sovereignty must be decided by a simple majority [according to the Good Friday Agreement] and the principle that governing arrangements should be arranged consensually [also according to the Good Friday Agreement, in this case for the internal governance of Northern Ireland]. If a majority opts for unification, then the transfer of sovereignty must occur, whether governing arrangements [for a new united Ireland] can be agreed consensually or not.”

This is the report’s central contradiction (as it may be in the 1998 Agreement itself). The working group is absolutely committed to that Agreement’s provision that a simple majority (50% plus one) must be the threshold for unity (they mention it at least 15 times during the course of the report, and even rule out a 52-53% majority to cover any margin of error in polling). They reject Seamus Mallon’s (and my) contention that the governments “should not agree to the holding of a Border Poll unless they were absolutely certain it would lead to a peaceful and stable outcome for the island of Ireland.” They say, correctly, that the Good Friday Agreement “simply stipulates the test as being that a majority in favour of unity appears likely.” They do not even deign to consider Mallon’s view that paragraph 7 of the Review section of that Agreement “makes express provision for review and adjustment” in the event of difficulties arising.

Similarly they reject Trinity College Dublin political scientist Professor Michael Gallagher’s suggestion that a ‘super-majority’ threshold for unity might be adopted “in order to ensure that, within Northern Ireland, a proposal cannot be passed with the support of just one community even if it is almost unanimously opposed by the other community.” He argues for a threshold of perhaps 60% in favour of unity. Another respondent warns that a unity referendum “should need a 60/40 majority to avoid reopening the Troubles. A 1-2% majority would lead to civil war.”

But the group are unmoved. “The simple majority threshold for deciding sovereignty is not a contingency of the 1998 Act, but a requirement of the underlying principle of equal treatment of the options on the ballot paper. Any qualified majority threshold would make it harder to change the status quo and would therefore favour the status quo. On the basic, binary question of sovereignty, that could not be justified.”

A second problem with the working group’s overall stance is their almost complete indifference to what might happen in Northern Ireland in the event of a unity referendum being defeated (outside a few paltry paragraphs). This is a group of academics – eight out of the 12 are Irish – who seem almost exclusively interested in the process of movement towards unity. There is almost nothing in this report about the reformed structures and processes that might be necessary to keep the North as a fair and functioning region of the United Kingdom in the event of such a defeat. Unfortunately, the only recognisably unionist person on the group, emeritus Professor Arthur Aughey of the University of Ulster, had to withdraw from it on health grounds.

Poor old unionists! Even this high-level group of academics can’t bring itself to include a unionist perspective. This may be a brilliantly argued piece of analysis by a distinguished group of political scientists, lawyers and sociologists. I have the utmost respect for the work of people like Professor Brendan O’Leary of the University of Pennsylvania, Professors Christopher McCrudden and Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, and Dr Alan Renwick (the group’s chair) and Professor Robert Hazell of University College London. But didn’t one of them think it prudent to point out that this major lacuna in their work leaves them (or at least the Irish members of the group) open to charges of pro-nationalist partiality?

I agree that it is probably impossible to involve unionists in discussions about the future shape of a united Ireland in advance of any unity referendum: before the actualisation of what they will see as a cataclysmic threat to their British identity, they will simply refuse to engage. But it does not help that the group appears to dismiss lesser versions of unity – federalism, confederalism, joint authority, some continued post-unity involvement of Britain in the North – so summarily.

Do they really believe that their third referendum configuration – no detailed model of unity before the referendum, followed by a quick transfer of sovereignty and the details of the new society and its structures to be worked out afterwards – would be a process “to encourage and facilitate the participation of unionists in the design of a united Ireland”? Would that beleaguered community not be more likely to feel betrayed, abandoned and trapped in an alien society they wanted nothing to do with? And in those circumstances would civil resistance and boycott of the new institutions not be a more likely response – if not violence?

Despite these reservations, I recognise that this is an important, if flawed, contribution to a vital debate which is now beginning. I will return to it in another blog in the near future. Other weaknesses I will highlight then include the wisdom of putting forward very detailed proposals for a unity referendum at a time when the nationalist electoral vote in Northern Ireland is stuck at around 39%; the extraordinarily complex and potentially destabilising nature of the referendum and post-referendum processes suggested by the report; the total absence of any mention of that element in unionism (sometimes called loyalism) which may use the significant delays identified by the authors as necessary for the implementation of those processes to try to halt or reverse them; the near-impossibility – recognised by the authors – of reconciling the clash between referendum voters having a clear and informed choice of the options before they cast their vote and the inclusivity needed to ensure that all communities (notably the unionists) have an input into developing those options; and the too brief treatment of the “major difficulties” and “significant practical upheavals” that unity will bring in policy areas like taxation, public administration, health and welfare, education, the law and policing.

However, I still commend this report to all interested policy-makers and seriously interested citizens in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain. At the same time I urge them to keep their critical faculties well-honed. In their concluding paragraph the authors express pleasure that the great majority of those consulted for this exercise “have recognised our work as reasoned and balanced”. Marvellously reasoned – yes. Balanced – no.

I do not expect this major piece of work to be widely read or understood (or intelligently summarised and analysed by the media) in my home place in the first of those jurisdictions. Here I concur with Bob Collins, a rare public figure who knows both the Republic and the North well (as a former head of RTE and of the Northern Ireland Equality Commission). He says: “I don’t detect the slightest sense in the Republic that the emergence of a united Ireland would alter people’s lives in the slightest respect, and that worries me deeply.”

Posted in General, Irish reunification | Leave a comment

Two disturbing videos which show the huge gulf of misunderstanding between the peoples of Ireland

Posted on Thursday, 6 May, 2021 by andypollak

This week I watched two depressing and disturbing videos which reveal the huge gulf of mutual misunderstanding, ignorance and loathing that continue to exist between the peoples of this island. The first was a 46-second clip from the front runner for the leadership of the DUP, Edwin Poots. Poots is a ‘creationist’ (who believes the earth was formed 6,000 years ago, rather than the 4.5 billion years ago that science tells us), an opponent of gay marriage and an unashamedly sectarian politician who has stated that the incidence of Covid-19 was six times higher in Catholic areas. He is happy to undermine 23 years of hard-won cross-border relationships by boycotting the North-South institutions of the Good Friday Agreement as part of a futile campaign to undo the Northern Ireland Protocol to the UK-EU trade agreement.

Unsurprisingly, in his video Poots never mentions division or conflict in Northern Ireland, nor the urgent need to make the North a warmer house for nationalists if unionists are to have any chance of keeping the province in the UK. Such people appear not to matter to him. He seems intent on appealing to the old fundamentalist core of the DUP, those who are hard right in politics, religion and culture, and who are seen outside the North as hopeless, backward-looking dinosaurs. People at the more open-minded end of the party hope against hope that Poots will prove more pragmatic if he gets to lead the next government (pointing out that it was he and Simon Hamilton who negotiated a package with Sinn Fein to get back into government in February 2018 – a package that was scuttled by their party’s MLAs on the grounds that it included an Irish Language Act).

These people would prefer Sir Jeffrey Donaldson as the ‘continuity candidate’ to follow Arlene Foster’s slightly more progressive and flexible line. But continuity is probably the last thing many in the party’s tiny electoral college (i.e. its Assembly members and Westminster parliamentarians) want after Foster’s error-strewn five and a half years. The likelihood of Donaldson, as the more presentable and slightly more centrist candidate, winning is lessened by what one close observer of the party calls the “mood of irrationality” among unionists about what can be achieved to unravel the Protocol.

The second video was the more alarming of the two. It is a slick and professional production glorifying the memory of Provisional IRA man Seamus McElwain, who was shot dead by the SAS while on ‘active service’ on the Monaghan-Fermanagh border 35 years ago last month. He was, the video informs us, “the most feared volunteer” in the south Fermanagh region, so notorious that British soldiers carried a photo of him on their rifle butts. He was sentenced to two life terms for the murder of members of the locally recruited security forces, UDR corporal and farmer Aubrey Abercrombie as he drove his tractor and RUC reserve constable Ernest Johnston outside his home. He was part of the mass Maze prison escape in 1983.

Eulogising McElwain on the video, Monaghan Sinn Fein TD Matt Carthy said he was an “intelligent, humorous, engaging young man”, widely held in “huge esteem and regard.” His brother Sean said he was “the kind-hearted, good-natured older brother that everyone would love to have.” He was a “perfect son” to his parents and “lit up many a room with his smile and quick wit…Seamus died so our children could have a better life.” He said it was the duty of Irish republicans to play their part in finishing what McElwain and his “fellow patriots” had set out to achieve. “We can agree on one thing, we’re all looking for a united Ireland and the time is now. The opportunity is here, and by working together we can build this new Ireland, the Irish Republic which Seamus died for.”

Travel a few miles across the border (a million miles in terms of consciousness) and you meet Kenny Donaldson, a thoroughly decent young Border Protestant who heads the (mainly unionist) victims group, the South East Fermanagh Foundation, and who has a starkly different view of McElwain. Pointing out that most of his victims were off-duty members of the security forces, Donaldson goes on: ” It was a hallmark of Mr McElwain’s approach that he murdered when those innocents were at their most vulnerable. Seamus McElwain is linked to circa 25-28 murders; he was a ruthless and psychotic terrorist”. Both Arlene Foster and the RUC believed McElwain was one of the gang who shot her father John Kelly, a farmer and reserve policeman, in the head (he survived) in an attack at his home in 1979.

South of the border, according to that most well-informed of commentators, Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy, the Sinn Fein narrative of the Northern conflict as “a noble and justified struggle for human rights quietly advances.”¹ Leahy recognises and then dismisses unionist concerns. If Sinn Fein was leading the government in Dublin, he asks: “Would the Seamus McElwain commemorations become State events, or at least events honoured by the presence of ministers of the government? That – and what it represents – is the smouldering fear of unionists, beyond Brexit, beyond border checks, beyond the Irish language and all the rest of it. I think it is far fetched to be honest. But the fear is real.”

You can say that again. As a Northern Protestant who lived through the ‘troubles’ and is a proud citizen of this republic, I share that fear. Leahy is depressingly sanguine about the takeover of Irish commemoration and memory by Sinn Fein’s simplistic and one-sided narrative, which is deeply inimical to any coming together of the peoples of this island. “Irish politics will have to accept Sinn Fein’s ancestor worship; it is integral to the party’s identity, “he writes.

I believe Leahy’s predecessor as political editor, Stephen Collins, is closer to the dangerous truth when he writes that Sinn Fein continues to be “no ordinary party.”² “[Matt] Carthy’s eulogy for McElwain should put paid to the naive notion that the Sinn Fein leadership is somehow trapped into an unwilling defence of the IRA because of old loyalties that have no great relevance to current politics. The fact of the matter is that Sinn Fein was, and remains, the political mouthpiece of the IRA. That is the fundamental reason for its existence. Carthy made no bones about it in his address last Monday evening, saying: ‘Seamus and all those who fought for Irish freedom continue to inspire us.”

But as Leahy says, for young people who vote Sinn Fein in the South “it is all ancient history anyway. Efforts to remind voters of the ‘armed struggle’ by Fine Gael and Fianna Fail tend to fall flat.” Sinn Fein are surely marching on to lead the next government in Dublin and it will be the folly of young, ‘north blind’ people who will put them there. That doesn’t lessen the duty of those of us who are older and wiser, who remember the awfulness of the Northern ‘troubles’, to keep reminding our younger fellow citizens that the relentless Sinn Fein campaign for an early Border Poll leading (they hope) to unity, is the one thing likely to re-ignite that conflict. In a Belfast Sunday Life poll last weekend (the usual warnings apply) 90% of unionists believed that “the prospect of a united Ireland could jeopardise peace on the island of Ireland”, as did 68% of Northerners as a whole and 62% of Southerners.

In an intelligent article last weekend, former Belfast Telegraph editor, Gail Walker, despaired of Edwin Poots becoming DUP leader and put the view of the ordinary, thoughtful unionist. “The Union needs to build allies. Not everybody content with the Union is a unionist. That may seem paradoxical, but it’s quite possible to have long-term aspirations which don’t involve the Union yet find it attractive in the interests of peace, stability, prosperity, opportunity. We already know that Northern Ireland has managed to gain levels of consent among nationalists. As Arlene Foster said in her resignation speech, there are people with ‘a British identity, others are Irish, others are Northern Irish, others are a mixture of all three and some are new and emerging.” She concluded that there was a significant section of the population in the North which had “modernised its sense of identity.”

But where are the strong moderate voices articulating this in politics? Why do Northern voters have a choice between a formerly violent ultra-nationalist cult (only recent converts to democracy, and then largely for tactical reasons) and a party of hard right religious bigots and British empire loyalists? Maybe in the next few years Alliance, with its impressive left-of-centre leader Naomi Long, will attract enough unionist voters to become a real electoral force (between the 2017 and 2019 elections it took 18% of DUP voters away from that party). Maybe the SDLP’s revival at the expense of Sinn Fein in Derry (where that party appears to have imploded) and in South Belfast will continue.

But what about the Republic, where Sinn Fein often seems to have undisputed ownership of the ‘national question’? Micheál Martin is doing his best with his embryonic Shared Island initiative, although at the moment it seems to be at the level of ‘talking shop’ events and ‘scoping studies’, and media interest in it is underwhelming. At the same time, absolutely the wrong message was sent by the failure of the two main constitutional parties to support the liberal South Armagh unionist Ian Marshall in his bid for a Seanad seat – for the second time.

As usual, Fine Gael seem to have no ideas. Would it be a good idea for the smart young Dun Laoghaire TD, Neale Richmond, who comes from a Church of Ireland background, to be appointed as a junior minister with a brief to come up with a new long-term political strategy to complement the Taoiseach’s largely economic ideas on bringing the two parts of the island together in as mutually acceptable a way as possible? In a future blog I will suggest some thought-provoking ideas on what might be included in such a strategy.

One of the problems is poor leadership. I simply don’t trust the present generation of political leaders – whether Boris Johnson in London, Mary Lou McDonald and Leo Varadkar in Dublin, Michelle O’Neill and Edwin Poots (!) in Belfast – to have the kind of wisdom and statesmanship to move us peacefully to the next phase of this island’s too often bloody history. Those brave leaders of yesteryear – Hume and Mallon and Ahern and Blair and Trimble and Ervine and Adams and McGuinness and Mowlam and Mitchell and Clinton – are long gone. As that great Chinese Communist leader Deng Xiaoping once said, disputes that can’t be resolved except by war should be left to wiser generations. Maybe the next generation of politicians in Ireland will be wiser.

In the meantime, I would echo former Tánaiste Michael McDowell, a sensible centrist when it comes to Northern Ireland, writing this week: “Sadly, polarised politics rather than reconciliation is the current coinage. The North badly needs a decade of political quietude and conciliation.”³

¹ ‘DUP can see the future, but cannot face it’, 1 May

² ‘McElwain tribute shows Sinn Fein is no ordinary party’, 30 April

³ ‘The North needs reconciliation, not a referendum’, Irish Times, 5 May

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism, Sinn Fein | 8 Comments

The loyalist riots and London and Brussels’ ‘cloddish insensitivity’ to Irish concerns

Posted on Monday, 26 April, 2021 by andypollak

Now and again this writer comes across a blog by another author that is so apposite that he takes the liberty of reproducing it in full. I have done this recently with pieces by Paul Nolan and Duncan Morrow. The article that follows from the London Review of Books is by Daniel Finn, features editor of the American left-wing magazine ‘Jacobin’.¹ Finn is a young Dubliner who has written a well-reviewed book on the IRA: ‘One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA’.² This is the best short piece of analysis I have read about the recent loyalist riots and the current plight of unionism – mind you, the current woeful level of analysis of the North in the Republic’s media means there isn’t much competition.

“In trying to make sense of the worst disturbances in Northern Ireland for years, there are two symmetrical pitfalls to be avoided. One is to present the recent violence as a simple reflex of Brexit, drawing a straight line between Boris Johnson’s campaign bus and a burning bus on the Shankill Road, while ignoring the local factors at work. The other is to overlook the many ways in which choices made at the highest levels of the British state have unsettled the region and added to the stock of combustible material.

To begin with the immediate context: a year into the pandemic, in the working-class unionist areas where the rioting was concentrated, the jobs that young people are most likely to have – if they have jobs at all – have been the worst affected by the economic downturn, and most forms of social infrastructure, from youth centres to sports facilities, have been shut for long periods. Anyone bent on causing trouble wouldn’t have been short of recruits.

Loyalist sources have pointed the finger at the Ulster Defence Association’s South East Antrim Brigade – a quasi-autonomous faction, immersed in drug dealing and other forms of criminality, that wanted to retaliate against the Police Service of Northern Ireland after recent arrests. The same sources also suggested that the group had ‘piggy-backed’ on anger in the unionist community that was ‘completely justified as far as any self-respecting loyalist is concerned’. Whether or not it is justified, the existence of that anger is not in doubt. Nor is it confined to the people throwing petrol bombs.

The first grievance has nothing to do with Brexit. The Northern Irish prosecution service decided last month not to bring charges against senior Sinn Féin politicians who attended the funeral service for the IRA veteran Bobby Storey in June 2020. The prosecutor argued that it would be hard to make any charges stick since the rules on public gatherings during the pandemic were changeable and unclear. Unionists dismissed that as an excuse for a political decision to let Sinn Féin off the hook.

Their cynicism was unsurprising, even if claims about ‘two-tier policing’ slanted against unionists are hard to sustain. In February, the PSNI aggressively broke up a memorial event for the victims of a loyalist massacre in a Catholic area of Belfast, and its handling of Glasgow Rangers fans celebrating a Scottish league victory a few weeks ago was distinctly more low-key than the heavy-handed policing of Black Lives Matter protests in Derry and Belfast last summer (which was found by the Police Ombudsman to have been unfair and discriminatory).

The Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster escalated the row over Storey’s funeral by calling for the PSNI’s chief constable, Simon Byrne, to resign. Foster doubled down on that call in the wake of the rioting: ‘When I think of all those officers out facing the violence over this past few nights, I really feel for them, because their leadership team has let them down and let them burn really bad.’ As PSNI officers were facing a hail of petrol bombs, the choice of metaphor was more than a little hair-raising.

Foster’s willingness to play with fire reflects the weakness of her party’s position, and this is where Brexit comes in. The DUP has protested vehemently against the arrangements now governing Northern Ireland’s relationship with the European Union and with the rest of the UK. A statement last week from the Loyalist Communities Council, an umbrella group that represents loyalist paramilitaries, put on record their ‘absolute determination to remove the hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of our country that has been imposed on us by the Northern Ireland Protocol’. The LCC’s sense of grievance is understandable. But its anger should really be directed against the DUP, which opened the door to this outcome through its hubris and strategic myopia after the 2017 UK election.

The DUP was in a position of rare influence at Westminster for a Northern Irish party, as Theresa May relied on its MPs to stay in power. Foster and her colleagues could have used the opportunity to educate the British political class and the wider public about the realities of Brexit. Neither the government in Dublin nor the nationalist parties in Northern Ireland were going to accept a deal that established a hard border on the island. That only left two options: either the Conservative Party would back away from May’s pledge to leave the single market and the customs union, and move towards a softer version of Brexit, or it would agree to special arrangements for Northern Ireland.

For all the bluster and brinkmanship of the last five years, there was never any reason to doubt the ineluctable nature of this choice. May’s ‘backstop’ was an attempt to postpone it that ended up pleasing nobody. If the DUP wanted to minimise the danger of a gap opening up between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, it should have been calling for the soft-Brexit option that commanded much broader support among the British public than either May’s deal or the version of Brexit eventually pushed through by Boris Johnson.

Instead, the party let its role as parliamentary kingmaker go to its head, allying with the Tory right and welcoming Boris Johnson to its 2018 conference as he pledged never to allow any trade barriers to be established in the Irish Sea. It should have come as no surprise that Johnson reneged on that promise when he returned with a new Brexit deal the following autumn – least of all to politicians whose overriding political objective is to safeguard Northern Ireland’s position within the UK against any conceivable threat.

The LCC’s statement calls for ‘no hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, and no hard border on this island’. While those demands should not have been incompatible – the Brexit model generally referred to as ‘Norway plus’ would have taken care of both – Johnson’s victory in the 2019 general election opened a chasm between them. Johnson deserves a healthy share of the blame for unabashedly lying during the election campaign about the terms of his deal as it applied to Northern Ireland. The British media also have to take responsibility for reporting those lies as if they were even remotely credible. But Foster and her colleagues have as much claim on our sympathy as a man who swaps his family home for a jar of magic beans.

The result might have been the same had the DUP followed a different approach: Northern Ireland carries so little demographic weight in the UK that transferring all its Leave votes to Remain in 2016 would not have tipped the balance. But as things stand, the DUP’s fingerprints are all over this fiasco for the unionist cause. Little wonder that the party’s average support in the last two opinion polls was 7 per cent lower than its vote share in the 2017 Assembly election. A performance like that on election day would see the DUP slip well behind Sinn Féin.

The self-inflicted loss of political standing explains why Foster’s party has been ramping up tensions over Bobby Storey’s funeral and the Northern Ireland Protocol. The European Commission made it easier for them with its breathtakingly foolish move at the end of January to invoke the protocol’s doomsday hard-border clause over the supply of vaccines. Politicians in London don’t have a monopoly on cloddish insensitivity to Irish concerns. The commission rolled back on that decision almost immediately, but the damage had been done, as the DUP called for the protocol to be scrapped.

By the end of February, Arlene Foster was meeting with the LCC as the loyalist paramilitaries prepared to withdraw their support for the Good Friday Agreement. She brushed aside criticism, claiming that the LCC’s component groups were committed to ‘peaceful and democratic’ means of political struggle. Within weeks, the rioting was in full swing.

Unionism has unquestionably suffered a real setback over the last two years. This does not mean that a united Ireland is inevitable, or even probable, but the ties binding Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK now seem weaker than at any time since the peace process began.

The variety of British nationalism that Boris Johnson personifies and the political leadership of unionism have together done more to undermine the union since 2016 than the IRA could manage in a quarter-century of conflict. Whatever agreement can be reached between London and Brussels to smooth over the new arrangements will not change that fact. The chances of the DUP leadership engaging in public self-criticism of its record over the past few years are negligible, so there is every reason to expect further exercises in displacement, even after the current crisis has died down.”

¹ https://lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/april/cloddish-insensitivity

² Verso, 2019

PS I would like to pay tribute to my friend Dr Jim Jamison, who died last week. Jim was formerly chief statistician at the Northern Ireland Department of Health and Social Services and in the 1990s director of the Health and Social Care Research Unit at Queen’s University Belfast. There was little Jim did not know about health provision in Northern Ireland. I got to know him in 2000-2001 when he led a high-powered group of researchers from Belfast, Dublin and London in a research project for the Centre for Cross Border Studies entitled ‘Cross-border Cooperation in Health Services in Ireland’. This pathfinding project recommended, among many other things, joint health promotion campaigns to prevent communicable and non-communicable diseases, which, if they had happened, could have gone some considerable way towards minimising the impact of Covid-19 on the island. Jim was argumentative, brilliant, fearless and indomitable. I particularly admired him and his beloved wife Kathleen (who died last July) for their courageous and inspirational determination not to allow physical disabilities to prevent them from living lives rich in personal fulfilment and public service. Suaimhneas sioraí dó.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | 2 Comments

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2 Irelands together

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Two disturbing videos which show the huge gulf of misunderstanding between the peoples of Ireland

The loyalist riots and London and Brussels’ ‘cloddish insensitivity’ to Irish concerns

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