2 Irelands together

For the second year running my politician of the year is a Protestant Ulsterwoman. This year it is Heather Humphreys, Irish Minister for Arts, Culture, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, a Monaghan Presbyterian whose grandfather signed the 1912 Ulster Covenant and who calls herself a republican. And the reason? In her low key way she was the person who oversaw the success of the centenary commemoration of the 1916 Rising. Enda Kenny paid an indirect tribute to her when he wrote in the Irish Times earlier this month   “any fears that the centenary would plunge us into regressive nationalism proved unfounded…as we commemorated the iconic event of our modern nationhood, we became more outward-looking, less insular and more compassionate.” And how did we do that?  “The transformative potential of arts, culture and heritage” and “broad cultural participation” are the reasons, says the Taoiseach¹. In other words, much of the success of the year was down to the central role played by writers, artists, musicians and historians, and by ordinary people engaging in cultural rather than p0litical activities.

However for the purposes of this column I am going to suggest a radical political way in which the Republic’s leaders might break down the barriers on the island even further. For nearly a century every single political party in the Republic has held as an article of faith the belief in Irish unity. And nearly a century after the island was divided we are no nearer that utopian goal. Indeed I would argue strongly that the IRA’s campaign of violence to undo Northern Ireland’s connection with Britain – and thus against the unionist population which is fiercely attached to that connection – has only served to push it further away than ever. Talk to any liberal unionist who loves Ireland and that is what they will tell you.

50 years ago Sean Lemass was already stressing that there would be no Irish unity without a significant element of unionist consent. That requirement was written into the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. However there is not a snowball’s chance in hell of unionist consent  happening any time soon, despite Sinn Fein’s posturing about pro-EU majorities and Border Polls. Short of hundreds of thousands of unionists deciding to pack up and leave the North, it will not happen in the foreseeable future  – certainly not in my lifetime (I am in my sixties).

So why don’t the South’s political leaders try something different for a change? At the moment Fine Gael and Fianna Fail’s policies on the ‘national question’ are a  watered down version of Sinn Fein’s: Irish reunification to be achieved with as much or as little unionist consent as is necessary to push it over the line. My personal opinion is that Sinn Fein – the only party that has any kind of strategy for driving towards unity – sees this happening by it taking over as the largest party north of the border and growing its Dail representation in the South to the point where it holds the balance of power there, and then pressuring the British into some kind of weakening of the union. One could argue that both these targets have flatlined in recent years.

But why should the two largest parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail,  continue to be paler versions of Sinn Fein on this fundamental issue? For those of us who are not unionists – but who believe that a wafer-thin majority for unity in a Border Poll is a recipe for a return to violent conflict – are there any alternatives? I would suggest that there is one. In October I read an article on commemorating 1916 by the young playwright and theatre director, Sian Ní Mhuiri, in which she wrote: “I’m not nationalistic, but Ireland is my home and I love the communities here. ‘Irishness’ has little meaning in itself; it has value when people who are sharing this island come together and build communities that tackle the problems we have and create a more inclusive, fair and equitable place for everyone in the Republic and our sister state of Northern Ireland (my italics).”²

That phrase caught my eye: “our sister state of Northern Ireland.” Why shouldn’t we in the Republic start treating our fellow Irish people in the North as citizens of a legitimate and equal ‘sister state’? After all this is not the bigoted, discriminatory Orange statelet of 50 years ago. It is a modern region with a power-sharing government in which nationalists enjoy a new equality and confidence at all levels of society and the economy. Its smartest political leaders are nationalists, as are some of its top civil society and business leaders. Its health and education systems are in many ways superior to ours in the Republic. It even has a dash of incompetence and corruption – as shown by the ‘cash for ash’ controversy – that should make people south of the border feel at home!

So here’s my suggestion for 2017. Fine Gael and/or Fianna Fail should start treating Northern Ireland as an equal rather than a failed and unreformable state. ‘Parity of esteem’, first proposed for the two communities in the North by the Opsahl Commission over 23 years ago, should be extended to the two states on the island. This should help to remove the sense of threat that most unionists suffer so grievously from. It would also make a change from the ‘parity of contempt’ that has been practiced by most politicians and people in the two jurisdictions for most of the past century: Northern unionists treating Southerners as benighted and ignorant bogmen, Southerners treating Northerners – and particularly Northern unionists – as bigoted and violent extremists. In many ways this has already started to happen since the Good Friday Agreement: I believe it’s time to take it a step further by one of the major Southern parties taking the courageous step of adopting it as an explicit policy.

It doesn’t mean giving up on Irish unity. Rather it moves the emphasis from unity coming about by the North being assimilated into the Irish state, to real unity of people coming closer together in a relationship of mutual aid and understanding and even – perhaps one distant day – affection. This may sound utterly utopian, but is it any more outlandish than believing that unionists will roll over and accept unity in the relatively near future, which is what many republicans appear to believe? And isn’t it more realistic to begin to talk about how we can work together as ‘sister states’ with important interests in common at the precise moment when external events are conspiring to raise a higher post-Brexit border between us that we will have to learn to overcome in imaginative new ways? More and more cooperation for mutual benefit between equal partners across that border until we find we have much more in common  – that should be the rallying cry.

Such a new policy turn may not lead to unity as we have traditionally understood it. But it could move us towards a more realistic ultimate goal: some form of confederation.  I incline to the view of the late Sir George Quigley, one of the North’s most insightful thinkers, who believed that before there can be any future constitutional coming together on the island of Ireland, there must be a recognition that there are “two mutually opposed ‘principles of legitimacy’ which are strongly held – one nationalist and one unionist – and some common ground would have to be found on which the divergent aspirations are transcended in a general consensus.” He saw the model most likely to secure such consent as a confederal one, which he called  the “most persuasively argued” of the three options in the 1984 New Ireland Forum report. “On this basis the final agreed Ireland would be a joint, equal venture between North and South, with each having its own governance structure, and with policies to be specifically delegated to confederal level determined jointly by representatives from North and South.”

Quigley quoted the 1984 Report’s comment that “based on the existing identities, North and South, [a confederal solution] would reflect the political and administrative realities of the past 60 [now 95] years and would entrench a measure of autonomy for both parts of Ireland within an all-island framework. While protecting and fostering the identities and ethos of the two traditions, it would enable them to work together in the common interest.”³

Is it time to revisit the New Ireland Forum Report? A joint equal venture between sister states – could this be the basis for beginning a discussion on a new formulation of the tired old ‘national question’?

 ¹The Irish Times, 12 December 2016, p. 12

² The Irish Times, The Centenary Conversations special report, 29 October 2016, p.8

³ The Journal of Cross Border Studies in Ireland, No.8, Spring 2013, pp.27-28

“Be positive, Andy” said the former Sinn Fein Lord Mayor of Belfast, Tom Hartley, when I met him at ‘Amazing the Space’, a splendid Cooperation Ireland event on the old Maze prison site last month, which brought together 3,500 young people to talk, sing and dance about peace-building.

And he’s right. It’s so easy to be negative about Northern Ireland (especially for an old journalistic hack like me), even if it’s not the North’s fault sometimes these days: for example, being forced to accept Brexit when a clear majority there voted against it. So I’m going to pick out three positive, very different Northern Irish and North-South initiatives I have come across in recent weeks and highlight these for a change.

Firstly, there is the continuing quiet work going on behind the scenes in Belfast and elsewhere to sort out the toxic legacies of decades of conflict. At the end of September this led to the resolution of the three year old deadlock over Orangemen marching past Catholic Ardoyne every 12th July, thus effectively ending 21 years of often violent disputes associated with the Orange marching season. With the help of two facilitators, former Methodist president Harold Good and Derry businessman Jim Roddy, agreement was reached along the following lines: the Orangemen would be allowed to complete their evening march home to north Belfast on this occasion, but there would be a moratorium on future such marches unless the Ardoyne residents association agreed;  that association would not object to (or protest at) future 12th July morning marches to join the main Belfast parade (although of course, this being Belfast, there was a smaller, more extreme republican residents group which angrily dissented); and the Twaddell Avenue loyalist camp protesting the blocking of the march would be dismantled. At the same time an inter-community forum would be set up to open a dialogue which would be about more than just parading.

There are other things happening that would have been unheard of even a few years ago. Sinn Fein and the Orange Order shared a platform in Enniskillen recently to discuss the commemoration of 1916. Discussion panels at the West Belfast Festival and Queen’s University have seen PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton, Sinn Fein leaders Martin McGuinness and Eibhlin Glenholmes, and leading loyalist Winston Irvine exchanging honest arguments and friendly handshakes.

However the legacy of a violent past is still a major issue blocking moves towards greater mutual understanding and reconciliation. The complex interlocking institutions of the 2014 Stormont House Agreement, which were meant to begin to deal with that legacy – the Historical Investigations Unit,the Independent Commission on Information Retrieval, the Implementation and Reconciliation Group and the Oral History Archive – appear stillborn while the governments and parties try to untangle the Gordian knot between criminal investigation, protecting national security, and uncovering the truth of past violent acts by all sides. Journalist Brian Rowan, who has been involved in several civil society initiatives in this area and has written a book about legacy issues called Unfinished Peace, believes such top-down initiatives may not be what are required and that  “we need to be honest about what is really achievable in terms of the truth”. He thinks a non-political Oral History Archive would be an important initiative to progress on its own, a real opportunity for the families of people who have been killed or injured to tell their stories.

Art and theatre have an important role to play here, Rowan believes. He points to the phenomenal success of the Colin Davidson exhibition of portraits of ordinary people who lost loved ones during the ‘troubles’, which was visited by around 80,000 people in the Ulster Museum and has since transferred to Paris and New York. And to a new play, Green and Blue, by former IRA hunger striker Laurence McKeown, based on 40 stories of the conflict in the border region taken from serving RUC officers and gardai. “I was trusted with these stories and my goal was to remain faithful to them,” says the former IRA man-turned-playwright.

Secondly – in the economic area – there is a visionary initiative by the two business confederations, Ibec in the South and CBI in the North, which largely slipped under the radar when it was launched in July due to the post-Brexit furore. This is the All-Island Investment Project’s proposal¹ for a comprehensive motorway and dual carriageway network to serve a projected island population of 8.25 million by 2040. The island currently has a population of 6.6 million, 4.76 million of whom live in the Republic. This has grown by 30% in the last 20 years, and Ireland now has the youngest and fastest growing population (bar tiny Luxembourg) in the EU. So we are not far away from the more than eight million people who lived in Ireland before the Great Famine in the 1840s (amazingly, England had a population of less than 15 million in 1841, compared to 53 million today).

If you think about it, planning our roads together to move the rapidly increasing number of people and goods around the island is plain common sense. The Ibec-CBI proposal says the time to begin doing this is now, when the cost of borrowing large amounts of money for major infrastructure projects has never been cheaper. Their paper contains striking maps of the island’s railway network in 1920 when no town was more than 10 miles from a station. The rail network in 2016 is a poor, shrunken thing compared to a century ago, and since replacing even some of those lost lines is simply not viable – due to Irish Rail’s desperate financial situation –  we must plan seriously for a 21st century all-island road network instead.

The Ibec-CBI argument is that if we don’t want the island’s dramatically increased population over the next 25 years to be squeezed into the east coast ‘corridor’, with all the problems of overcrowding and bottlenecks this will lead to, we absolutely must develop the western seaboard from Derry to Cork. The two business confederations’ most radical proposal is for what they call a ‘C ring road’ around the entire coastline, particularly through the north-west, west and south –  from Belfast through Derry, Sligo, Galway, Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Wexford – which are not well-served by a radial road network centring on Dublin. They also argue that a new era of ‘low emissions’ road transport is emerging with the development of driverless cars, electric vehicles, car sharing and improved fuel technologies.

“Brexit won’t take away from the need to have this modern infrastructure in both jurisdictions in the future”, says project leader Michael D’Arcy. He believes the Irish government should argue strongly for a relaxation of the EU’s fiscal rules to allow spending on such a strategic project for a uniquely fast-growing population, and this should be part of its special case for Ireland and Northern Ireland in the Brexit negotiations.

The third initiative is much smaller and is already happening. Earlier this month I went to a marvellous conference at which Ireland’s leading historians looked back at how the centennial commemorations of the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme were carried out over the past year. 240 people turned up at Dublin’s Mansion House to hear the likes of Professors Roy Foster, Diarmaid Ferriter, Gearóid O Tuathaigh,  Fearghal McGarry, John Horne and Lucy McDiarmid talk about the “sober, sensitive and mature way” –  in Horne’s words  – in which those commemorations had been handled. They singled out for special mention the role of the committee of historians set up by the Irish Government to advise on the commemorations, which had allowed for a suitably nuanced retelling of the complicated and contested foundation myths of both states on this island, and about the extraordinary people involved in them.

The event was organised by Universities Ireland, the all-island body which brings together its university presidents and vice-chancellors, and which is administered by the Centre for Cross Border Studies. This was the fifth annual conference to examine the 1912-1923 period and there are plans for seven more up to 2023.

¹ Connected: A prosperous island of 10 million people. Ibec/CBI

Earlier this month I walked from Belfast to Dublin, talking to people along the way. I tried as much as possible to avoid main roads, using back roads, green roads, hill paths and beaches. My route took me along the Lagan valley through Lisburn and Dromore; then east and south across Slieve Croob into the Mournes above Hilltown and Rostrevor; over Carlingford lough and through the Cooley mountains; across Slieve Gullion and through South Armagh to Dundalk; and then along the Louth, Meath and north Dublin coasts, via Clogherhead, Drogheda, Laytown, Skerries, Malahide and Howth and into the Irish capital.

Why did I do this? There were three reasons: firstly, I simply love walking through the Irish hills and countryside; secondly, I wanted to raise some money for two charities, BCM and Depaul, working with homeless people in Belfast and Dublin (I raised €5,000); and thirdly, I had the idea that I might write a book about my cross-border journey, which coincidentally began eight days after the UK’s ‘Brexit’ referendum, with a 56% vote in Northern Ireland for staying in the EU, placed a new question mark over the border.

This blog can only essay a few first thoughts from what turned, with all the zig zags, into a 200 mile walk lasting more than a fortnight. My overriding impression was of a fortunate country: peaceful (despite the violent recent past of its northern quarter), beautiful in the summer showers and sunshine, with friendly and generous people, and some towns and villages with a strong community and even entrepreneurial spirit.

What was the evidence for these initial conclusions? I was greatly cheered on my first morning at the Cenotaph in Belfast to see a possible future Taoiseach – the gay doctor of Indian parentage, Leo Varadkar – walking alongside the DUP Lord Mayor of Belfast at the centennial commemoration of the Battle of the Somme. This ceremony was very much a meeting of the two cultures: the British flag, anthem and Irish regiments of the British Army led by Irish pipers playing Irish airs and an Irish wolfhound, and veterans in the crowd wearing Irish worsted suits and telling me they were “first and foremost Ulsterman, but then Irishmen.”

The generosity was shown by the £200 I collected in Dromore Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church for my two charities; free boat rides across the Rogerstown and Broadmeadow estuaries courtesy of Rush Sailing Club and Malahide marina; and the insistence by three bed and breakfast owners south of the border that I should pay them nothing but should instead give an equivalent amount to the charities.

As our lives become increasingly privatised – lived in and through cars, alarmed and gated houses, mobile phones and PCs – public friendliness and community spirit are a little rarer. One meets very few fellow-walkers along Irish country roads these days – the absence of footpaths and the quizzical looks of fast-driving passing motorists are witness to the deviance of such ambulatory activity. The proliferation of children’s swings, slides and bouncing castles in people’s gardens – in my childhood they were largely confined to public parks – makes one wonder how these small people are going to learn the skills of meeting strangers that are so essential to successful adulthood. Around Hillsborough, in Belfast’s well-heeled commuter belt, the spread of large, almost plutocratic, gated residences is quite astonishing.

But the traditional Irish friendliness and hospitality are still there. People whom I only vaguely knew gave me a bed in their houses in Lisburn and Dromore. An AirBnB owner in Hilltown invited me to join the extended family’s welcoming dinner for his son, home from Australia. A community leader in Forkhill gave me the use of the local women’s centre to wash and change after I had camped out on the site of the former British Army base there: a small symbolic act on my part to show that South Armagh is now peaceful, beautiful and open for tourism.

Local community spirit and entrepreneurship were more evident in the Republic. The North’s divisions are unfortunately conducive to neither. Once bustling mainly unionist mill and market towns like Dromore and Rathfriland have a neglected air, full of boarded up shopfronts and those strange ‘make believe’ window displays that local authorities (or is it estate agents?) put up in a vain attempt to convince residents that classy new shops and restaurants are only a buyer’s call away. Outside Lisburn I passed the derilect hulk of the Hilden linen thread mill, a century ago the largest of its kind in the world, employing over 2,000 people, which finally closed in 2006. A mile further on I came across the spanking new local council offices-cum-arts centre, part-financed, like so many things in Northern Ireland, by the European Union. Regional dependence, whether on the EU or now on London’s declining resources, is what makes the North tick these days.

The contrast with an equivalent Southern town, such as Dundalk or Drogheda, was striking. Dundalk and its region has multinationals like Xerox and PayPal, but also high-achieving indigenous entrepreneurs such as Martin Naughton, the late Edward Haughey and the McCann family. Just across the border from Forkhill I caught a glimpse of the architectural monstrosity that Haughey was building for one of his sons before he died in a helicopter crash two years ago. The unoriginal thought occurred to me that for all their faults – and Haughey had a few of those – a society without driven, risk-taking entrepreneurs is a society that’s going nowhere. The odd vulgar mansion in a place long beggared by poverty, emigration and sectarian division (Haughey opened his first factory in Newry in 1969 as the North descended into near civil war) is a small price to pay for dynamic business leadership that brings in jobs and prosperity. Northern Ireland could do with some of the entrepreneurial spirit which seems to be in the water in Louth, Ireland’s smallest county.

I also noticed more multiculturalism in the Republic. After spending a long evening in South Armagh discussing the ancient, unresolved quarrel between native and planter, it was something of a relief to turn into Dundalk and meet three strapping, handsome Nigerian teenagers on Castletown bridge. The cafe where I stopped for lunch in the town centre was owned by a man with a Panamanian wife and the waitresses were Romanians and Serbs.

Further south again, in Rush in north county Dublin, I came across a suburban shop converted into a venue for a myriad of community activities: from positive parenting to Pilates; from Capoeira to set dancing; from drug awareness to English conversation; from Gaeilge to physical fitness; from ballet to police liaison to youth work to yoga.  A woman instructor in the sailing club said: “I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world except Rush.”

However a relatively contented, middle class society tends to breed smugness and a wilful blindness to continuing deep social problems. This is certainly the case in the Republic. On the last afternoon of my journey, walking along Dublin’s North Strand with community workers Mick Rafferty and Brian Treacy, we came across two young homeless couples living in tents  on waste ground within sight of the upmarket offices, apartments and conference centres of the Financial Services Centre and Spencer Dock. In the warm summer sunshine this was just about bearable, but what must it be like in the depths of winter?  The gaping social divides of Southern Irish society – and the unwillingness or inability of the Irish state to do much about them – never ceases to surprise and shock.

Despite this, the strongest impression from my midsummer cross-border trek was that most Irish people, north and south, are plain lucky. During my journey 84 people were mown down by a Tunisian madman in a lorry in Nice and a failed military coup in Turkey sparked a wave of repression by that country’s authoritarian government. The civilian death toll from bloody wars in Syria and Iraq rose relentlessly. In marked contrast, this quiet green island has a lot going for it and we, its fortunate inhabitants, have a lot to be grateful for. I hope to explore this and other themes in a short book  – the hard work starts here!