The divided worlds and parallel universes of Irish education

Posted on Sunday, 27 March, 2016 by andypollak

As a former education journalist, I should write about education more often. However as a passionate advocate of greater North-South cooperation in Ireland, I find the lack of progress in bringing together children and teachers across the border in the vital field of education deeply dispiriting.

In a report to the two Departments of Education six years ago I wrote about the estimated 18,000 children every year who were involved in cross-border educational exchanges (most of them funded by the EU) at the height of the peace process in the early years of this century. I went on: “This must be the largest cross-border movement of young people for the purposes of education and mutual understanding anywhere in the world in recent memory. This movement affects not only the students themselves, but their teachers, their families and their communities. There is a great opportunity here for consolidating the present peace and future reconciliation of Ireland by continuing to work with the more open minds of children and young people. This must not be lost by lack of foresight on the part of the leaders and planners of the island’s educational systems. If the gains of the extraordinary explosion in North-South educational cooperation of the past 10-15 years are allowed to peter out, what will the people of Ireland say in 10 or 20 or 50 years?”

A decade further on all I can say is that my worst fears have been borne out. There has been zero leadership by our policy implementers. North-South educational exchanges are now down to a miserable trickle. We have almost returned to the pre-Troubles situation described by one of Ireland’s most distinguished educationalists, Professor John Coolahan, who has said that when he was a young trainee teacher in the Republic in the 1960s ” as far as education in Northern Ireland was concerned it could have been Timbucktu… it was just out of one’s consciousness.” There are one or two shining exceptions to this turning our backs on each other once again: notably the SCoTENS all-island network of teacher educators.

For if the two Irish jurisdiction have one thing in common, it is that education is traditionally given huge value by parents, teachers and society in general. Teaching as a profession is prized in a way that is probably unmatched in any European country outside Finland and Scotland. The training of teachers is high-quality, although it now takes more time, is more research-based and is therefore higher in the South. The internationally renowned Finnish expert on teacher education, Professor Pasi Sahlberg, has gone so far as to say that entrants to the profession in the Republic of Ireland are the best in the world.

There are also some obvious problems that are shared. The funding of universities, and the inevitable move to a student loan system – apparently successful in England but so far resisted in both parts of Ireland – is a common and major headache, as it is for all developed countries. In the Republic a billion euro will be required to bring our universities up to international standard and cope with a 30% increase in student numbers by 2030.

However at school level the most urgent priorities are strikingly different. In the Republic they include the issue of high birth rates leading to overcrowded schools; the churches’ (and particularly the Catholic Church’s) reluctance to give up their 94% control of the management of schools in the face of a rapidly diversifying and secularising population; and finding innovative ways to assess young people aged 12-16 in the creative and critical thinking necessary for the modern world in the face of opposition by unions wedded to the old exam-oriented system.

In a growing economy, the hope is that the first of these will be solved by building more schools, and the third by the unions eventually seeing sense and getting some of the pay rises they have foregone during the years of recession. The second is a particular conundrum. Two reforming Labour ministers in the last government, Ruairi Quinn and Jan O’Sullivan, tried to begin to solve it by persuading Catholic school patrons and management boards in areas where there were a large number of schools to ‘divest’ one to another patronage body like the multi-denominational Educate Together (which faces huge demand for places in its schools). But in the absence of any real direction from the Catholic Church in particular (i.e. the patron, usually the local Catholic bishop), this process has stalled (or maybe never even started properly – only eight schools have been ‘divested’ to date). The underlying problem is that the churches own the schools and that ownership is protected by the Constitution. It seems that the churches will only be moved by the people voting in a referendum on this thorny issue, which is not going to happen any time soon. Meanwhile school access for children from non-believing families is becoming a political issue, especially in urban areas.

This remains a central educational fault-line in both jurisdictions: the continued division of children’s schooling according to the accident of the religion they were born into. As Ireland becomes more diverse (with large numbers of immigrants), the nonsense of this is becoming apparent to a growing number of unhappy and increasingly vocal parents. The multi-denominational sectors – the integrated schools movement in the North, Educate Together in the South – may be dynamic but they remain very small: 62 schools (including 18 secondary schools) out of around a thousand in Northern Ireland; 81 (including four secondary schools) out of 4,000 in the Republic. Educate Together has ambitious plans to grow this to 300 schools by 2020. The expansion of integrated education in the North, by contrast, seems to have plateaued in recent years.

The chair of Educate Together, Diarmaid Mac Aonghusa (himself the son of a Northern Protestant mother), sets out the problem simply and cogently: “We have to stop separating citizens at four years of age in both parts of Ireland. This is not a faith issue; it’s a tribal issue. The North won’t be fixed overnight, but people are far less likely to fight each other in the future if they grow up friends as children.”

The North’s school system remains deeply and multiply divided by religious denomination, class and gender. The main current problem here is that, unlike in the Republic, many second-level schools have been badly hit by falling pupil numbers. This has particularly affected the lower-performing secondary schools, which have seen many of their stronger prospective pupils poached by the selective grammar schools. The situation is graver in the mainly Protestant schools, which range from extraordinarily high achieving grammars (although recent school-leaving exam results have shown their Catholic equivalents to be pulling ahead) to rock bottom ‘failing’ secondaries. A 2013 report¹ found that disadvantaged Protestant boys at NI secondary schools were among the lowest achievers in school-leaving exams anywhere in the UK.

A second issue is teacher education. Far too many teachers are being trained for the number of places in Northern Ireland schools. Successive reports have pointed to the nonsense of four teacher training providers – two universities and two colleges of education – in such a small province. Common sense would dictate that the two denominational colleges of education – Stranmillis and St Mary’s – should merge with Queen’s University while keeping a modicum of autonomy. But the Catholic Church – followed by Sinn Fein and the SDLP – is fiercely determined to keep control over their own teachers. As in too many areas of Northern society, sectarian vested interests trump good policy-making.

There is one educational ‘good news’ story from the North. Shared education, which sees schools on both sides of the divide sharing classrooms, sports and other facilities, is on the increase. All the political parties support this concept to a significant extent. There are now 70 schools (primary and secondary) in cross-community partnerships, with over 240 more preparing to become involved. This means that in the very near future almost a third of all schools in Northern Ireland will be actively sharing teaching and other activities with schools across the divide. It’s not integrated education – which must remain the ideal, however unlikely to be realised – but it’s a big practical step in the right direction.

¹ Paul Nolan, Northern Ireland Peace Monitoring Report – Number Two. Northern Ireland Community Relations Council and Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

 

 

 

 

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | Leave a comment

The South Ulster town I loved so well

Posted on Wednesday, 24 February, 2016 by andypollak

It’s not very often that this column tries to escape from politics, especially by heading across the border!  But earlier this week I took a break from a rather uninspiring election campaign in the Republic and spent a day in Armagh, where I lived for nearly 14 years when I was running the Centre for Cross Border Studies.

The small city of Armagh – really a south Ulster market town – is one of the largely undiscovered jewels of Irish tourism. A travel writer in 1829 called it “probably the most beautiful inland town in Ireland”, and – with the exception of Kilkenny – that description remains an apt one to this day. Its origins are far more ancient than Dublin’s. Ireland’s only female ruler, Macha, ruled from the fort of Eamhain Mhacha (now the Navan Fort visitor attraction outside the town) either in the 5th century BC (according to Geoffrey Keating) or the 7th century BC (according to the Annals of the Four Masters). St Patrick built not only his first church there in 445 AD but also a monastic school of theology and literature which was to become famous throughout Europe. In the 9th century the Vikings attacked and sacked it regularly as one of Ireland’s principal centres of wealth and population (in 832 three times in a single month). After the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, Brian Boru, the Clare-born High King of Ireland, who was both a hardened warrior and a skilled peacemaker, was buried in the cathedral grounds (his burial plaque is prominent on the Church of Ireland Cathedral’s northern wall).

This mixture of a rich religious and intellectual life and regular bloody military incursions was to continue for another 600 years. In the 12th century Norman leaders like Sir John de Courcey and Philip of Worcester frequently attacked and pillaged the city and its churches. In 1162 the Synod of Clane decreed that nobody should be the director of a monastic school in Ireland who was not a graduate of Armagh. In 1598 Hugh O’Neill’s forces defeated the English two miles outside the city at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, the heaviest defeat inflicted on the English army in Ireland up to that point. In 1646 Owen Roe O’Neill did the same to a largely Scottish army at the Battle of Benburb, just across the nearby Tyrone border. Four years later Archbishop James Ussher, the Church of Ireland Primate, published his enormously influential study (still cited by some US creationists), drawn from a literal reading of the Bible, which put the date of the earth’s creation at 22 October 4004 BC.

Armagh’s role as a key ecclesiastical and intellectual metropolis was in decline for much of the 18th century, but came to life once more towards the end of that century. The background to this was a pre-Industrial Revolution ‘golden age’, when the rural areas around the city became briefly one of Ireland’s economic powerhouses based on the spinning and handloom weaving of linen.

The Church of Ireland Primate from 1765 to 1794 was Archbishop Richard Robinson, son of a wealthy Yorkshire family. He took the unusual decision, for an aristocratic Anglican cleric of the time, to live in Armagh.  There he spent much of his large personal fortune attempting to create a Georgian city along the lines of Bath (he also applied unsuccessfully to George III for approval for a university). He brought in leading architects like Thomas Cooley and Francis Johnston to design and build fine public buildings like the Primate’s Palace, the Public Library, the Royal School (where the Duke of Wellington and the Earl of Castlereagh were pupils), the Armagh Observatory (now the oldest working astronomical observatory in these islands) and the County Infirmary (which 200 years later would become the home of the Centre for Cross Border Studies and the North South Ministerial Council). He and his successors oversaw the lay-out of a new Georgian core, centred around the Mall, a pretty elongated city square-cum-public park. Here on sunny summer afternoons, with its shady walks, war memorials and cricketers on the green, one could more easily imagine oneself in an eternally peaceful English village than a historically fought-over Irish border town.

In the 1880s, according to George Henry Bassett’s encyclopedic Guide and Directory to County Armagh, the city, with a population of just over 10,000,  was a “comfortable and somewhat genteel neighbourhood” complete with a London-style gentlemen’s club, rugby and tennis clubs, and one of the finest markets in Ulster. The magnificent decorated Gothic Catholic cathedral, finally consecrated in 1904 after its foundation stone had been laid 64 years earlier, served a noticeably poorer Catholic community.

The partitioned Ireland of the 20th century did not serve its ecclesiastical capital well. In the early 1920s there was even a proposal to the Boundary Commission that it should be joined to the Irish Free State by a Danzig-style corridor. It was a town deeply divided by class and religion, with the usual discrimination in housing and jobs practised by the unionist majority on its council.  During the ‘Troubles’ more people died in County Armagh than in any other county of Northern Ireland outside Belfast. In a 1983 Irish Times report I quoted local priest Father Raymond Murray saying that the policing of an alienated Catholic population by the nearly 100% Protestant RUC and UDR had given the city “a terrible and emotional civil war tinge.”

All that has changed, thank God. Under the surface Armagh is still divided by a kind of polite sectarianism, much less obvious than its rougher relation up the road in Portadown. But it has now largely returned to its 18th and 19th century state as a peaceful and picturesque Ulster town, well deserving of a visit from people throughout the island who are interested in Irish history, religion, mythology, literature, archaeology and architecture. Its Public Library, on the hill beside the Church of Ireland cathedral, is for me simply the most beautiful small library in Ireland (‘The Healing Place of the Soul’ is the Greek inscription above its door). Beside it is one of the island’s most charming small museums, No 5 Vicars’ Hill, containing an array  of Roman and Greek coins, archaeological artefacts, paintings (including by Reynolds and Hogarth), maps, and ancient ecclesiastical documents from the private collections of Archbishop Robinson and his 19th century successor, Archbishop George Beresford. The town is coming down with museums and libraries: the County Museum and the Royal Irish Fusiliers Museum on the Mall and the Tomás Ó Fiaich Library under the Catholic cathedral are also well worth a visit. The Armagh Observatory – whose astronomers have included  internationally celebrated figures like Patrick Moore and Ernest Opik – and its public Planetarium (one of only two in Ireland) are another highlight.

The conundrum is why more people – particularly from south of the border – do not visit this lovely town. Its central place in 2500 years of Irish history – even if much of that centrality stems from our religious past – should be a source of great continuing interest in a country still fascinated by its history.

A particular barrier is the lack of civic energy among Armagh’s local politicians and other prominent citizens, leading to a certain incapacity to do anything imaginative about publicising the city’s many attractions (despite tourism, rather than industrial promotion, having been the local council’s top priority in recent years). Armagh is not Derry or Newry, which contain people – notably business people – who would lay down their lives to improve their local places. It is a complacent town, maybe even a little superior: former town clerk Don Ryan remembers that when he arrived in the 1960s: “Other places jumped up and down to try to tell the world they were there, but Armagh never felt the need to do that…In those days they would have regarded themselves as  a cut above most other centres in Northern Ireland.”

Another problem is the lack of good accommodation, restaurants and night life. The largest hotel, the Armagh City Hotel, is modern but character-less (although its pleasant cafe is a relaxed meeting place across the communal divide). Most other hotels and guest houses are simply shabby. In my 14 years there I never found a good restaurant (although I am told that a local man and his Polish wife have recently opened a nice place in Vicar’s Hill). Armagh is famous for bringing down its shutters and going home at 5.30. When I was looking for a convivial pub I used to go to Sheils in Tassagh (near Keady) or over the Tyrone county line to Tomneys in Moy. Dubliners these days wouldn’t dream of spending a weekend anywhere with such inadequate accommodation, food and entertainment.

Maybe this is changing a little.  I hope so. There is already a platform of three excellent festivals: the William Kennedy Piping Festival (an initiative of the amazing musical, artistic and sporting Vallely family) in November; the John Hewitt Summer School of literature and politics in July, and the Charles Wood Summer School of choral and organ music in August. Another good sign is the formation of a local Armagh Ambassadors group – ranging from teenagers to people in their seventies – who have a “suppressed passion” for the place and have pledged to promote it more imaginatively in the future. If they want advice about how to ‘sell’ their lovely little city here in the Irish capital, my details are on the web.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 3 Comments

Why do people like me demonise Sinn Fein?

Posted on Wednesday, 27 January, 2016 by andypollak

In a response to the revised version of my last blog published in the Irish Times, which began with a laudatory profile of Julie-Anne Corr Johnston of the Progressive Unionist Party, a reader called Joe Nolan chastised me in the following words: “This lady is no different to any of the innumerable young females canvassing for Sinn Fein in the upcoming general election. Yet one person is feted as the most impressive politician in 2015; the others are part of a political party demonised relentlessly in the media in this state and portrayed as an impediment to political progress on the island by many, including yourself.”

Because of that general election – expected within the next month at time of writing – this criticism forced me to think again about why I, and people like me, do ‘demonise’ Sinn Fein and see it as an impediment to political progress in Ireland.

First of all, as a former journalist who spent many years reporting from and working in the North, I have to admit to a grudging admiration for the Sinn Fein leadership, and particularly Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. These two men have shown huge leadership and vision in undertaking the extremely difficult task of persuading the Provisional IRA to make the transition from terrorist violence to democratic politics over a period of three decades and more. They are still playing a key role in that politics long after their co-authors of the Northern Ireland peace process – Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, David Trimble and John Hume – have left the stage.

And they have human qualities which are worthy of admiration. I remember Gerry Adams’ courage in going into the lion’s den of loyalist East Belfast to attend David Ervine’s funeral in 2007. He showed a different kind of courage when having to deal with child sex abuse accusations within his family at a particularly fraught time in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement. I have personally experienced Martin McGuinness’s courtesy and thoughtfulness, and listened to unionist-minded senior civil servants sing his praises for the same qualities.

But these men are not made of the same stuff as other democratic politicians – or leaders in any other area of Irish society. They have spent most of their lives as revolutionaries, wielding violence for political ends and taking enormous risks in the fanatical pursuit of their ultimate aim: Irish unity.  I once recall asking McGuinness a question he didn’t like during an interview and to which he responded that I was ‘demonising’ the republican movement. I saw the flash of steel in his eyes and I remember thinking: “This is a man who has sent out men to kill people”.

That is at the core of what worries me as Sinn Fein stands ready to be in government in both parts of Ireland. How committed to democracy are their leaders?  To what extent is Sinn Fein still run by a secretive and unaccountable cabal of senior republicans – most of them former members of the IRA army council? Is the thinking of these people still informed by the kind of ruthless militarism – or perhaps an equally ruthless Leninism – that sees the gaining of power by whatever means possible as the ultimate goal (or rather the penultimate goal)?

In the words one of the key architects of the peace process, Fianna Fail’s Martin Mansergh (in an interview in Deaglán de Breadún’s excellent book on the rise of Sinn Fein, Power Play): “The perception is that all the important decisions are taken by a kind of politburo, a group of eight to ten people. Adams and McGuinness don’t take decisions on their own. It’s not necessarily a fixed group. I am not convinced it’s formalised and it’s not the army council of old, as it includes people who were never involved in the IRA or are too young to have been involved; if it’s the army council, it’s a civilian version…The feeling that the Sinn Fein people sitting at the cabinet table wouldn’t actually have the power to make definitive and in principle irreversible decisions, that is what other parties would find uncomfortable about working with Sinn Fein.”

I also worry about a thuggish element I still see when I come across Sinn Fein marches in Dublin and border towns. The ghosts of Kevin ‘Jock’ Davison and Kevin McGuigan loom large. The sight of Adams praising former IRA chief of staff and criminal super-smuggler Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy is another troubling sign. Of course, I am now a middle class Dublin resident of a certain age (although unusual in coming from a Northern Protestant background) – but I am also a slightly disillusioned Labour Party supporter and would normally be looking for a party of the left to vote for. However nothing in my political, social and religious background would incline me to support Sinn Fein.

I would also disagree with them radically on how we should move towards a united Ireland. Given that the great majority of people in the Republic are not interested in this Sinn Fein article of faith if it means higher taxation or threats to social peace, the party will have a mountain to climb if and when they get into power here. As I have said many times in these columns, I believe the only kind of unity that will work will involve the real consent of a significant proportion of Northern unionists, and for that reason it remains a distant dream. Sinn Fein’s strategy comes out of a shorter-term realpolitik founded on demographics. It is based on the calculation that in the near future republicans and nationalists will have an electoral majority in Northern Ireland. This conveniently overlooks the fact that even 49% of the North’s population being virulently opposed to enforced unity is a recipe for only one thing – renewed conflict.

None of that will stop the current, largely Northern leadership. Their current aims are to become the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, thus entitling them to the First Minister’s job; and to hold the balance of power in the Dail (in an Irish Times interview last year Adams talked about the possibility of “a three or five party coalition”). If they get into office in both jurisdictions, their ministers will be able to meet each other in the context of the North South Ministerial Council, which they will present as a further step along the road to unity. Fresh pressure on the British for a Border Poll will be the next step.

Is the Southern electorate ready for all this? At a time of renewed if still fragile economic growth in the South (and an extremely uncertain international economic and political climate) and relative stability in the North, are they ready for the return to insecurity and destabilisation that these moves will cause? I think young people in particular are going to come out and vote Sinn Fein in numbers (as I might do if I was a young Dubliner with no knowledge of the North and a concern for equality and social justice). I only hope they don’t sleepwalk us into putting the party of the Provisional IRA into power.

P.S.  Another interesting series of Thursday lunchtime talks (starting at 1 pm) – this time on aspects of Dublin life in 1916 – will take place in Dublin Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green over the next two months. On 25 February Padraig Yeates will open with ‘Political and social life in Dublin in 1916’; on 3 March Elaine Sisson will speak on ‘Irish education and Pearse’s St Enda’s school in 1916’; on 10 March Mary Muldowney will talk about ‘Women in work, trade unions and the Irish Citizen Army’; and the final talk on 24 March, by Martin Maguire, will be ‘Dublin Protestants and the Easter Rising’. Entry is free and all are welcome.

Posted in General, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

My politician of the year is a lesbian loyalist from Belfast

Posted on Saturday, 26 December, 2015 by andypollak

The most impressive politician I met in 2015 was Julie-Anne Corr Johnston, a 28 year old member of Belfast City Council, representing the small left-of-centre Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), many of whose members are former UVF prisoners. Julie-Anne is a lesbian and gay activist.

At a talk in Dublin’s Liberty Hall earlier this month she spoke movingly of growing up in north Belfast; self-harming as a teenager because she felt different and excluded; and ‘coming out’ and marrying her beloved partner. She also spoke about how her initiation into politics had come through the Belfast union flag protest three years ago, when PUP leader Billy Hutchinson had spotted her at a street demonstration and persuaded her that politics was about a lot more than flags.

Here was a young woman who personified all that is best in politics in this day and age: idealistic, radical, working to correct the injustices of poor health, housing and education in her  working class constituency, and a fighter for the rights of LGBT people. In this she is no different from thousands of young people who campaigned so successfully for marriage equality in the Republic of Ireland last spring.

However there is one thing that marks her out from those young Irish people: she is a passionate Ulster Unionist. She told the audience in Liberty Hall: “When the flag came down from Belfast City Hall I felt my identity and sense of belonging as a British person were under attack.  I feel British; that’s who I am, that’s how I was brought up, I don’t know anything else; I identify strongly with Britain as an inclusive, progressive, multi-faith and multi-cultural society.”

What are my republican and anti-partitionist friends going to do about this impressive young woman and people like her? She goes against the handy (and handed-down) nationalist stereotype that all Unionists are right-wing, bigoted and impossibly intransigent and therefore the best thing to do with them is to go over their heads and ‘persuade’ their British masters to hand them over to an all-Ireland republic.

The alternative is much slower and more difficult, and may not even work in the end. That is to find some common ground with Nationalists that may – just may – persuade them in the fullness of time that they have something they can share with the other people on this island. Here we can learn from the Dutch, the French and the Germans, who after the Second World War set about the slow, painstaking work of building peace and mutual understanding between peoples who had experienced the horrors of war and occupation to a degree that was almost unthinkable to the self-obsessed Irish, ignorant as we too often are of comparable situations in other regions.

For example, I have listened to several speakers from the Dutch-German border region explaining the 60 year process – beginning in the 1950s – which has led to it becoming the prototype for successful cross-border cooperation in the European Union. They all emphasised that the first way people divided by war and bloodshed can start coming together is through ‘people to people’ cultural and artistic activities. When the people of that region started to work to heal the wounds caused by centuries of conflict – in their case going back 350 years  to the Thirty Years War – they began with exchanges in music, sport, the arts and education.

Through a system of twinning 100 town and cities, within 15 years they had over 150,000 people every year involved in these enjoyable and life-enhancing activities. This allowed mutual knowledge and trust to build up and contributed enormously to the success of the second phase of the cross-border process: a business and economic development programme. I heard one Dutch leader emphasising that this very long-term process needed to be continually renewed, with each new generation being “made aware of its neighbours needs all over again” and taught how to overcome psychological barriers and prejudices. This process was beginning to happen across the Irish border in the early 2000s (helped by significant EU funding), but it has dwindled to a trickle in recent years.

Could the Irish language play a role here? Another speaker at Liberty Hall was Linda Ervine (sister-in-law of the late David Ervine), who told the extraordinary story of how she had led the development of Irish in loyalist East Belfast. There are now several hundred people learning the language in that unlikely quarter – usually known for its fierce antagonism to anything Irish – who are comforted by the thought that the Celtic languages are spoken in Scotland and Wales as well as Ireland (and in Scotland by considerable numbers of Presbyterians), so Irish can be a unifying rather than a dividing element in these islands. As Linda said: “As long as it’s used as a weapon, the language has no future. But as a bridge it has a bright future.”

The arts are another area where high barriers put up by centuries of bad, divisive politics can be overcome so that ordinary people start seeing those divisions differently. The author and historian Philip Orr, a third speaker at Liberty Hall, recalled a play of his on the Ulster Covenant in front of an enthusiastic audience containing everyone from dissident republicans to Orangemen in the deeply polarised town of Lurgan. “Theatre gives people a licence to listen to the unlistenable”, he said. Museums also have an important role, Orr stressed, singling out the splendid exhibition ‘Belfast Boys’ – based around the common experiences of a young Unionist and a young Nationalist in the First World War – which is currently showing at the Glasnevin Cemetery Museum.

The Glencree Peace and Reconciliation Centre in Wicklow is planning a conference next June on these issues under the title ‘Imagining Reconciliation through Culture’. However this kind of cultural change is necessarily a very long-drawn out business: changing mindsets forged over several centuries of fear and conflict will take something like the same time to put right. Nothing is going to happen quickly. That wise woman Mary Robinson said in a BBC interview three years ago that a united Ireland  “doesn’t need to be on the agenda” and “isn’t relevant in the context of what is happening on the island now.” I would suggest it will take the best part of another century (if then) for the kind of necessary trust to build up through healing inter-personal and cultural exchanges in order to begin to re-consider unity as a serious item on the political agenda. It would be most refreshing – although extremely unlikely – if such a message were to go out from at least some political and civic leaders of this republic on the eve of the centenary of the foundational event of our national independence movement.

 

Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | 5 Comments

Most Irish people don’t want unity if it means more taxes

Posted on Wednesday, 25 November, 2015 by andypollak

Irish people aren’t stupid: when it comes to the big issues, they vote with their heads rather than their hearts. In an opinion poll carried out for RTE Prime Time and BBC Northern Ireland’s Nolan Live earlier this month only 11% of people in Northern Ireland and 31% in the Republic said they would like to see a united Ireland in their lifetime if it meant they had to pay more taxes.

This represented a dramatic reduction from the 30% of people in the North (57% of Catholics) and 66% in the Republic who said they would like to see unity in their lifetime before there was any mention of higher taxes. As the Labour politician Pat Rabbitte, on the panel in the RTE studio, commented: “Some of us are dreamers…When asked if I would like to see a united Ireland in my lifetime, in my heart I would say I would like it. But when it comes to the nitty-gritty of paying for it, that’s a different issue.”

Irish people’s hard-headedness was further illustrated in their answers to the question about constitutional change ‘in the short to medium term.’ In the North 66% wanted UK solutions to their constitutional issues: 42% wanted continued devolution, while 24% wanted a return to direct rule from Westminster. 52% of people from a Catholic background wanted UK solutions (3% of people from a Protestant background wanted Irish unity). In the South more people (36%) wanted UK solutions than a united Ireland (35%).

The ‘don’t knows’ were also a significant element: 27% of Northerners and 20% of Southerners didn’t know whether they wanted unity in their lifetime; 18% of Northerners and 17% of Southerners didn’t know what their preferred constitutional status was for Northern Ireland in the short-medium term.

None of this prevented the Sinn Fein representative on the RTE panel, the normally impressive Pearse Doherty, using make-believe figures to claim that the subvention from the UK Treasury to Northern Ireland was not £10 billion per year – as universally accepted – but only £3 billion, and therefore unity wouldn’t lead to tax increases.  The DUP finance minister, Arlene Foster, was more convincing (indeed she was by far the most convincing politician on either the Dublin or Belfast panel) in arguing that the poll results were ‘very positive’ for unionism.

Overall the joint RTE-BBC programme – ‘Ireland’s Call’ – was a poor one. The RTE producer made the extraordinary decision that the opening voice – that of a woman in the Dublin audience – would be to express the old, xenophobic, now widely discredited republican view that Britain should “get out of Ireland and hand Ireland back to the Irish…if you don’t want to be Irish, go back to Britain.” There followed a cacophany of inarticulate and partisan voices, from politicians and people alike. For a nation of self-proclamed good talkers, we had remarkably little coherent to say about this huge foundational issue.

There were a few good points.In his bullying way, the BBC’s Stephen Nolan managed to force an answer out of Minister for the Diaspora, Jimmy Deenihan, about whether the Irish government could could afford a united Ireland at this time – “No, not really”, mumbled the Minister.

The professor of Irish history at UCD, Diarmaid Ferriter, on the Dublin panel, pointed to a central flaw in the 1916 Proclamation, which declared that the new Irish Republic would be “oblivious to the differences that have been fostered by an alien government.” Ferriter went on: “The imposition of partition was a great tragedy. Even those on the British side responsible for Anglo-Irish relations at that time were willing to admit that in private.  But what was the alternative?  You could have been looking at a civil war as the unionists would have resisted coercion. If there’s a history lesson in that, it’s that you can’t be oblivious to differences.”

I was asked to speak from the audience. I based my remarks on the wise words of the often unjustly derided Brian Cowen in 2010: that improving North-South friendship and cooperation should be given a greater priority than campaigning for unity. He said then that the genius of the Good Friday and St Andrews Agreements was that they allowed the people of Ireland to go on “a common journey together where we have not decided on the destination.” He said both traditions in Ireland are legitimate – “one loyal to Britain, the other looking to Irish unity as a legitimate objective, but one that will only be pursued peacefully by common consent” and not “forced or imposed on people on either side of the island.”

That kind of nuanced and sensitive thinking from the leader of nationalist Ireland  represented a huge change from the ‘Brits out’ (and leave the key to the money-box on the mantelpiece) unthinking of old-fashioned republicans. It had been there under the surface for 40 years, just waiting to be said openly. Diarmaid Ferriter quotes the British ambassador in Dublin in 1972 reporting a conversation with the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch.  He had asked Lynch how important the issue of reunification was to the Republic’s electorate. “His answer amounted to saying that they could not care less. As far as he was concerned, he wanted peace and justice in the North, and close cooperation and friendship with us.”¹

The eminent political scientist, the late John Whyte, identified 25 Northern Ireland opinion polls between 1973 and 1989 about the North’s constitutional status, and there were broad consistencies. A united Ireland had miniscule support from Protestants, far from complete support from Catholics, and the solution that attracted most support from both communities was power-sharing.

So what’s new in 2015? Two old words: Sinn Fein. Ironically Sinn Fein have played down their united Ireland rhetoric (and their past connections with IRA violence) south of the border because they recognise that the route to power in the Republic requires them to win over an electorate that wants nothing to do with violence and does not see unity as a priority. They have put themselves forward instead as the most effective anti-austerity party and seen their vote soar as a result. When will this contradiction come back to haunt them? We are in for some interesting times ahead.

P.S. There wasn’t a lot that was fresh in the ‘Fresh Start’ agreement reached between the governments and the Northern parties (mainly the DUP and Sinn Fein) on 17 November: a re-established international paramilitary monitoring body and a multi-agency initiative to tackle cross-border crime are the two most significant elements. After the Stormont House Agreement last December, one Irish official commented “with a bit of luck it will last a couple of years.” In the event it lasted three months. One hopes that this latest deal will allow the parties to stagger through until NI Assembly elections next May. We should be grateful for small mercies.

  1. The Irish Times, 7 November 2015
Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 1 Comment

Why Enda Kenny should say ‘thank you’ prayers for Kevin McGuigan and other killers

Posted on Tuesday, 27 October, 2015 by andypollak

Taoiseach Enda Kenny should be saying ‘thank you’ prayers these days for Kevin McGuigan, Gerard ‘Jock’ Davison and the other IRA killers and lethal Northern leopards who cannot change their spots. Just as he is beginning his election campaign around the theme of ‘stability or chaos’ (i.e. urging voters to put the Fine Gael-Labour coalition back in to continue the economic recovery or take their chances with the political party of the IRA and a bunch of Trotskyists and independents), events in Belfast conspire to underline his message in bright blood-red ink.¹

That perceptive Irish Times columnist Noel Whelan called it right after the publication last week of the British government-appointed panel’s report on the continuing structure, role and purpose of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland (set up in the aftermath of McGuigan’s killing). That report suggested that the IRA army council remains central to setting the strategy for the Republican movement – albeit this strategy is entirely geared to peace these days and the council does not necessarily tell Sinn Fein what to do. Whelan’s assessment was that the IRA’s continuing influence over Sinn Fein was probably achieved by “an overlap between the army council and some at the highest level of Sinn Fein…Many have long spoken of a sense that there is a controlling West Belfast clique that exerts considerable influence on Sinn Fein’s strategy even in the Southern political market place.”

His colleague Stephen Collins added that “over the past couple of years members of the army council have been observed in the precincts of Leinster House, notably at times when Sinn Fein was under pressure to deal with the fall-out from republican abuse claims” (e.g. Mairia Cahill’s allegations last year).

This has clear historical echoes, of course. Gerry Adams likes to compare the Provisional IRA to the old IRA of the War of Independence, and himself to Eamon De Valera. One major difference – and there are many others – was De Valera’s reluctance to have anything to do with an oathbound, anti-democratic secret organisation like the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

All this should give Southern voters food for thought before next spring’s election. Fianna Fail leader Micheál Martin, who has always courageously set his face against any future coalition between his weakened party and Sinn Fein, put it well when he told the Dail: “The fundamental question for our republic that we must answer, and which this report does not ask, is the threat to democracy from an organisation that is involved with politics but which retains a military structure, with an active intelligence-gathering department and access to weaponry.”

Meanwhile in the North the indications are that the DUP and Sinn Fein are desperate to get back into government with each other. Nothing else could explain Peter Robinson’s surprising eagerness to accentuate the positives in the panel’s report, emphasising the importance of the current talks to save Stormont. We have come a very long way from Robinson’s 2007 comment that he didn’t see power-sharing with Sinn Fein as “a lasting and enduring form of government” to his words to RTE’s Tommie Gorman last week (in response to a question about whether power-sharing had a future) that he “didn’t think there’s any other future for Northern Ireland than our community working together to try to resolve outstanding issues.”

Even if the hurdles of continuing paramilitary structures (and let’s not forget the continuing violence and gangsterism of elements of the UVF and UDA) and welfare cuts can be overcome in resumed inter-party talks, there is a huge backlog of issues yet to be tackled by a NI Executive that has all but ceased to function as a decision making regional government in recent years. Look at the promised things that have not been done by the Executive since it took office in 2007: implementation of a strategy to deal with the North’s endemic curse of sectarianism; a strategy to deal with the past; implementation of an economic strategy; tackling the social housing crisis; progress on contentious parades; a Bill of Rights; a Single Equality Bill: an Irish Language Bill; a renewed Civic Forum – the list is a long one.

The distinguished Belfast journalist David McKittrick was writing last month about the disillusion of many ordinary people in Northern Ireland with Stormont’s politicians. He cited quotes from people in a recent opinion poll that they were a  “waste of time”, “a bunch of clowns”, “useless at running a government”, “unproductive but grossly overpaid”, “dysfunctional”, “unfit for purpose”. However he also noted that the same poll suggested that, although many are deeply irritated by the Assembly, more than two-thirds of nationalists, and about half of unionists, still regard it as valuable.²

Maybe a new independent monitoring commission to oversee another attempt at winding down the paramilitaries (I personally believe the loyalist paramilitaries continue to pose a greater threat to the Northern peace process than what’s left of the IRA), plus an extra slice of ‘laundered’ British exchequer money to take the edge off the welfare cuts, might square the circle and get the ancient enemies back into government together again. Even those of us who have spent a large part of our lives working in, reporting on and occasionally trying to make a bit of peace in Northern Ireland get weary with the endless sectarian shenanigans of the North’s politicians. But what’s the alternative?  An eventual slide back into mayhem.

P.S. Dubliners with a concern for the North might be interested in a series of lunchtime public talks at Liberty Hall (1-2 pm) in November and December at which people from the Belfast’s working class loyalist communities – voices rarely if ever heard on a Southern platform – will speak. The series – ‘Our Friends from Belfast’ – will be opened by the  leader of the small left-of-centre Progressive Unionist Party (and former UVF prisoner), Billy Hutchinson, on Thursday 19 November. He will be followed by the East Belfast Irish language activist, Linda Ervine, on 26 November: the author and historian of the First World War, Philip Orr, on 3 December; gay rights activist and PUP Belfast City councillor, Julie Anne Corr, on 10 December; and the East Belfast playwright Robert Niblock on 17 December.

  1. For more see Jim McDowell, ‘Kevin McGuigan: An IRA enforcer who lived and died by the gun. But did his old friends pull the trigger?’ Belfast Telegraph, 14 August 2015
  2. ‘Stormont survival depends on goodwill of both sides’, Irish Times, 15 September 2015
Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

The role of stupidity in local and global politics

Posted on Sunday, 27 September, 2015 by andypollak

Stupidity. I am going to write this month about the role of stupidity in local and global politics. Some of this comes from having read a number of books over the summer in which such stupidity played a central role. The first was a superb history by William Dalrymple of the first Afghan War in 1839-1842, where the British Raj’s terror of Russia and colossal errors by top Indian civil servants (led by Ulsterman Sir William Macnaghten) led to Britain’s worst military defeat of the 19th century.¹

Then there were the leaders of Europe in the paranoid and self-deluding months on the eve of the First World War.”The protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing,  haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world”, concludes Cambridge historian Christopher Clark in his magisterial study The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914.

Then there was the idiocy of the so-called clever men who ran Britain’s monetary policy in the run-up to the post 2008 Great Recession through their membership of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, and who failed utterly to see it coming. David Blanchflower, the eminent Ivy League economics professor (no relation to the great Northern Irish footballer), who was the lone voice on that committee warning that the country was falling into deep recession, called it “absolute abject incompetence…they missed the biggest event in macroeconomics for 100 years.”²

A (very brief) mention of the obscure province that is my home place: Northern Ireland. Here, for a change, the stupidity which led to the current political crisis was not the fault of the unionists, but of those two usually far smarter organisations: the Police Service of Northern Ireland and Sinn Fein. What possessed the most politically-conscious police force in Western Europe to put out a carefully choreographed series of statements that the IRA was involved in the revenge killing of a notorious former IRA hit man (Kevin McGuigan) if they didn’t have any hard evidence to back these up? Did they not foresee the implications for the stability of the institutions and thus the whole peace process? And what possessed the Sinn Fein leadership to allow the former IRA Belfast commander and Northern Sinn Fein chairman, Bobby Storey – a legendary hard man who has been close to Gerry Adams for 40 years – to become involved in the killing (if he was – the police certainly believe he was)? Did they not see the implications for both the peace process and for their electoral support in the South, which has gone down significantly for the first time for years as a result?

Which brings me to the Great Stupidity of our age: the inability of world governments to agree on anything which will start to tackle the imminent catastrophe of climate change. Following the chaos of the last UN climate change summit in Copenhagen six years ago, the world’s leaders will meet in Paris at the end of November to try again to achieve a legally binding worldwide agreement on how to tackle this gigantic problem. As is now universally known, such an agreement will aim to keep global warming under 2° Celsius above pre-industrial era temperatures.

The latest (2014) report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – representing the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue – concluded that climate change was already having large-scale effects: melting sea ice and thawing permafrost in the Arctic, killing off coral reefs in the oceans, and leading to heat waves, heavy rains and mega-disasters. They warned that the worst is yet to come, with climate change posing a threat to global food stocks and to human security.

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” said IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri. And the extreme weather events being forecast will take a disproportionate toll on the poor, the weak and the elderly. The IPCC scientists said governments did not have systems in place to protect those populations. “This would really be a severe challenge for some of the poorest communities and poorest countries in the world,” said one of the report’s authors, Maggie Opondo of the University of Nairobi.

Until this summer the Irish government’s draft climate change legislation was pathetic. When a weak Climate Change Bill finally emerged – three years late – last January it seemed that Labour Environment Minister Alan Kelly was not much more engaged than his predecessor Phil Hogan, whose Fine Gael party advisor on the environment was a climate change sceptic (Dublin Institute of Technology academic Conor Skehan).

There was sharp criticism of the absence of any specific target for greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the draft legislation (and, of course, no mention at all of our main source of emissions: agriculture). Kelly was accused of ignoring some of the key recommendations made by the Oireachtas Committee on the Environment.

These included basic things like providing a definition of low carbon; guaranteeing the independence of the proposed Expert Advisory Council, as was the case in the financial area (taken a thousand times more seriously by the government) with the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council; and referring to the need for ‘climate justice’ – assisting developing countries in their struggle to modernise without producing the huge amounts of carbon emitted by the developed countries.

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan charged that the Bill had neither targets nor ambition. “The Bill contains nothing but vague aspirations,” he said, adding that the first emissions reduction plan would not be prepared in the lifetime of the Government. “Fine Gael and Labour have no ambition when it comes to tackling climate change . . . they don’t give a damn.”

In July Kelly responded to strong lobbying by environmental groups and added amendments to cover some of these objections: a long-term and non-binding commitment was made to reduce carbon emissions by 2050 by 80% from 1990 levels; the Climate Change Advisory Council was given the same independent status as the Fiscal Advisory Council; and a reference was inserted on the need for climate justice – sharing the burden of cutting emissions fairly between developed and developing countries.

We will have to wait until mid-December to find out if agreement can be reached in Paris to keep temperatures below 2°. I am hoping against hope that Naomi Klein’s belief (in her brilliant book This Changes Everything) that the massively powerful multinational fossil fuel companies – the real villains of this piece – will not be too concerned about what happens in Paris will be proved wrong. The omens are not good. In March 2014 ExxonMobil explained to shareholders that new restrictive climate policies were “highly unlikely” and, based on this analysis, there was no need for them to worry that the company’s oil and gas reserves would become “stranded” (i.e. lose their value) in the future.

P.S. For those interested in this all-important issue, the Dublin Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green will be holding five lunchtime public talks (1-2 pm) on climate change in the run-up to the Paris summit. On Thursday 15 October Eamon Ryan will talk about climate change solutions; on 22 October one of the world’s leading environmental theologians, Father Sean McDonagh, will talk about the Pope’s encyclical Laudato Si; on 29 October Ireland’s top climatologist, Professor John Sweeney, will talk about climate science; on 5 November Lorna Gold, Head of Policy and Advocacy at the Catholic aid agency Trocaire, will talk about climate justice; and on 12 November environmental journalist Frank McDonald will talk about the negotiation process from Kyoto to Paris.

 1. Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan by William Dalrymple. Bloomsbury 2013.

2. The Establishment – and how they get away with it by Owen Jones. Penguin 2014.

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Republic of Ireland | Leave a comment

The Republic is a good place for Protestants now

Posted on Wednesday, 26 August, 2015 by andypollak

As someone from a Northern Protestant background happily resident in Dublin, I know there is little or no point in trying to persuade my co-religionists that they should agree to do away with the border and become part of my society. I may have the nicest Irish house in the world, but the truth is that the vast majority of Northern Protestants and unionists want to continue to live in their British houses, however uncaring and untrustworthy their landlords are.

However for the purpose of provoking a little thinking (and because so many Northern unionists are still woefully ignorant about the South), I am going to argue in this column that in 2015 the Republic of Ireland is a good place for Protestants to live. Ireland, in the words of former Irish Labour Party leader Ruairi Quinn, is now a “post-Catholic secular republic”. The old Roman Catholic Church which they so feared is a shadow of its former self. Priestly vocations have collapsed, graphically illustrated by the dramatically shrinking lists on the graduation boards at St Patrick’s seminary in Maynooth. One rarely sees a priest’s collar or a nun’s habit in the street these days. Some might say that one of the final nails in the coffin of old-fashioned, priest-ridden Irish Catholicism was the extraordinary ‘Yes’ vote – against the instructions of any bishop who was brave enough to oppose it – in the marriage equality referendum in May.

Anti-Britishness, one of the hallmarks of political and popular debate when I first moved to Dublin in the early 1970s, has all but disappeared. Indeed opinion polls show that young people in particular feel they have more in common with the English than they do with the Northern Irish of whatever religious complexion.

Garret Fitzgerald used to say that Irish society had changed more rapidly than any other society in Western Europe in recent times. Nearly 10% of the population are now foreign-born, and while the influx of Poles has served to swell some Catholic congregations, immigration from the US, Africa and other regions has often done the same for Protestant churches.

The Church of Ireland and other Protestant churches are now growing again, helped both by immigrants and Catholics often disillusioned by a lack of spiritual and moral leadership (most scandalously by child-abusing priests) in the majority church. I would estimate that around three quarters of the worshippers at my own Unitarian Church in central Dublin are from an Irish Catholic background. Senior Church of Ireland figures such as the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral and the head of the Church of Ireland College of Education are former Catholics.

Irish Catholicism is itself becoming more ‘Protestant’, with far more emphasis on liberty of the individual conscience and participation by grass roots members than in the previously authoritarian institutional church. What used to be dismissed scornfully by conservative Catholics in the 1980s as ‘a la carte’ Catholicism is now what many people practice: Mass attendance along with the pill; confession along with divorce; gay marriage along with the Eucharist.

In politics, the kind of kowtowing to the Catholic hierarchy that went on in the days of Eamon de Valera, John A. Costello and Sean MacBride is now utterly unthinkable. In 2011, in an unprecedented attack by an Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny accused the Vatican of downplaying the clerical rape and torture of children in the Cloyne diocese in Cork to protect the institutional church’s power and reputation.  Foreign Affairs Minister Eamon Gilmore followed this by closing the Irish embassy to the Vatican as a cost-cutting measure (although it has since reopened as a one-woman mission).

These days there are a significant number of high profile Southern Irish people from a Protestant background, some of them icons of Irish modernity: Bono in rock music, Katie Taylor in sport, Chief Justice Susan Denham in the law, Graham Norton in broadcasting and David Norris in sexual politics. Two cabinet ministers – Jan O’Sullivan and Heather Humphreys – are Protestants (twice the number of Protestant women ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive).

As we approach the centenary of 1916, the role of Protestants in the struggle for Irish independence is being re-evaluated in a more inclusive fashion. In his recent book Vivid Faces, the eminent Oxford-based historian Roy Foster (himself a Southern Protestant) has brought to life fascinating Protestant nationalists, republicans and radicals such as Rosamund Jacob, Cesca Trench, Kathleen Lynn, Alice Milligan, Darrell Figgis and Bulmer Hobson.  The guns smuggled for the Irish Volunteers through Howth and Kilcoole were brought in by the Protestant yachtsmen Erskine Childers and Conor O’Brien. The historian Martin Maguire, who has written extensively about Southern Protestant history and culture, has identified over 80 men and women from that tradition who were active in the War of Independence.

A 2005 study of society North and South¹, based on social survey data from European Values Surveys, found that the two societies shared a great deal. By European standards they both enjoyed high levels of income, welfare provision, individual life satisfaction and social capital. They were both stable democracies governed by similar legal systems which had withstood the tests of time. The old divisions based on religion seemed to be fading as both societies were edging – and the authors emphasised the qualified word ‘edging’ – towards a more secular, post-Christian future. At the same time both societies continued to share more conservative views on family and sexual morality than most other parts of Europe (the May referendum may indicate that this has now changed in the South).

None of the above is meant to persuade my unionist readers to give up their Britishness – I wouldn’t be so foolish. However if I could do two small things I would be content: firstly, to persuade them that the Republic of Ireland isn’t such an alien place these days – in many ways it is an open-minded, tolerant and liberal society (indeed strikingly more so than the North);  and secondly, it wouldn’t do them any harm to admit that they too have a little bit of Irishness in their make-up and it might be interesting, at the very least, to visit the South to explore that small part of themselves. The Progressive Unionist Party leader Billy Hutchinson (a former UVF prisoner) puts it well when he says: “We have to recognise that the Irish Republic has a very special relationship with Northern Ireland. It’s not just a foreign state. We were brothers in a previous time. Partition was like a split in a marriage: one brother went with the father and one went with the mother. We need to recognise that the Republic is not a priest-ridden or an IRA-ridden state. We have to get beyond that. There is a different political dispensation in the Republic now and it’s not to our disadvantage.”

  1. Conflict and Consensus: A study of values and attitudes in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, by Tony Fahey, Bernadette Hayes and Richard Sinnott.

 

 

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 6 Comments

Why we need to be on the same team as the Germans

Posted on Wednesday, 29 July, 2015 by andypollak

Germany is now the undisputed boss of the European Union. Any lingering doubts about this were ruthlessly dispelled during the recent Greek bail-out crisis. Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, forced through a package of reforms even more brutal than the one rejected by the Greek people in a referendum only a week earlier, and the hapless Greek government toed the line, their Marxist principles sacrificed for the sake of national survival through continued eurozone membership.

The European Union is now effectively being run by Merkel and Schäuble along with the French president Francois Hollande (who tried to speak up for the Greeks), one or two other leaders of larger countries (occasionally), and the heads of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But Merkel has the final word. On the face of things Germany appears to have achieved by pacific means what it was unable to bring about through military conquest on a number of occasions over the past century – the domination of Europe. However as a permanent condition, this ‘German Europe’ is a non-starter. The Germans are the first to recognise that such a condition is the source of the deep antipathies that that have divided the continent not for one but for many centuries (as was argued brilliantly in a recent history of Europe by the Cambridge-based Irish historian Brendan Simms)¹.

I believe that the challenge for Europeans, Irish included, is to persuade the Germans that setting up a banking union and transferring some fiscal powers from the EU states to central EU governing bodies must involve what the eminent British sociologist Anthony Giddens calls mutuality² – that is, shared responsibilities between richer and poorer countries alike (with Germany supporting the weaker EU economies in sustainable ways that it signally failed to do with Greece). This is the only way to a stable Europe and may require further political integration, i.e. a federal solution of some kind, in the relatively near future.

There are other reasons why we in Ireland should seek a closer relationship with the economic powerhouse of Europe. On a short visit to Germany and Austria earlier this month I was impressed again by the sheer scale and dynamism of German industrial and environmental innovation. As we landed in Ryanair’s version of Munich airport (at Memmingen, over 100 kilometres west of the city), I was struck by the multitude of solar panels on practically every rooftop (although perhaps too many of them were made in China!). On days when it is both windy and sunny wind and solar energy can now generate as much as 85% of Germany’s electricity needs. On the outskirts of Munich we passed a towering glass Mercedes Benz showroom with hundreds  of tiny, highly fuel efficient Smart Fortwo cars, the world’s smallest automobile. At the Max Planck Institute of Metereology at the other end of the country in Hamburg scientists from Germany, France and Scandinavia are researching the controversial subject of geo-engineering as a means of curbing carbon emissions.

Germans are big into engineering; something our business leaders tell us we should be better at if we are going to make it as an economically successful nation (and something many people in the north of Ireland used to be very good at 50-100 years ago). Just 7% of Irish school leavers go on to be engineers; in Germany it’s 37%. Sean O’Driscoll, head of Glen Dimplex, the hugely successful border region producer of heating appliances (which also employs 1,200 people in Germany), says that rather than such a high proportion of our young people going to university, more should be doing engineering apprenticeships.  “We need to learn from Germany and start making money out of making things, not out of financial engineering.”

One thing in our favour is that the Germans like – even love – us. Greatly influenced by Nobel literature laureate Heinrich Böll’s 1957 Irish Journal, which portrayed a country of old-fashioned courtesy and humour, omnipresent religion and children, and rainy romanticism (albeit containing some people who believed that Hitler wasn’t such a bad man), most Germans still insist on seeing us through an idealised lens of green pastures, fat cows and extremely relaxed and friendly (if not always quite sober) people. “A lot of it has to do with their search for an untainted landscape and an untainted culture”, says an Irish acquaintance who has lived for 40 years in Germany. He says it is difficult for a foreigner to grasp just how much German thinking continues to be influenced by the shame most Germans feel about what happened under the Nazis. Germans have also not forgotten that it was during an Irish presidency in 1990, despite opposition from Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand, that the EU endorsed German reunification.

They also admire us for how we have worked our way out of the horrendous post-2008 crash. A 2012 Irish Times opinion poll found that Germans believed that of the financially-distressed ‘PIGS’ countries (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain), Ireland was trying hardest to fix its economy while Greece – by a distance – was the one that should try much harder. Joachim Beck, professor of public administration at the University of Kehl, says that German politicians hold up Ireland as an example to others: “Look at Ireland. We were nasty with them but they managed to solve their problems. They showed that with proper leadership difficult reforms can work.”

On the other hand, their fear is that Greece is heading towards being a failed state. “Europeans preach to Africa and Latin America about the values of the rule of law, ethics in public administration, people paying their taxes and so on. Germans worry that these things aren’t happening in Greece”, says Beck. In contrast Ireland is seen as “a serious state and a serious European partner. In Ireland you can see where the billions in Structural Funds have been invested – not so in Greece, where they have fiddled the statistics.”

That skilled networker Enda Kenny has shrewdly both played on the theme of ‘good little Ireland’ and cultivated a personal friendship with Angela Merkel since they both started leading their respective Christian Democratic parties in the early 2000s.

However don’t get the idea that the efficient and orderly Germans are a particularly happy people. They work too hard; they have seen negligible pay rises over the past two decades (and the German dole is about half the Irish equivalent); they worry about having the oldest population in the EU (Ireland has the youngest); and they can be xenophobic and extremely right wing when it comes to immigration (although Germany accepts by far the largest number of asylum seekers of any EU country).

And what about Northern Ireland?  As in so many European countries, it is now largely invisible. However many Germans take their religion seriously (they have a Protestant pastor as President and the daughter of a Protestant pastor as Chancellor, while Bavaria is a strongly Catholic region), and still react with slightly horrified fascination to the news of disturbances around Orange marches every summer.

There is also an interesting North-South implication to my advocacy of closer Irish-German relations. As the Unionists join many (perhaps most) British Conservatives in calling for the UK to leave the EU, could Dublin cosying up to Berlin become another unfortunate factor in building the wall of partitionism higher on this island?

1. Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy – 1453 to the Present (2015)

2. Anthony Giddens, Turbulent and Mighty Continent – What Future for Europe? (2014)

 

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Views from abroad | 3 Comments

Why does economics matter so little in Northern Ireland?

Posted on Friday, 26 June, 2015 by andypollak

Why does economics seem to matter so little in Northern Ireland?  The biggest political debate in the UK’s contemporary history – whether or not to pull out of the European Union – is now taking centre stage in British politics and will stay there for most of the next two years. It is basically about two things: national sovereignty and national economic self-interest. An answering debate is starting in Ireland, initiated, inter alia, by a thought-provoking book of essays, Britain and Europe: The Endgame – An Irish Perspective, published recently by the Dublin-based Institute of International and European Affairs¹.

A key conclusion of the chapter on Northern Ireland, by the economist John Bradley (who has written extensively on both the Northern and cross-border economies), is that NI faces two broad choices in the potentially tumultuous period ahead: one is to muddle along with “agendas crowded by the mistrust, recrimination and divisiveness of history”, bobbing impotently in the wake of decisions taken in London with not a moment’s thought for the province’s particular needs. The other, which it will certainly not take, is to seize the opportunities offered by ‘island of Ireland’ economic synergies (including a common low corporation tax), lessen the cosy stranglehold of the British subvention’s dependency culture, and take the brave, if risky, first steps towards a possible future as a revitalised European region.

In his remarks at the Belfast launch of this book, Bradley elaborated on his thesis. He said that not only Northern Ireland but all the UK’s regional economies (including northern England) would have to face up to how ‘Brexit’ would affect their futures. “Will there be a preference for remaining inside the EU, with its commitment to greater regional cohesion and equity; its evolving social institutions and protections; and (for NI) a benign context within which North-South and East-West problems can be handled? This is clearly Scotland’s choice.”

“Or will there be a preference for leaving the EU and embracing the exciting, brave new post-‘Brexit’ world, a decision that will be driven by the obvious opportunities for a strong economy in the English south-east, focussed on London, but would tend to be neglectful of the development needs of the less strong regions?” Northern Ireland’s particular weakness as an external trading economy would be “cruelly exposed” in such a situation, he believes.

Few people in London ever think about Ireland, let alone Northern Ireland. The report by the OneEurope think tank on ‘Brexit’ earlier this year contained just three references to Ireland. Two were on British-Irish trade (Ireland is the UK’s fifth largest trading partner and the only one with which it has a surplus) and the third, the most revealing of south-east England’s supreme indifference to this island, was an admission that, in costing ‘Brexit’, the writers had not taken into account the cost of re-establishing the line of customs posts along the Irish border that a UK withdrawal from the EU would almost inevitably require (and which would immediately become a target for some reinvigorated republican paramilitary group).

In Northern Ireland the problem is not one of indifference, although the almost total absence of any public debate there on the massive changes looming for the UK is something I have remarked on before in this column. The issue, as to do with so many things in the North, is identity.

Because in Northern Ireland – unlike in more secure and normally functioning parts of the developed world –  identity always trumps economic self-interest. Senior Unionists will say (the more sensible of them slightly apologetically) that even the province’s unionist-minded farmers  – who have a huge amount to lose if the UK pulls out of an EU powerfully influenced by their counterparts in France and Germany – will plump for following London into the international free market jungle (the words ‘turkeys’ and ‘Christmas’ spring to mind).  Generous agricultural and regional EU support programmes like CAP and the Structural Funds (not to mention PEACE funding) will count for nothing when British identity is at stake.

And it’s not only the farmers. Ireland (the republic) is a bigger trading partner for Northern Ireland than the rest of the EU (outside the UK) put together. Many small and medium-sized firms – by far the largest private sector employers of the province’s workforce – are particularly dependent on the South as their premier export market, a market that the cross-border body InterTradeIreland has worked successfully over the past 16 years to expand. An external EU frontier running from Derry to Dundalk would have an extremely damaging effect on those relatively new relationships. North-South trade over the past couple of years has recovered from the 2008 crash to reach just over €3 billion, not far off the €3.6 billion it reached at its height in 2007.  All that will be in danger from ‘Brexit’.

Does any of this count in the thinking of the North’s politicians and people – and particularly those of the unionist persuasion? I doubt it.  Economic self-interest will take second place as the mindset of a fearful frontier people, with their age-old dependence on an indifferent and unsympathetic metropolis, wins out.

Paradoxically, the debate on the consequences of a possible ‘Brexit’ for both economies on this island has the potential to bring our policy makers closer together, rather than to divide them. The British market looms large for both regions and a UK withdrawal from  the EU threatens the crucial small firm sector in both jurisdictions in broadly similar ways. It would be tragic if the process of mutual strengthening of the island’s two economies through North-South trade and economic co-operation were to be disrupted by a ‘Brexit’ that neglected our geography, our special relationship, and our deep economic and business links.

I want to finish on a different note. I think the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive in its present form is now doomed, despite DUP finance minister Arlene Foster’s last-ditch ‘fantasy budget’ which is likely to be passed by the Assembly in the next few days (only a provincial assembly where economics doesn’t matter could pass a ‘fantasy budget’ that is £600 million short of actual spending commitments!). I simply don’t see Sinn Fein signing up to yet another round of large welfare cuts as part of the £12 billion in overall UK cuts signalled by  British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, for 8th July.

But that doesn’t have to be the end of the world, or rather of the Executive. Watch out for a forthcoming article by my friend Paul Nolan, author of the highly regarded NI Peace Monitoring Reports, who will suggest that Sinn Fein should simply move to the opposition benches at Stormont (with the assurance that  ‘petitions of concern’ can now block any abuse of majority rule). In one stroke, this could bring about the advent of the ‘normal’ left-right politics in Northern Ireland that many of us have been praying for since about 1910!  The DUP, the Ulster Unionists and Alliance could then push through a right-of-centre cost cutting budget, while Sinn Fein and the SDLP could oppose it from the left.

1. Britain and Europe: The Endgame – An Irish Perspective, edited by Daithi O’Ceallaigh and Paul Gillespie. IIEA 2015.

 

 

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Northern Ireland | 2 Comments