2 Irelands together

I believe that Gerry Adams is one of the world’s great liars

Posted on Monday, 2 June, 2025 by andypollak

The cynic would say that politicians always lie. But, led by the example of the current President of the United States, we are in an era of political leaders speaking astonishing untruths to a degree that I have never witnessed in six decades of watching politicians as a journalistic observer.

Gerry Adams is up there with the best (or worst) of them. A former IRA man and lifelong Sinn Fein member told journalist Aoife Moore for her 2023 book The Long Game: Inside Sinn Fein: “When he is confronted with any uncomfortable truth, his first instinct is to lie to everybody. That’s part and parcel of politics, but this guy has no qualms at all. And this guy has no conscience about stuff, he’s not troubled by anything.” One Sinn Fein staffer told Moore: “The thing about Gerry is he could look his dearest friend in the eye and lie.”

Adams’ whole life has been based on the lie that he was never in the IRA. Gerry Moriarty of the Irish Times, reporting on his victorious defamation trial against the BBC last week, recounted his renewed denials on the witness stand “that he was in the IRA or that for many years he served on its ruling Army Council. Whatever about south of the Border, there is hardly a person in Belfast, or indeed in Northern Ireland – or indeed any republican living on or off the Falls Road – who lends credence to that claim.

“For Sinn Fein and IRA supporters generally, they just shrug their shoulders and say that if Adams feels that his denial of IRA membership is something he must persist with, then so be it. ‘Gerry knows best’ tends to be the response of the faithful.”¹

The most highly regarded chroniclers of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, journalists and political scientists alike, all agree that Adams was both in the IRA and on its Army Council. Ed Moloney wrote in A Secret History of the IRA that he was one of the Army Council’s longest serving members in the mid-1990s and still on that body in the early 2000s. Patrick Radden Keefe in his brilliant book Say Nothing (later turned into a film) detailed his involvement in the IRA’s 1972 abduction and murder of the Belfast mother of ten, Jean McConville. Professor Richard English, in his book Armed Struggle: A History of the IRA, stated categorically that he was in that organisation, listing his ranks and the dates he held each position. Former IRA comrades Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes have recounted their experience of being led by Adams as their Belfast commander.

Yet last week a Dublin High Court jury found in his favour and against the BBC Spotlight programme for a 2016 allegation that he had authorised the killing of former Sinn Fein administrator and MI5 informer Denis Donaldson ten years earlier (the Real IRA had claimed responsibility for his killing). Adams is super-smart. He sensed that Spotlight was on weak ground with its single, anonymous source (a Special Branch informer) for that allegation and pounced, led by a high powered legal team that included Paul Tweed, defender of numerous celebrities in defamation cases. Spotlight journalist Jennifer O’Leary – an excellent investigative reporter – said she had five confirming sources, three of them security sources, but was not completely convincing.

Adams was helped by Dublin jury consisting mainly of people in their twenties, thirties and forties who had little or no memory of the horror of the ‘Troubles’. Journalists reported that members of the jury appeared “captivated” by Adams charisma, charm and sense of humour. He provoked laughter in the court and smiles from the jury when he said a photo showing him shouldering the coffin of an old republican while wearing the black beret associated with IRA membership made him look like the ineffectual Frank Spencer in the TV comedy ‘Some Mothers do ‘Ave’ ‘Em.

The judge, Mr Justice Alexander Owens, also helped his case by telling the jury that “all this guff is not evidence” as to whether or not Adams was a member of the IRA. He was dismissive of the BBC’s attempt to portray Adams as an IRA leader, emphasising that “a person’s reputation can change” and they should evaluate Adams’ reputation as of “2016 and now”. A strong part of his legal team’s strategy had been to present him as a peacemaker, as he undoubtedly was in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement (although a peacemaker who continuously lied to his IRA grassroots to keep them on board the peace process, according to Ed Moloney).

More generally, this was another example of the increasing legitimisation and normalisation of 30 years of republican violence in Northern Ireland, and it was a bad day for investigative journalism where the IRA and Sinn Fein are concerned. Adams said he took the case “to put manners on the British Broadcasting Corporation” which he said “upholds the ethos of the British state in Ireland” (a ridiculous statement when put alongside investigations by programmes like Spotlight and Panorama of British security forces’ abuses in Northern Ireland). The former editor of the Belfast nationalist newspaper, the Irish News, Noel Doran, said: “There will be a chilling factor in newsrooms. People will be thinking very carefully about anything to do with Adams. There is a danger that a much more benign view of the Troubles becomes commonplace.”

That is happening anyway, much to Sinn Fein’s delight. Whether it is the ‘Oh, Ah, Up the Ra’ chant at rock concerts or the success of the republican rappers of the balaclava-clad Kneecap group (not helped by the British police’s absurd charge of terrorism against one of them for waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert), young people are ingesting a sanitised and romanticised view of the IRA and its killings of nearly 1800 people during the ‘Troubles’ (nearly five times more than the British Army, RUC and UDR combined).

It was left to SDLP MLA Matthew O’Toole to remember “the thousands of victims of the IRA, loyalists and the state who will never get a single day in court, let alone justice.”

As that fine Belfast journalist Sam McBride wrote in the Irish Independent: “To those who idolise Adams, such issues don’t register. They see only his sense of humour, his magnetism and his political achievements. Adams has never given any reason to believe that he saw the terror and the killings as immoral. Murder was a price worth playing for Irish freedom.”²

McBride wrote that Adams had told an English church magazine in 1996 that “he couldn’t get through life without being prayerful” and “I like the sense of there being a God.” Asked why he wouldn’t condemn violence, he gave a typically woolly answer: “I think these questions of morality are very difficult and vexed ones for all of us.” Before feeling understandably appalled by the sheer, bloody neck of the man, it’s worth contemplating that the IRA’s 1,800 killings pale into insignificance when compared to the hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered by so-called ‘Christian’ armies over the centuries.

¹ ‘What does the libel victory mean for the former Sinn Fein president’s legacy?’, Irish Times, 31 May

² ‘Adams is a man of huge ambition who had no moral qualms about securing his goals through murder’, Irish Independent, 31 May

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics, the-troubles, travel | 1 Comment

How do you build a reconciled society in the future if you’re trapped by the tribal traumas of the past?

Posted on Thursday, 22 May, 2025 by andypollak

It’s not an original thought to observe that many people in Northern Ireland are still obsessed – haunted even – by the traumatic experiences of the ‘Troubles’. 27 years after the coming of relative peace with the passing of the Good Friday Agreement and the last terrible atrocity in Omagh, the northern newspapers are full of stories about so-called ‘legacy issues.’

Take one day last week, 13th May. The nationalist Irish News reported that Ulster Human Rights Watch (an organisation which advocates for victims of terrorism, mainly republican terrorism) said the British government’s legacy body, the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), had agreed to re-investigate the Kingsmill massacre in January 1976, in which 10 Protestant workmen were murdered by an IRA gang in South Armagh using a cover name. Nobody was ever convicted for these killings and a recent Police Ombudsman report identified a series of failings in the original RUC investigation into them.

The Irish News also reported that the family of Sean Brown, the GAA official from Bellaghy, Co Derry, murdered by loyalists in May 1997, met the Tánaiste, Simon Harris, to urge him to support their demand for a public inquiry into his killing. They were accompanied by the GAA president, Jarlath Burns. GAA members have been asked by the family to take part in a ‘Walk for Truth’ in support of their demand.

The unionist News Letter reported that an online petition to protect British soldiers who had served in Northern Ireland from prosecution, started by a former soldier, had garnered nearly 30,000 signatures in three days. If it reaches 100,000, it will trigger a debate in the British parliament.

Campaigning for victims and survivors of Northern Ireland’s violence is too often a tribal business: nationalists advocating for nationalist victims, unionists for unionist victims, British for British victims. The main exception to this rule is the WAVE trauma centre, with groups all over Northern Ireland which, in its own words, provides “care and support to anyone bereaved, injured or traumatised through the civil unrest in Northern Ireland, irrespective of religious, cultural or political belief.”

WAVE does important work in a divided society that too often looks backwards to past trauma rather than forward to future hope. Its mission statement continues: “WAVE promotes a respect for life and an understanding of difference that is seen as enhancing rather than threatening. WAVE affirms and acknowledges that there are ways of resolving differences other than through the use of violence and continually seeks creative ways of working through issues that have the potential to divide.”

Wouldn’t be a wonderful if the tribal lines were crossed for a change: if South Armagh man Jarlath Burns – by all accounts a thoroughly decent man – were to accompany Ulster Human Rights Watch in making representations on behalf of the 10 Protestants murdered at Kingsmills? Or if the local Presbyterian minister in Bellaghy were to accompany the Brown family in meeting politicians to demand a public inquiry into his murder? Or if the highly effective organisations set up to commemorate Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972 were also to take up the forgotten cause of the nine people – five Catholics and four Protestants – who were killed by an IRA bomb in the County Derry village of Claudy in July 1972?

That’s what we call reconciliation, and I recognise that it’s a very hard ask for families who have suffered terribly at the hands of Irish paramilitary groups or British security forces. I am a member of a small group called the Truth Recovery Process, headed by the historian and journalist (and former paramilitary) Padraig Yeates and the former head of the Glasnevin Trust, John Green. It proposes a system that would enable former combatants – mainly paramilitaries and soldiers – to provide information to victims and their families about the facts of how their loved ones died without fear of prosecution. Victims’ families would still have recourse to the courts if they so wished, although we believe that since many of the worst killings were in the early and mid-1970s, the chances of getting justice and ‘closure’ through the courts are increasingly unlikely as both perpetrators and family members get old and die.

We want to see cases dealt with through a mediation process overseen by senior British and Irish judges, with a Justice Facilitation Unit to mediate between victims and former combatants and provide mechanisms that would allow them to engage directly with each other.

The aim of this process is to enable both sides, victims and former combatants, to reconcile on the facts of ‘Troubles’ killings, since we believe that without such agreement, any further forms of reconciliation are very unlikely in the North. We agree with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that without the truth about such killings becoming known – initially to the family and (if they allow it) to the wider public – it will be very difficult to move towards reconciliation in wider society. As one loyalist acquaintance of mine put it recently: “It’s keeping our communities more divided and has the potential to make things even worse over the coming years.” The rash of controversial legacy issues that have consumed Northern Ireland in recent months and years only confirm us in this belief.

We believe that our Truth Recovery Process would provide for a speedier and fuller examination of each event than is possible through the courts, facilitate a wider process of reconciliation in divided communities and create a greater understanding and acknowledgement of the past. It is a future-oriented proposal to take the place – where feasible – of interminable past-oriented legal processes.

We are planning a second conference (the first, two years ago, looked at parallel truth and reconcilation processes in South Africa, Chile and Colombia) on 18th October at Queen’s University Belfast. This will look at the controversial issue of giving former combatants ‘conditional amnesty’ if they come forward and engage with victims’ families in good faith. We believe that there is only a narrow gap between this and the so-called ‘protected disclosure’ procedure allowed for in the legislation that set up the much-criticised Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR).

And we agree with Professor Brice Dickson, former Northern Ireland Human Rights Chief Commissioner, and now a member of the ICRIR (another honourable man), when he wrote recently: “Victims and their families are primarily in need of information – from non-state as well as state sources – rather than endless legal investigations which at the end of the day are most unlikely in and of themselves to lead to liability or accountability.”¹

Further information available from http://www.truthrecoveryprocess.ie

¹truthrecoveryprocess.ie/newsupdates/is-the-icrir-more-compliant-with-human-rights-law-than-opponents-claim

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | Tagged belfast, history, ireland, Northern Ireland, the-troubles | Leave a comment

Northern Ireland isn’t such a bad place, with less division and more shared values than one might think

Posted on Wednesday, 7 May, 2025 by andypollak

As a Northerner living in Dublin, I sometimes I get weary with the way that the great bulk of news from Northern Ireland is negative: the continuing sectarianism; the logjam over legacy; the ineffectiveness of the NI Executive; the poisoning of Lough Neagh; the declining health service; the hopelessness of the DUP; the rows over inconsequential tribal issues like Irish language signs at Belfast’s new central station; and the poor economic, education and health statistics when compared to the Republic. It’s as if nothing that is good can ever come out of NI. I was guilty of joining in the ‘doom and gloom’ party in my last blog, by reporting the startling statistical gaps between North and South (almost all of them strongly in the Republic’s favour) revealed by a recent Economic and Social Research Institute study. More on that in the second half of this blog.

However the news isn’t all black. There are more shared values in that famously divided society than one might think. Using data from the World Values Survey (WVS) – the largest international social survey of its kind, conducted in over 100 countries – the Belfast-based Social Change Initiative (in partnership with King’s College London’s Policy Institute) has recently published Values and Attitudes in Northern Ireland 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement. This report found a shift in social attitudes and values among the people there which challenges many people’s long-held perceptions of the region. The Social Change Initiative is an international, philanthropic organisation led by highly regarded people like Martin O’Brien (formerly director of the Campaign for the Administration of Justice) and Avila Kilmurray (formerly director of the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust),

Among the report’s conclusions are:

“Social attitudes have changed considerably, with the Northern Ireland public – particularly younger generations – having become much more open on key social issues like abortion, divorce, homosexuality and euthanasia. Internationally, Northern Ireland now ranks among the most socially liberal nations.
We have also become more comfortable with difference, with growing acceptance of people who would have been historically marginalised. For instance, levels of homophobia and xenophobia, assessed in terms of those we would be comfortable having as neighbours, have decreased.
There is greater openness to workers from abroad, even when jobs are scarce, and support among many for more open immigration policies. Though a greater share of the Northern Ireland population supports stricter limits on immigration than in other UK nations.
Despite our history of division, the survey finds limited evidence of strong affective polarisation (i.e., strong negative feelings about the ‘opposing’ political party or group).
While the Northern Ireland public support democracy as a political system and are interested in politics, they are highly dissatisfied with the way politics is working in practice – much more so than in many western European countries including Great Britain.  Confidence in government institutions and the press are also at worryingly low levels in Northern Ireland. People have much higher levels of confidence in civil society organisations such as universities, women’s organisations, NGOs, trade unions and churches.”

Looking to the future, although the World Values Survey findings for Northern Ireland raise several concerns, the report’s authors say they also suggest ways forward that can build on NI people’s shared values:

“We need to create more space for values-based conversations that focus less on religion and identity politics and acknowledge the plurality of views that exists, for instance, the more socially liberal views of younger people compared with the more traditional views held by many older people and the religious.
Northern Ireland is not as polarised or divided a society as is often portrayed. The data suggests more common ground exists across and between groups around shared values, with less support for extreme positions. This presents further opportunities for dialogue and conversation. 
Despite being very dissatisfied with how politics is currently working, we have an interest in politics and belief in the democratic process that can be built upon. Civil society institutions, which enjoy much higher levels of public confidence, could take a more leading role in building inclusive civic engagement and encouraging more participative democracy. These civic conversations must involve young people who are more disillusioned with the functioning of a democratic society, presenting a challenge for future stability if left unattended.”

This chimes strongly with my call in my two February blogs for reconvening the 1994-1996 Forum for Peace and Reconciliation and holding an all-island Forum on Common Values.¹“We need to create more space for values-based conversations [both within Northern Ireland and on the island as a whole, I would hold] that focus less on religion and identity politics” and acknowledge the views of younger people, say the report’s authors.

On a different issue: further to my blog last month on the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) report on the major and growing gaps between economic and social well-being in Northern Ireland and the Republic, the strongly unionist economist Graham Gudgin (he was part of David Trimble’s backroom team in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement) has pointed out some very different ways of interpreting those findings. He says “the hugely distorted national accounts of Ireland deceive people into thinking that the Republic of Ireland has higher living standards than the UK and especially Northern Ireland. When correctly measured the opposite is true. Living standards are higher in the UK than in Ireland and even Northern Ireland has higher living standards.”²

He quotes the former Governor of the Bank of Ireland, Patrick Honohan, writing in 2021:“Ireland is a prosperous country, but not as prosperous as is often thought because of the inappropriate use of misleading, albeit conventional statistics.”

Instead of being one of the richest countries in the EU as commonly claimed, Dr Honohan concluded that it was probably 12^Th richest. He went on: “There is less consumption per capita than in the United Kingdom, and on this metric we are closer to New Zealand, Israel and Italy, than to the United States, Switzerland or Norway (which is where the GDP comparison would put Ireland).”

Gudgin then quotes from the ESRI’s recent report: “Internationally, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is the most commonly used measure for comparing living standards across countries. GDP-based measures can be misleading for Ireland so here we focus on measures using modified gross national income (GNI*), as it is a more reliable measure of output in Ireland. Comparing GNI* per capita in Ireland to GDP per capita in Northern Ireland shows there was a gap of 57 per cent in favour of Ireland in 2022”.

He goes on: “As is well-known, Ireland’s official statistics for GDP are hugely distorted by multi-national companies diverting global profits into Ireland to take advantage of some of the world’s lowest corporation tax rates and laxest tax rules. Taking a straight comparison of GDP per head at current exchange rates, Ireland’s per capita GDP is second only to Luxemburg in the EU and is exactly double that of the UK. Although widely included in international statistical comparisons, this headline measure of GDP gives zero insight into comparative living standards. To combat this problem Ireland’s Central Statistics Office uses alternative measures of national income which attempt to exclude the profits of multi-national companies.

“The most accepted of these measures is Modified Gross National Income (GNI*). This is GDP excluding profits repatriated abroad by multinational companies, and also excluding profits of foreign-owned companies which have registered their HQs in Ireland for tax purposes. Finally, depreciation is excluded on aircraft leasing and intellectual property. What US Commerce Secretary Howard Luttnick rightly calls ‘a tax scam’ revolves around (mainly American) multi-national companies registering in Ireland their intellectual property (brands, patents etc.) derived from R&D conducted abroad. This hugely magnifies their profits declared in Ireland, but also means that huge amounts of annual depreciation are added into Ireland’s GDP. A significant part of this comes from aircraft leasing, since around 90% of the world’s commercial airliners are owned in Ireland purely for tax reasons.

“Irish living standards are, of course, not double those of the UK, but nor are they 18% higher than the UK, as suggested by using the GNI* measure. This is because the modified GNI measure is still not free of distortions since there is no adjustment for intellectual property produced in Ireland by multi-national companies.

“The authors of the ESRI study recognize that their 57% estimate for southern living standards relative to those in Northern Ireland may be exaggerated…Instead, they calculate another measure which they say is free of distortions caused by multi-national firms. This is household disposable income (i.e. household incomes including benefits, pensions etc. net of tax). Allowing for differences in prices north and south (but not school or medical fees which need to be paid in the South), they calculate that living standards in the South are 18% higher than in Northern Ireland. This figure seems wrong. OECD data for household incomes per head in 2021 in purchasing power parity show approximately equal levels between Ireland and Northern Ireland, with the UK average 20% higher than either.

“Household disposable income is still not a direct measure of living standards. To return to Dr Honohan, a superior measure is consumption per head, including both consumer spending by households and spending by government on behalf of households on such things as health, education and housing. This measure has the not very catchy title of Actual Individual Consumption (AIC) and is published regularly by the OECD and by the EU statistical agency Eurostat. It is adjusted for differences in the prices of goods and services, which are 15% higher in Ireland than in the UK.

“This easy to access AIC measure shows that Irish living standards were 12^th in the EU in 2023 and 12% below the UK. Northern Ireland is not separately identified by OECD or Eurostat, but a simple calculation using UK official data indicates that its AIC is 7% below the UK average. A simple subtraction indicates that living standards in Northern Ireland are thus 5% above those in the Republic of Ireland.

“Northern Ireland is ninth in the list of the UK’s 12 regions ranked by GDP per head and close to the seventh. It is below the UK average for living standards but by no means the poorest. Its living standards are boosted by generous levels of public services where spending per head is 10% above the UK average, and by low house prices. Northern Ireland’s economic model based on generous subsidies to a peripheral region is thus more advantageous for its citizens than Ireland’s tax-haven model.”

Gudgin criticises the ESRI study for “a lack of scholarly rigour and perhaps a determination to show Northern Ireland in a poor light. Similarly, the failure of the ESRI study to mention the AIC figures, despite the authors being on record as describing them as a ‘useful indicator’ of living standards, is unprofessional. A more interesting study might have been to explain why Ireland’s tax-haven economic model has been unable to generate higher living standards than in Northern Ireland, one of the UK’s poorer regions, in more than half a century of application.”

I am neither an economist nor a statistician. I don’t know who is right on this; I cite it only to provoke thinking and add a little balance to the debate. I have crossed swords with Gudgin in the past over his use of dubious statistics to downplay Ireland’s 20th century economic performance and the role of the EU in supporting the Good Friday Agreement.³ I have also queried ESRI reports, notably on education.⁴

Was it Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli who invented the phrase: “Lies, damned lies and statistics”?

¹ ‘Is it time to reconvene the 1994-1996 Forum for Peace and Reconciliation?’ (4 February) and ‘Theme for an all-island Values Forum: Love is the doctrine of this country?’ (20 February)

² https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/northern-ireland-richer-than-ireland/

³‘Apocalyptic views of Brexit?’ Letters to the Editor, Irish Times, 28 September 2016

⁴ For example, a 2022 ESRI report on on education systems north and south failed even to mention (or reference) a significant study I did in 2011 (when I was director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies) on obstacles to cross-border undergraduate education for the IBEC-CBI Joint Business Council and the EURES cross-border partnership.

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | Tagged economy, history, ireland, politics, travel | Leave a comment

A reconciling Taoiseach and the yawning gaps in well-being that may lead towards a united Ireland

Posted on Wednesday, 23 April, 2025 by andypollak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | Tagged belfast, history, ireland, Northern Ireland | 1 Comment

In a world of ugly leaders, this attractive social democratic politician is a breath of fresh air

Posted on Wednesday, 9 April, 2025 by andypollak

We live in a world in turmoil, dominated by extremely ugly political leaders: right-wing megalomaniacs like Donald Trump, warmongers like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, fascists and authoritarians like Marine Le Pen and Victor Orban. So it is a breath of fresh air to meet a hard-working, high-speed social democratic politician like SDLP leader Claire Hanna.

I met Hanna last month in her office in Belfast. She breezed into the room full of chat and energy, although it was a Friday and she was clearly exhausted after a hard week in Westminster, leading her diminished party and working her South Belfast constituency. She told Seanín Graham of the Irish Times last October that she worked “silly hours,” but tried her best to maintain some semblance of a work-life balance in order to spend time with her three daughters, aged seven to 12. “Many’s a time I would fly home from London to Dublin because the last flight to Belfast is at 8 pm but you can get one to Dublin at 10 pm. I get the Aircoach up and get in at 1 am because I want to be there for school the next morning.”¹

She is both a pragmatic politician who wants the best for the people of Northern Ireland and an idealistic nationalist who is confident that there will be a united Ireland – or a ‘new Ireland’ – in her lifetime. However she insists that the North’s problems can’t be solved by “having a Border poll tomorrow.”

“If you’re getting a piece of work done on the house, do you want it done quickly or do you want it done properly?” she told the Irish Times. “And I feel the same about a Border poll. I feel like we are extremely limited by being a part of the UK. I really do. I feel that more and more every day. Even with a Labour UK government, who are more interested in Ireland and more respectful of Ireland, we are still low down on the list of priorities. It feels like a straitjacket.”

While paying tribute to the work of the group of academics around ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South), she also says she wants to see some authoritative research on the economy of a united Ireland. “At the moment one economist says it will be a disaster, another says it will be milk and honey.”

She still spends as much of her limited leisure time as she can in Galway – where she was born when her father, later to become the SDLP’s general secretary, was working for Údarás na Gaeltachta (her mother would become an SDLP MLA). She quotes the historian Diarmaid Ferriter on the South’s “rhetorical empathy” with the nationalist North while not wanting to get into the “meat and bones” of its problems. However she also believes that the Republic, having successfully managed huge social change – including dealing with major migrant inflows and passing abortion and equal marriage referenda – is well capable of handling the even greater upheavals that constitutional change will bring.

She is strong on reconciliation (with some caveats), pointing out that it is the number one principle in her party’s 2023 New Ireland Commission’s list of principles. However she emphasises that “it’s not an either/or, reconciliation or unity. There are those who hold reconciliation up as it it were a Trojan Horse, a blocker to unity. We’re absolutely not among those. Unity is not worth having if it’s not based on reconciliation, as Seamus Mallon stressed in his memoir, ‘A Shared Home Place’. It would be hard to see how unity would be successful without it.

“However reconciliation has not been achieved in the present constitutional arrangement, so it’s also fair to ask if it hasn’t materialised at this point, should we not try it in the next stage? You can’t say ‘everybody must be reconciled’ before we’re allowed to open the gate to that next stage. It’s not an either/or: reconciliation and empathy are a way of living your life and a way of approaching politics and change. Reconciliation has to be at the core of constitutional change and will be at the core of it for the SDLP. We emphatically don’t share Ireland’s Future’s analysis that reconciliation comes later and will magically occur in the next constitutional dimension. We think they must happen in parallel.”

She is a strong supporter of Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s Shared Island initiative (again with caveats). “A ‘new Ireland’ must be about improving people’s lives and Shared Island is actively delivering that”, she says. “But it is important that we don’t get into a narrative where Shared Island is the end.”

She would like to see more meaningful cooperation – including shared budgeting – between government departments, North and South, while wondering if “Shared Island can constitutionally even do those things.” She worries that the North-South structures set up by the Good Friday Agreement are not being properly utilised, while the North South Ministerial Council is “much less than the sum of its parts.”

Hanna strongly dislikes the SDLP being compared with Sinn Fein. She told the US-based political scientist Padraig O’Malley in 2023: “Sinn Fein’s narrative is that it was appropriate to bomb and kill to get a united Ireland. While that odour is in the air, you can understand people being uncomfortable about moving towards such a united Ireland. Unfortunately the IRA have made a lot of people associate Irish unity and the Irish Republic with death.”²

“The SDLP doesn’t exist as Sinn Féin’s little sister, we don’t orbit around Sinn Féin. Yes, we attract people who never vote Sinn Féin – not that they’re virulently anti-Sinn Féin, it’s because we have our own separate world view.” Her party, she argues, is offering something unique in its approach to tackling what it defines as the three main challenges for the North: sectarianism, inequality and partition.

Part of that uniqueness is its combination of pragmatism and idealism. She quotes the SDLP’s Leader of the Opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly, Matthew O’Toole, outlining the kind of practical and specific policies the party would follow if it were in government: things like a costed hospital waiting list strategy; a target to reduce childcare costs by 50% by 2030; a commitment to removing the ability of one party to collapse the political institutions; delivery on the targets set out in the Climate Change Act; the creation of an independent Environmental Protection Agency; and ‘stand alone’ hate crime legislation to tackle continued sectarian division and intolerance in Northern Ireland.

Last week Hanna raised the vital issue of policing, seen for many years as the real success story of the post Good Friday Agreement period. She said this progress was now seriously endangered. She asked for the reintroduction of 50:50 Catholic and Protestant recruitment to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, one of the key reforms recommended by the Patten Commission in 1999, which was scrapped in 2011 (Catholic representation in the PSNI is currently 32%).

She wrote in the Irish News that “the optimism and possibility of the Patten reform has ebbed away, through neglect by inadequate resourcing, failure to deal with the past, weak authority of the Policing Board and the persistence of operational and cultural relics within the PSNI”.³ She said legacy issues had made for a difficult environment for the police service, which was “constantly pulling resources and headlines back to the past…Truth and disclosure are blocked and the hostile environment compounded by PPS [Public Prosecution Service] decisions in relation to Operation Kenova.”

Hanna said current PSNI numbers are “inadequate for maintaining public safety and tackling crime effectively,” adding that stretched resources “make public confidence almost impossible to maintain. The rule of law suffers, recruitment becomes ever more challenging and the cycle continues.”

She believed that there needs to be a “recommitment to the rule of law,” stressing that the Good Friday Agreement had “acted decisively on issues of law, order and justice around which conflict had revolved, with interventions on policing, justice, rights and equality.There should be a review of what has worked so well since and why; interrogate the risks to the rule of law today and start the heavy work on its renewal.”

She also emphasised the importance of legacy.“The acid test is getting legacy right, based on the needs of victims and survivors, not the protection of perpetrators,” she said. “The temptation to ‘draw a veil’ is a mirage.” She praised current PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher as “the right leader and in the nick of time” but cautioned that “getting policing back on track isn’t a one-person job”.

Hanna has a wonderful head of curly, dark hair. “What unites the deeply sectarian loyalist and deeply sectarian republican trolls is a resistance to hair that isn’t straight,” she told the Irish Times, only semi-jokingly. “I could post, ‘the sky is blue’, and I could have five people saying, ‘brush your f***ing hair’. I know it sounds a bit chaotic, but I laugh and say I could build a peace process around mutual detestation of my hair.

“The point is, the people who are hateful, who are racist, who are sectarian, are usually misogynist as well. Bear in mind there is an epidemic of gender-based violence here – with 23 women murdered since 2020.”

¹ ‘New SDLP leader Claire Hanna: ‘We are extremely limited by being part of the UK. It feels like a straitjacket.’ 5 October 2024

² Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland, p. 197

³ ‘SDLP leader Claire Hanna calls for a review of policing to bring it back to what Patten intended’, 2 April

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | Leave a comment

In this cruel new Trumpian world, who cares about little Northern Ireland any more?

Posted on Monday, 10 March, 2025 by andypollak

The world has been reeling in the past 10 days since President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance’s cruel two-handed public humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House. Even more shattering has been the realisation that NATO without its American security ‘umbrella’ is probably dead and the nations of Europe need to massively re-arm to take over from a newly isolationist US the role of keeping the continent (or at least its eastern European constituents) safe from Russian aggression. Are 80 years of post-Second World War peace and prosperity, culminating in the soft power marvel of the European Union, heading for the dustbin of history?

Where do little Ireland and tiny Northern Ireland fit into this emerging international turmoil? Maybe other small, self-obsessed countries are similar, but there is no doubt that we Irish people, north and south, often suffer from the illusion that we are the centre of the universe. Whether it is the Northern peace process and the Good Friday Agreement, or our recent Celtic Tiger Mark Two economic boom, our successful campaign to keep the Irish border invisible after Brexit, or our legion of brilliant actors, singers and writers, we believe we one of the greatest – if not the greatest – little country in the world.

Whatever about the Republic, Northern Ireland and its problems are categorically off the world’s radar. Those faraway days in the 1990s when American presidents, British prime ministers, European Commission heads, military leaders and police chiefs from Britain, the US, Canada and Finland, and past and future Finnish and South African presidents queued up to play a part in our peace process, are long gone. Nelson Mandela phoning David Trimble to help push him over the line leading to the Belfast Agreement is the stuff of ancient legend. The world has moved on to a much more dangerous and warlike place, and our little internecine divisions – which, thank God, nobody dies for any more – are of almost no interest.

I was at a conference in Belfast of the dialogue group Compass Points on legacy last week. The two main speakers were former BBC security correspondent Brian Rowan and Queen’s University law professor, Kieran McEvoy, along with a panel of republicans, loyalists, civil society actors, and victims and survivors. Most of them agreed that the British Government’s Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) was not working. This was mainly because not enough people were engaging with it, and it would experience extreme difficulty in getting information about past killings out of some of the key warring parties in the Northern ‘troubles’, notably the Government’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, and the IRA.

What they proposed instead was an independent international commission with powers to compel British intelligence agencies for their part to cooperate on establishing the truth of hundreds of killings during that conflict. In my humble opinion, this is cloud cuckoo land. In the middle of an international crisis over the war in Ukraine and the apparent need for Europe to become a military power, the idea that the British and Irish governments (let alone the US government) are going to scour the world for eminent people to sit an international commission of inquiry into events in Northern Ireland 40 and 50 years ago is utterly unrealistic.

And as ICRIR commissioner, Professor Brice Dixon (a former NI Human Rights Chief Commissioner), asked as part of his argument that the new legacy body was beginning to function: Is an international commission any more likely to get information out of an intelligence agency like MI5 than the present commission under former Northern Ireland Chief Justice, Sir Declan Morgan?

The Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework have shown how little the sovereign government of the UK cares about Northern Ireland these days when much bigger strategic issues – notably relationships with the EU and now the defence of Europe – are at stake. After last week’s meeting between Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Taoiseach Micheál Martin in Liverpool, the two governments issued a 38 paragraph joint statement on future cooperation. This featured cooperation in defence, maritime issues, energy, the economy, science, climate change, culture and the arts, sport and young people. One had to wait to paragraph 37 for a brief mention of Northern Ireland. 20 years ago there would have been almost nothing but Northern Ireland in such a statement!

In Dublin interest in the North is similarly low. The Tánaiste, Simon Harris, said during his first visit to Stormont in January that unity was not his priority and he did not expect a Border Poll during the five year term of the new Irish government. Taoiseach Micheál Martin has made it clear that his priority is to expand and develop his Shared Island initiative.

This did not stop the Belfast nationalist paper, the Irish News, trumpeting a story with the headline ‘Irish government begins work of costing out a united Ireland’.¹ This was apparently an unpublished report compiled by the Irish Department of Social Protection which looked at the impact of merging the two jurisdictions’ welfare systems in the event of unification. It concluded that the cost of applying the most generous welfare rates on both sides of the border would be nearly €22 billion a year above the taxes collected for social protection. There was no comment from the Irish News – or anywhere else – about whether this might present a giant disincentive for the government to pursue unity.

On a related note, I see that my favourite Northern journalist, Sam McBride, has dug out some 56 year old papers from the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy which show some interesting thinking by senior Irish government officials about unity at the outbreak of the ‘troubles’.² Among them is a confidential cable issued to Irish diplomats around the world in September 1969, asking for ideas, including ‘personal’ views about the way forward.

“The cable – from Hugh McCann, the most senior official in the Department for External Affairs (now the Department of Foreign Affairs) – appealed for ideas to alter policy on Northern Ireland. The responses included radical suggestions: ditching the flag and anthem, abandoning neutrality, and ending the Catholic Church’s pre-eminent role in national life.

“Influential diplomat Eamonn Gallagher believed that ‘unionist moderates will see the need to get out of a steadily more untenable dead end; their only credible alternative is an accommodation with Dublin’, because they would be ‘squeezed from the right by a monstrous bigotry of their own creation’ which would mean they would have to ‘suppress definitively the Orange disease’ – language which would be offensive to many unionists.

“Yet he went on to say Dublin should ‘seriously examine constitutional and statutory provisions which repel Protestants and be prepared to get rid of them… a united Ireland is necessarily a plural society – our Constitution should reflect this and our statutes should never lose sight of this.’ He added that ending partition peacefully ‘presupposes in practice obtaining the large consent of the people of the North’.

“Eamonn Kennedy in Bonn advocated facing ‘hard realities which cannot be wished away’, one of which was that among northern Catholics there was a fear of unity due to ‘the real fall in living standards’ that would ensue. He said many Southerners ‘may not yet be prepared to carry the burdens reunification would imply’ and wondered: ‘Would our taxpayers be prepared to subsidise the North in the manner to which it is accustomed?’

“He said that for half a century, Dublin had followed policies ‘whose ultimate effect was the psychological heightening of the frontier’. A ‘realistic’ unity would mean ‘some kind of a federation in Ireland which will not be entirely Gaelic, or Catholic, in which the non-republican attitude of the majority in the North will have to be accommodated and in which the policy of neutrality may have to be abandoned in favour of participation in the defence of the West.”

“He also said the government should ‘take the IRA out of Irish politics,’ observing that ‘the IRA did little to help the ordinary citizen in his hour of need, but they did a great deal to strengthen the reactionary hand of the northern government.’

“T.J. Horan in Stockholm admitted he didn’t know a single unionist, and had ‘no direct knowledge of what these people think and how they feel’. He thought ‘the Six-County Orangeman’s or Protestant’s fear of us is real – as real as the Russians’ fear of the Germans. We must do something to dispel that.’…He said that since partition ‘we have done nothing to ‘woo’ the Six Counties. On the contrary, practically everything we have done has tended to widen the separation.’

“He added Dublin should ‘stop using the propaganda line that partition is the root of all these troubles. It is not… partition was already there, and has been there since the planters were settled… Before partition became an established constitutional fact, partition was already there in embryo. I think we should face this fact.”

“Con Cremin in New York suggested the Irish language’s official status need not extend to the entire island. An unnamed official in Madrid proposed consideration of NATO membership. A diplomat in Ottawa proposed a new flag and anthem, as ‘neither [in their present form] would be acceptable’ to unionists. An official in Buenos Aires suggested ‘inviting some prominent and liberal Northerner, like Captain [Terence] O’Neill, to be the next president of Ireland.’

“A diplomat in Washington suggested ‘a restricted area around Belfast having wide and substantial powers within in a 32-county democratic Republic’. He also suggested Dublin should set aside millions of pounds to pay unionist diehards to ‘make a fresh start in England or elsewhere’.

Those diplomats 56 years ago were often more realistic than many ordinary citizens of the Republic today. The latest Irish Times/ARINS opinion poll indicates that 58% of those polled agreed or strongly agreed that “consideration should be given to significant changes to the existing political institutions” in the Republic in the event of unity.³ This vague, aspirational formulation was in sharp contrast to the more specific question in the equivalent poll three years ago, which found that majorities of 71-79% were against paying more taxes, cutting public services, changing the flag and anthem, and re-joining the Commonwealth in return for unity.

As everyone knows, we do vague and aspirational well in this republic!

¹ Irish News, 2 March

² ‘The secret papers which reveal radical thinking’, Belfast Telegraph, 9 March

³ ‘Southern voters would consider changes to institutions in a united Ireland’, Irish Times, 7 March

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Views from abroad | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | Leave a comment

Theme for an all-island Values Forum: Love is the doctrine of this country?

Posted on Thursday, 20 February, 2025 by andypollak

I am going to return to the theme of my last blog earlier this month: the need for a forum to discuss not the constitutional politics which continue to divide the people of this island, but the values – peace, democracy, equality, community, environmental sustainability, Christianity in all its forms, and European-ness – which the great majority of Irish people, north and south, have in common.

My belief in the need for an all-Ireland Forum on Common Values was only increased by reading the results of the latest Irish Times/ARINS opinion poll on constitutional options for this island earlier this month. The casual reader perusing the headlines on six days of lengthy articles – ‘Support of Irish unity growing in North, poll finds’; ‘Trends show rise in support for unity among Northern voters’; ‘Majorities in North and South favour planning for possibility of Irish unity’ – might assume that there had been significant changes in opinion in Northern Ireland favouring reunification.

However that is definitively not the case for the main group traditionally most hostile to reunification. What the headlines did not say is that the vast majority of Northern Protestants “remain strongly opposed to Irish unity, with 82% saying they would vote against it, and just 7% in favour.” In Northern Ireland overall, 48% of all respondents said they would vote against unity, while 34% say they would vote in favour. This latter figure is up from 27% in the first year of the survey in December 2021, this being “mainly accounted for by a sharp rise of Northern Catholics saying they would vote for a united Ireland”.¹

So there’s not much new there except that with the rise of Sinn Fein to become the largest party at Stormont – a body which still achieves very little in terms of good governance – and resignations, divisions and scandals on the unionist side, some less nationalistic Catholics are being persuaded by the unity argument.

On the Southern side there is little in these latest findings to indicate that people in the Republic are any more prepared to compromise on their comfortable existence and traditional nationalism to accommodate unionists in a ‘new Ireland’ than they were in the first such poll in December 2021. Then an astonishing 79% said would not accept higher taxes; 79% less money for public services; 77% a new flag; 72% a new anthem; and 71% re-joining the Commonwealth.

Three years of exhaustive Irish Times/ARINS polls only confirm me in my belief that this Republic is utterly unprepared to incorporate 700-800,000 alienated and betrayed Northern Protestants and unionists (because that is how many of them will feel) into its body politic. In the words of Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy, commenting on the necessity for a reunified Ireland to become a little bit more British to recognise the British identity of those Protestants and unionists in its constitutional arrangements and ‘national expression’: “Don’t like the sound of any of that? Don’t fancy a state that’s a bit more British? Figure that we fought a war to get rid of the British (two wars, the Provisional IRA might say) and to hell with the idea of changing the Irish identity of the Republic in order to accommodate unionists? That unionists can like it or lump it, and if they don’t like it, well, they know where the door is?” An Irish Times editorial put it equally bluntly when commenting on Southern Irish people’s reluctance to consider measures that might take account of the identities and concerns of unionists: “There remains a strong strain within Irish nationalism that sees unification in crudely assimilationist terms.”²

I believe such an attitude would be disastrous for a country which – in the words of the new Article 3 of the Constitution, inserted after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – has pledged that unity will come about through “harmony and friendship” to peacefully unite the people of the island “in all the diversity of their identities and traditions.”

Which is where I believe an all-island Forum on Common Values (an updated version of the 1994-1996 Forum on Peace and Reconciliation) comes in. Because I believe those common values – as listed in the opening paragraph of this blog – can provide a real foundation for the building of harmony and friendship on this island. Let us put aside for a few years the deep and enduring political divisions. While very few Northern Protestants want to see a united Ireland, many – perhaps most – of them would have no objection to a closer relationship with the now prosperous, economically dynamic and culturally liberal Republic.

The 1994-1996 Forum created the means to bring Sinn Fein in from the cold and to enable all the parties to find a way of engaging with each other. The story is told that on the first day, when Gerry Adams entered Dublin Castle, Senator Gordon Wilson (who had lost his daughter in the IRA’s Enniskillen bombing) made a point of shaking his hand – showing Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and others the pathway for how to engage with that party.

David Bolton, founder of the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation, which did important work with victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing (currently in the news as the heartbreaking testimonies of its victims and survivors, speaking at a long-delayed public inquiry, are making headlines), wrote to me recently to say how valuable he had found the 1994-1996 Forum. He said he had attended it on two occasions and got to know some of the staff well. But it was at the lunches “where the magic happened. People found themselves sitting alongside others whom they would never have a chance to meet – never mind have a conversation with.”

I am a member of the Unitarian Church in Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green, a liberal Presbyterian congregation with strong Northern connections which believes above all in freedom, reason and tolerance in matters of religion. We have recently been discussing whether a ‘new Ireland’ could come to mean an island where these core Unitarian values could flourish, whatever its constitutional status. A renewed commitment to freedom, reason and tolerance under Article 3 of the Constitution could surely help Irish people come together around the values of peace, democracy, equality, a strong sense of community, environmental sustainability, the Christian tradition in all its forms and even a sense of being European (since a majority in Northern Ireland voted against Brexit and it is still connected to the EU through the NI Protocol and the Windsor Framework)?

Here’s one example. Could an all-island Forum on Common Values bring together Orangemen and members of the GAA? For many in both these organisations, the other organisation is like the devil incarnate: exemplifying anti-Catholic bigotry and support for IRA violence respectively. Whereas in fact they have a lot in common, especially in rural areas, as important factors in community cohesion in a world where community values are often under threat. I have talked to the most senior officer of the Orange Order, Rev Mervyn Gibson, at a Shared Island Dialogue event in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. I’m sure he could be persuaded to speak on the cultural importance of the Orange Order at a Forum for Common Values. The president of the GAA, Jarlath Burns, an innovative and open-minded school principal from South Armagh, could be invited to respond.

The absence of mutual understanding and tolerance here is great. A Northern businessman of my acquaintance, a member of the Orange Order, recently recalled a TV programme he had seen about the great Irish rugby player, Brian O’Driscoll, visiting Northern Ireland. O’Driscoll had been “absolutely flummoxed” to witness people who carried the Union Jack on the 12^th of July and wore Orange collarettes supporting the Irish rugby team. “You could almost see the cogs in his brain going: ‘What’s going on here?” Yet for this man and a lot of his fellow Orangemen, this identification with two nations, two cultures on the island of Ireland, was completely normal. “Some people say ‘I’m British, and that’s it.’ Others are happy to say ‘I’m Irish and I’m British’, he said. “It was the funniest thing to see Brian O’Driscoll’s head nearly explode at the thought of this.” The same man recounted a conversation with friends in Galway who, when he told them he was an Orangeman, “looked at me as if I had been beamed down from Mars, as if I was some sort of alien.”

On the back of an envelope, I can list 30 prominent unionists of various kinds I would be confident would be prepared to voice their views at a Forum on Common Values. They range from politicians and former politicians like Mike Nesbitt, John Kyle and Brian Ervine; through community workers like Brian Dougherty and Jackie Redpath; prominent women like Dawn Purvis, Debbie Watters, Sarah Creighton and Alison Grundle; academics like Peter Shirlow and Paul Bew; former leading DUP members like Wallace Thompson and Sammy Douglas; and Presbyterian clerics like John Dunlop, Norman Hamilton and Leslie Carroll.

Maybe a university or a peace organisation like Glencree could be funded by the Irish government to organise an initial gathering of such a forum. The churches could play a key role. Some years ago I was approached by a Southern Irish university about organising a re-run of the 1992-1993 Opsahl ‘citizens inquiry’, which was on ways forward for Northern Ireland at a particularly despairing juncture (and which I coordinated), but this time on an all-island basis. In the end it came to nothing because the businessman offering money for such an initiative was not able to deliver. One of the Opsahl Commission’s key strengths was that it put no limit on what people making submissions to it could include: politics and the constitution, law and justice, economics, culture, religion, identity, education, the environment and whatever else people thought was important for the future of the North. The result was over 550 submissions representing the ideas of around 3,000 people. Some of these ideas found their way into the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Maybe I am a dreamer. Maybe my family background – a liberal Northern Presbyterian mother and a Czech socialist father – predisposes me to be too idealistic about the flexibility of that notoriously stubborn and often anti-Irish community, the Northern Ireland unionists. But when I look at the statement of beliefs in the back our Dublin Unitarian hymnbook, and I change one word, replacing ‘church’ with ‘country’, I see a perfect starting point for a discussion about common all-island values.

‘Love is the doctrine of this country

The quest of truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer.

To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom,

To serve mankind in fellowship.

To the end that all souls shall grow in harmony with the divine

This we do covenant with each other and with God.’

In his ‘Unthinkable’ column last week, the Irish Times journalist Joe Humphries suggested that the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, should draw inspiration from Ireland’s history of Christian scholarship when he visits President Donald Trump in Washington on St Patrick’s Day next month. “He should use the opportunity not to lecture Trump about his policies, but to speak about the shared Christian values underpinning Irish and American societies.”³

If we can talk to the mad Trump about shared Christian values, surely we can talk to Northern Protestants and unionists about the same thing!

¹ ‘Support for Irish unity growing in North, poll finds’, Irish Times, 7 February

² ‘So the North says No. But for how much longer?’, 8 February. ‘Slow shifts in debate on unity’, 11 February (editorial)

³‘Christianity is too important to be left to extremists’, 10 February

Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | Tagged brexit, history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 7 Comments

Is it time to reconvene the 1994-1996 Forum for Peace and Reconciliation?

Posted on Tuesday, 4 February, 2025 by andypollak

Last week on the same day I was involved in two very interesting conversations about the way forward for this island. I had lunch with a young Belfast-born, Dublin-resident solicitor called Ross Neill. Neill is that rare thing: somebody from a unionist background who now lives and works happily in Dublin and calls himself a nationalist (an SDLP-style nationalist).

In particular he is an admirer of John Hume. He quotes Hume in America saying “the most amazing thing” about the USA was “that it’s one country.” I recalled a similar quote from the great SDLP leader: “You Americans probably take this for granted. There’s a commonplace saying, a saying so famous in America you’ve probably forgotten about it – E Pluribus Unum , ‘From many, one’. It’s so commonplace in America that you have it on your smallest coin, here on the back of a penny.” He went on: ‘That’s what we’re striving for in Northern Ireland, from our diversity to create one nation, E pluribus Unum, which has long been the American national slogan; something we’re striving towards even today – to create one nation of equal citizenship among all our diverse constituent communities.”¹

This provoked a discussion about coming up with a ‘big idea’ that might help to bring together the people of the island. Currently ‘New Ireland’ is just another way of saying ‘United Ireland’, which is why Sinn Fein use it so much, and why unionists are so uninterested in it. But could a ‘new Ireland’ come to mean something different: an island that, whatever its constitutional make-up, could come together slowly around values common to the people of both jurisdictions: peace, democracy, the Christian tradition in all its forms, a strong sense of community, the English language and even European-ness (since Northern Ireland is still connected to the EU through the NI Protocol and the Windsor Framework). Should we be coming together to discuss what we have in common through our shared values before we move on to the difficult business what divides us because of starkly different views on constitutional futures?

20 years ago I reviewed a book called Conflict and Consensus: A study of values and attitudes in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, by leading sociologists and political scientists Tony Fahey, Bernadette Hayes and Richard Sinnott.² It was based on analysis of the Irish data from the 1999-2000 European Values Surveys and the 2002-2003 European Social Survey in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The authors concluded that both societies on this island had been blessed over the previous decade by a combination of benevolent circumstances which made them highly unusual in European, not to mention, world terms.

I wrote, summarising the authors’ findings: “They [both societies] enjoy high levels of income, welfare provision, individual life satisfaction and social capital. They are both stable democracies governed by similar legal systems which have withstood the tests of time. The old divisions based on religion seem to be fading as both societies are edging – and the authors emphasise the word ‘edging’ – towards a more secular, post-Christian future.”

I then voiced two contradictory thoughts which ironically both led in a positive direction. Perhaps, this study suggested, “secularisation could play a role in the future in creating cultural divisions that cut across the ethno-national divide and so reduce polarisation.” One of these, since magnified by referenda in the Republic on gay marriage and abortion, could be the division on family and sexual issues between liberals and conservatives of all denominations.

Or (in contradiction) perhaps those conservative Christian family values which many Irish Protestants and Catholics still share – and which make them unlike their fellow citizens in Britain and Europe – might provide some of the basis for understandings which go beyond and deeper than those reached between unionists, nationalists and republicans in 1998.

The authors concluded: “The two societies and the two traditions are characterised by major similarities as well as by self-evident differences. Put another way, the grounds for consensus within and between the two societies are almost as extensive as the grounds for conflict.”

Could this consensus be a basis for a wide and compelling all-Ireland discussion that would bring in elements of society in both jurisdictions far wider than the political parties, including significant Northern Protestant groups? A kind of re-run of the New Ireland Forum of the 1980s or the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation of the 1990s (a better name if we want to involve unionists) with no limit on what issues – economic, cultural, religious, environmental as well as political – that people participating wanted to raise. Anybody could appear before such a forum to raise any issue concerning the future well-being of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Reflecting our hugely changed technological times, it would have to have both face-to-face and online dimensions. It could be a development of the Irish Government’s Shared Island Dialogues, and, like that exercise, would have to take place in both Irish jurisdictions.

Such a forum would be a great place to raise and discuss radical new ideas. It would be the opposite of a Sinn Fein-proposed Citizens Assembly to discuss Irish political unity, aimed at reaching one conclusion only. I know smart unionist-minded people who would have no problem in taking part in such an open-ended exercise: politicians and ex-politicians, religious leaders, youth and community leaders, writers and artists, business people. I believe this is the time – when the Irish government’s coffers are overflowing, with another billion euros approved for Shared Island – to mount such an innovative and open-minded initiative.

I only hope that the new government in Dublin has the vision to embrace such an idea in the spirit of the new post 1998 Article Three of the Constitution, that it is the will of the Irish nation “in harmony and friendship [note those important words] to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island.”

That constitutional article was central to the second conversation I witnessed that evening: between former SDLP leader Mark Durkan and Professor Graham Spencer of University of Portsmouth, who has done Irish history and politics a significant service by interviewing in great detail a wide range of politicians and officials who played a role in the Good Friday Agreement. His latest offering is a book-length interview with Durkan, a man I have always liked as one of the smartest and most open-minded of Northern politicians.

Durkan said successive Irish governments had made a mistake “in not developing that [Article] so that the terms of any discussion, or understanding, around a united Ireland are very much rooted in the spirit of Article Three that is directly sourced from the Good Friday Agreement. Perhaps the best way in which to take these matters forward would be if the Irish government did something like reconvene the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, or another body like it, but specifically with the idea of developing new understandings and appreciations in relation to Article Three.” He said that the 1994-1996 forum had allowed the parties and people involved to get away from fixed positions and to be creative and future-looking. Such a body could help to ensure that “thinking becomes less partisan, because it is shared, where it is informed and stimulated by other parties’ opinions and by expert opinion”, he said last week.

He also has an unusually nuanced view of what an eventual Border poll (a term he doesn’t like) should aim to do. “We are going to have to address far more issues and many more arguments, questions and uncertainties rather than just talk about the border if we are going to win support for a united Ireland. Also, when I talk to some of my unionist friends, their support for the Union doesn’t mean that they particularly want a border in hard or awkward form. They don’t want anything like that imposed. Their support for the Union is natural. It is instinctive and they would see it as positive, so they think that under the Good Friday Agreement you can have a relatively borderless island.”

Durkan said when it comes to a Border poll “the question shouldn’t be a united Ireland, yes or no, but the choice between two equally legitimate aspirations as affirmed by the GFA. That is, remaining part of the UK, or becoming part of a sovereign united Ireland. There should be two questions and two options, so that both sides of the argument have to present a strong, compelling and positive prospectus for what is on offer and for what the result favouring that outcome would mean. If you don’t have both sides campaigning positively and it’s a united Ireland, yes or no, well you’re almost typecasting unionists into a ‘no’ camp and yet again it becomes easy for one side to just basically run a negative narrative about what the other campaign is offering.”

He called for a healthy debate about “answering the honest questions that people have, whether it’s the shape of public finances, how well rights are guaranteed, public services, or whether it’s just about how the transition would be handled if the vote is for a united Ireland. If it were to be a united Ireland, would it be one big bang of integration of all public services, or more of a phased approach? Would there be some element of devolution and continuity? Would it be a case of using, or saying, that a lot of the structures for the Good Friday Agreement are still there and that we use the review mechanisms of the Agreement to make a lot of the adjustments internally in Ireland?

“On the other side, if the result is not for a united Ireland, but for remaining in the UK, are there assurances that people are not going to abuse that result to say we can proceed to dispose of things like the European Convention on Human Rights as promised in the Good Friday Agreement, or we can do things just whatever way the UK want and that people should take what the Westminster parliament throws at them, with the GFA somehow relegated? We need to make sure that people who have doubts about either option and about how the result for either side would be treated or mistreated, will be addressed.”

This is fiendishly complex stuff and there was almost nothing about it in the very threadbare section on unity in Sinn Fein’s recent election manifesto. This is a long and difficult journey and we haven’t even started on it.

¹ John Hume in America, Maurice Fitzpatrick, p. 50

² ‘Proof the Belfast Agreement is resting on firm foundations’, Irish Times, 14 April 2005

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, news, Northern Ireland, politics | 1 Comment

Alliance leader Naomi Long talks a lot of sense (including about a Border poll)

Posted on Monday, 13 January, 2025 by andypollak

Alliance Party leader and Northern Ireland Justice Minister Naomi Long is somebody who is rarely interviewed or profiled by the Southern media, and almost never appears on public platforms in the Republic. But she is an impressive woman. I was at the latest ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South) event in Dublin last month to hear her talk about ‘My Identity’. This working class East Belfast woman comes from tough circumstances: her father worked in Harland and Wolff shipyard, partly losing his sight and hearing as a result, and died young; her mother was a courageous and independent-minded woman who worked in the Belfast ropeworks.

She has a vivid childhood memory of an incident when a group of Southern Irish construction workers were building apartments opposite her family’s terraced house off the lower Newtownards Road. Local men appeared at their door before 12th July seeking a financial contribution to paint the street’s kerbstones red, white and blue as an aggressive message to the Irish workers. Her mother refused to contribute, making it clear she wanted no such painting outside her house. The following morning they woke up to see a huge Union flag painted on the road outside, with the slogan ‘No Surrender – Remember 1690’. The neighbours were curious to hear her reaction to this. “Those workers will now have the joy of driving up and down over the Union flag all summer” was her response. “It felt like bullying and I hated that”, said Long. “What are those symbols for? Why were we using them to intimidate people?”

She feels her identity is a layered one, since “nobody you’d want to spend time with is just one thing.” “I see myself as Irish. I grew up in the Church of Ireland; I became a member of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. But I also grew up as British. My first passport was British. That was my nationality by dint of where I was born…Being from Northern Ireland is another layer of that identity. It’s a unique experience having lived in Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. That’s a shared experience we have which other people on this island and in other parts of these islands don’t share.” However being a European is also very important to her (she served briefly as an MEP before the UK left the EU). She quotes her pragmatic mother on the subject of roots: “Roots are important, but God gave you feet as he expects you to move.”

Most Alliance Party members will acknowledge that “there’s a bit of both British and Irish in them. But national identity is not what the party is about. We come together around common values and a vision about how we can make people’s lives better in Northern Ireland…We’re also about good relationships: North/South and East/West.”

She respects the fact that flags and symbols are important to people in the North. “But I am also weary of symbols being used as weapons, and of disrespect for other people’s symbols,” she says. “I’m tired of flags on lamp posts marking territory. I don’t have any hostility to the Tricolour or the Union flag, but I’m tired of seeing them abused to cause offence to other people, to make them feel excluded. The purpose of flags should be to bring people together, but that’s not how they’re used in Northern Ireland.”

“I grew up in a deprived neighbourhood. Across the ‘peace wall’ in the similarly deprived Catholic area of Short Strand they believed that [as a unionist working class area] we had it good. In our area we had the same belief. But actually we had the same issues of poverty and deprivation. Instead of working together to resolve those issues, we were being sold a lie that we were better off. People in those working class unionist communities believed their politicians were looking after them and thus they were better off – but they weren’t.”

Because of her mother’s strong views and willingness to articulate them, she grew up with a belief in “battling for the underdog”. Also that “when something is wrong, you should speak out about it.” She recalls the “totemic moment” when Gordon Wilson said he forgave the IRA men who killed 11 people, including his daughter Marie, in the 1987 Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing. “I believe that small acts of courage and kindness like that can change communities.”

Long is passionate about the value of integrated education in beginning to tackle the kind of segregation which means that around 90% of people in Northern Ireland continue live in communities that are 90% segregated from the other community. This means that children have “no real lived experience of anyone who is different from them…they get one set of messages over and over again and these are never challenged. But that’s not real life, where you go out into the world and you’re going to be mixing with people from different backgrounds and with different opinions and you’ve got to learn to accommodate that difference and diversity.”

She remembers a time in her childhood when she went on a cross-community school trip and her bus was stoned. “I was unaware of how hated I was as a Protestant child.” An added irony was that a child on her bus pointed to a Catholic child stoning the bus and said “that’s my cousin”. Even across the sectarian barriers in East Belfast, there was inter-marriage.

Although there is now a programme by which parents in a state (mainly Protestant) or Catholic school can sign a form to say they want to ‘transform’ their school into an integrated one, the Northern Ireland Education Authority insists that this must not threaten the viability of existing segregated schools. Long says this has led to the absurd situation where she knows of 14 villages with two unviable segregated primary schools which cannot amalgamate into one integrated school. The probable result, she says, is that one or the other (or both) of these schools will close, children will be bussed to a school in another village, families will eventually leave and the village will die. Despite this, she believes that “ultimately parent power will transform the education system in Northern Ireland.”

Long also spoke honestly about her religious faith. “Faith has played a big part in my life; it played a big part in me engaging with my community as a politician. I’ve always believed in service, at home and abroad (in international development) through my church.” However she started to feel uncomfortable in her Presbyterian church because comments made by members against migrants and homeless people did not fit with what she understood to be Christ’s teachings: “Jesus was a migrant for the early part of his life, and he wandered around preaching and relied on the charity of others.”

She finally parted company with the Presbyterian Church over its treatment of LGBTQ people: “they treated these marginalised people appallingly and bullied the people in the church who were trying to reach out to them, to show kindness and inclusion following the example of the Good Samaritan…The church has become very pious, rather than a place for people who are broken and need healing.” She saw her predecessor as Alliance leader, fellow-Presbyterian David Ford, being pilloried and taken to a church court for his stand on equal marriage. The last straw came when the church said it would no longer baptise the children of gay people. She regrets that many Protestant denominations in the North have become “aligned with a very narrow right-wing agenda which is not a reflection of my understanding of the Bible.”

On the constitutional question, she quotes a survey carried out by the Liverpool University academic, Jonathan Tonge, for a recently published book on the Alliance Party¹,which found that a Border poll did not rank among the top 10 priorities for party members. He found that “the vast majority of members are ‘neithers’ who reject both unionism and nationalism as political philosophies that will advance society. They are really not interested in that conversation; they are interested in education, housing, poverty and the environment. There are also people like me who are interested, but that interest is driven not by ideology, but by what the future will hold, what it will look like, and how we can shape it. It will be a decision people will reach based on pragmatic and practical considerations if and when the time comes.”

She remains a passionate European. “People like me valued the European project because it was part of something bigger, that overarching European identity we could all buy into. The brilliance of the EU was that it was trying to diminish the impact of borders. I’m not a natural nationalist of any description (British or Irish) – I think nationalist politics is the road to no town. In the EU project there was less emphasis on borders and division, and more on cooperation, collaboration, working together and harmonising our systems so that the Border almost became an invisible thing.”

Brexit “frustrated me hugely and baffled me,” she says. It was driven by a combination of “British nationalism, wartime nostalgia…and an underlying xenophobia that I found really grim… It was led by people who were disingenuous, who said ‘ we don’t want those [European] elites ruling us’, and then you’d look at them and say ‘but you are the elite!’.

Brexit had also dramatically changed something in North-South relations. “The re-emergence of the question – What will happen to the Border? – was a really toxic infection in our politics at that time; another focus on division rather than what we could do together. We were like the children of divorcing parents. Both governments were at loggerheads and some of our politicians [she clearly means the DUP] saw an opportunity to play them off against each other to see if they could get something for Northern Ireland out of it.” What they got was the trade border down the Irish Sea, which Long said she could see coming soon after the 2016 vote, although the unionist parties apparently couldn’t. “It was the logical choice. If you’re the [British] government, are you going to police the 200-300 miles of the land border, all farms and lanes and sheughs [Northern Irish for ditches], or put customs posts at the seven ports and airports?”

During question time, Long returned to the issue of the Border poll. She accepted that Alliance was largely ignored in the Republic, although she believed this was part of the larger weariness with the North by Southern politicians, the media and the public as they dealt with more immediate problems like the Covid pandemic and the housing crisis. “We’re not relevant to them these days – we’re a place apart.”

However she went on: “Actually, we are the group of people they should be interested in. Because if there’s ever a Border poll, we’re the group who will make the key decision. Nationalists will vote nationalist, and Unionists will vote unionist, and it will be the people who haven’t made up their minds yet who will decide what actually happens. So we’re the group of people who they should be most interested in because we’re going to be the ones who will be the deciding factor.”

This Alliance Party leader who talks so much sense on a range of issues never spoke a truer word.

¹ Jonathan Tonge and others, The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland: Beyond Unionism and Nationalism, 2024

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 2 Comments

A rare story of mercy and forgiveness between former combatants in Northern Ireland

Posted on Saturday, 28 December, 2024 by andypollak

At year’s end, and in the spirit of my last blog about the need for hope, I am once again going to shamelessly lift a whole column from another writer, and once again it’s from the superb Belfast Telegraph journalist and Sunday Independent columnist, Sam McBride. I admire McBride for his loyalty to and determination to tell the truth about his much maligned home place. This is his story about mercy and forgiveness between former combatants in that home place, Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland).

“Lying bleeding on the Crossmaglen ground after being shot by a Royal Marine Commando, the IRA man thought he was dying. The soldiers he’d attacked were now attacking him and continued to do so after a shot brought him to the ground. As death loomed, a soldier saved his life. That one moral act now might be central to solving a mystery stemming from one of the most immoral acts of the Troubles.

That former IRA man has now spoken not just about how he escaped death, but to reveal a secret personal crusade to find the body of Captain Robert Nairac, the undercover soldier who was abducted, killed and secretly buried by republicans in 1977.

The man’s remarkable motivation is told in a podcast ‘Assume Nothing: The Secret Search for Captain Nairac’ by Gordon Adair, a former BBC NI journalist. He had been a contact of Adair’s for years and had told him the story — but only now agreed to be interviewed.

It takes a lot for a former IRA man to spend three decades on a secret personal search to honour a former foe. Yet the reason is stunningly simple. It’s a story of hope from one of the most hopeless times.

All’s fair in love and war, or so the aphorism goes. Yet we know it’s not. It’s not OK to sleep with your best friend’s wife. It’s not OK to kill a defenceless civilian. In the Troubles, such basic morality often seemed absent, yet in truth it was everywhere. It was why the vast majority of the bereaved didn’t respond by bombing or shooting their neighbours. It’s why so many victims made tearful appeals for no retribution. It’s why the bloodshed never tipped into irretrievable civil war.

Adair’s contact wasn’t involved in Nairac’s abduction, murder or burial. Most of those involved in that weren’t IRA members, even if they were sympathisers. Yet one incident altered this south Armagh man’s perspective on humanity and ultimately drove him to a personal crusade to find Nairac’s body.

While attacking Crossmaglen army barracks in the mid-1970s, the man was shot and seriously wounded. He recalled: “As I lay on the ground, I thought of really only one person. I thought of my mother. I knew it was going to destroy her.”

Lying defenceless, he said he was “treated badly” by the soldiers, “but I was expecting that”. Then one individual changed his life. “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one man coming toward me and he just put his finger to his lips to let me know ‘don’t saying anything; be quiet’. He stopped them from doing that. I can still hear his words now: ‘Leave him alone. Leave him alone. He’s a soldier,’” he said.

Bleeding through the mouth and nose, he thought he was dying, but he survived. The gratitude he still feels many decades later is audible in how he speaks: “This man was exceptionally kind to me… it had a profound effect on me… this man saved my life.” He described summary execution, irrespective of the circumstances, as “a disgusting thing to do” and Nairac’s death as “a disgusting war crime”.

There were lurid stories that Nairac’s body had been put through a mincer. Adair’s contact said that after years of talking to a host of individuals, some of whom were directly involved, he’s definitively clear that’s wrong: “He’s definitely available.”

Similarly, after conducting his own investigations into allegations that Nairac was involved in atrocities, he doesn’t believe them. “Robert Nairac was an honourable man. From his own narrative, from his own idea of why he was posted to Ireland, he was acting, I think, at all times with morality… In a different conflict, in a different period, in a different epoch, I’d be very glad to have Robert Nairac by my side because he was a very brave man,” he said.

To the staunchest ideologues on either side, this man’s story is challenging; it doesn’t easily fit the black-and-white depiction of irredeemable good fighting irredeemable evil. Yet it’s compelling because it’s so deeply human. The man said: “I could not give up. My own life being saved by a decent man in a British army uniform has a profound effect on you… that experience created an indelible mark on my own sense of fair play and moral compass.”

He now wants to “show the man the respect he deserves” and a few months ago led the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) — set up to recover the bodies of the Disappeared — to a field in County Louth where he believes Nairac’s body was buried. In October, that search was halted without success because the ICLVR said “more information is needed”. Nairac’s body may be there, but finding the bones of a man in a field after almost half a century isn’t straightforward without precise information.

Yet even the telling of this story has had a powerful reconciling impact on some of those who’ve heard it. Former Ulster Unionist leader Doug Beattie — himself a former Royal Irish Regiment captain highly decorated for bravery — said the IRA man’s words were “as close to true reconciliation between enemies from our Troubles as I’ve heard”.

There’s a wider truth here. Some ex-paramilitaries cling to the belief that they had no choice; they were simply products of their environment which inexorably pushed them towards killing. This simplistic and self-serving belief system is demonstrably nonsensical when we consider that the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland, whatever their politics or religion, rejected the murder which surrounded them.

It’s too easy to say ‘we’d no moral choice’. What both the Royal Marine medic and the IRA man demonstrate is the impact one moral person can have. Our actions have consequences which echo for good or evil long after the instant in which we exist.”

If you have information about the location of the bodies of the final four Disappeared victims — Joe Lynskey, Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac and Seamus Maguire — you can contact the ICLVR on 00353 1 602 8655, or secretary@iclvr.ie, or ICLVR PO Box 10827 Dublin 2.”¹

¹ ‘One Small Act of Mercy – Captain Nairac, Sunday Independent, 22 December

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | Tagged Northern Ireland, the-troubles | 1 Comment

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