Why did 20th century Irish governments make so many mistakes when dealing with the North and unity?

Posted on Wednesday, 27 August, 2025 by andypollak

Much of my summer reading this year has been 20th century Irish history, and the work of superb historians like Alvin Jackson, Paul Bew, Diarmaid Ferriter, Oliver MacDonagh and others. One thing that has struck me forcibly is how many mistakes were made by successive Irish governments during the fifty years after independence when dealing with the single largest and enduring block to Irish unity: the fierce opposition of Northern unionists.[A separate, even longer article could be written about the abandonment of Northern nationalists by the Free State and successive governments].

It started early. Alvin Jackson writes that “perhaps the supreme paradox of the reunification strategy was that Dublin sought an end of partition through consolidating the structures and attitudes that maintained it. When – as in early 1922 – the Belfast government was politically vulnerable and open to moderate concession on the constitutional question, the Dublin ministry, sensing blood, ruthlessly applied the principal of northern subordination to any cross-border deal. When, in early 1923, the Northern government was economically vulnerable, the Dublin ministry sought to reinforce the economic divide between the two territories. Reunification was admittedly never likely in the early twenties, but there were certainly junctures when perhaps critical cross-border institutions might have been put in place. These passed unattended, partly because of the Free State government’s untenable claims to absolute supremacy over its northern counterpart.”1

The most striking example of this was the Free State government’s refusal to have anything to do with a Council of Ireland, proposed in Westminster’s 1920 Government of Ireland Act. Edward Carson told the House of Commons in November of that year: “I am optimistic enough to believe that it is in this Council…that there is the germ of a united Ireland in future.” The Northern finance minister, H.M.Pollock, when asked in the following year about the “ultimate unity of the country”, replied: “Through the Council of Ireland – Yes. North and South would be brought into constant contact, and the possibilities of ultimate union are, on the whole, great.”2 That British proposal remained stillborn for the following 53 years, until it was resurrected as part of the abortive Sunningdale Agreement in 1974.

Ernest Blythe, a rare republican from a Northern Protestant background and a minister in the first Cumman na nGaedheal government, said there was no need for a full-time, permanent post in the Free State government for North-South cooperation. One consequence of this extraordinary short-sightedness was that there was no senior Dublin official responsible for and/or knowledgeable about Northern Ireland affairs for nearly 50 years, leading to ignorance, confusion and panic in the Irish cabinet when the ‘Troubles’ broke out there in the summer of 1969.

Oliver MacDonagh’s view was that “Britain’s ultimate objectives in the 1921 [Anglo-Irish] negotiations were to keep Ireland within the empire, and to maintain the system of imperial defence intact. The fate of the Ulster Protestants was a secondary concern…Thus in return for an oath of allegiance to the Crown, no larger measure of independence than dominionhood for the Irish Free State, and three naval bases, the British government was prepared to coerce Northern Ireland into either some form of union with the remainder of the island or the cession of (in all likelihood) something between 30 and 45% of its total territory” [through the ill-fated Boundary Commission]. MacDonagh concluded that any far-sighted British statesman should have seen that this would be preferable to storing up future trouble by keeping the six counties of Northern Ireland intact.3

During the debates on the Anglo-Irish Treaty in January 1922, it seems extraordinarily revealing of the already partitionist mindset of most TDs that less than 3% of speaking time was devoted to the North. Things had not improved by 1935, when Taoiseach Eamon de Valera admitted in the Dail in relation to ending partition, “we have no plan…by which we can inevitably bring about the union of this country.”4 Four years later, in a speech to the Seanad, he said he would not sacrifice 26 county sovereignty or the policy of gaelicisation for the possibility of unity.

In June 1940, with the German threat to Britain at its height, an emissary from British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, Malcolm McDonald, came to Dublin with an offer to De Valera. If the Free State joined the Allies and set up an All-Ireland Defence Council, Britain would immediately declare its acceptance of the principle of a united Ireland and create a North-South body to work out the practical details of such unity. De Valera and his cabinet rejected the proposal, sceptical about the British government’s ability to deliver the Unionists.

Northern premier James Craig may have angrily rejected such a proposal. But Henry Patterson writes that Basil Brooke, a future prime minister, had told his son that faced with the choice between the destruction of ‘western civilisation’ by the Nazis and Irish unification, he would have had to accept the latter. However De Valera’s preference for maintaining the neutrality of the 26-county state (a popular position in the country) and the unity of Fianna Fail, which would have split over any jettisoning of that neutrality, saw the end of “a historic opportunity to undermine partition.”5

Then in April 1949 came the South’s witless departure from the Commonwealth, nine months before India declared itself a republic and stayed in the Commonwealth. Predictably, this was followed by legislation in the Westminster parliament to consolidate Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom.

The implications of leaving the Commonwealth for further alienating the unionists didn’t seem to have occurred to Fine Gael Taoiseach John A.Costello or his external affairs minister Sean MacBride. British prime minister Clement Attlee concluded that “the government of Eire considered the cutting of the last links which united Eire to the British Commonwealth was a more important objective of policy than ending partition.”6 The ultimate irony was that 1949 also marked the launch of the Irish government’s hopeless international anti-partition campaign.

In 1959 the new Taoiseach, Sean Lemass – who would overturn the old nationalist taboos by seeking friendly relations with the Northern unionist government – told the British ambassador that “a great number of mistakes have been made here in relation to Northern Ireland.” In 1967 the Committee on the Constitution recommended the replacement of Article 3 of the Irish Constitution with the more conciliatory wording: “The Irish nation hereby proclaims its firm will that its territory be re-united in harmony and brotherly affection between all Irishmen.” (Women were not considered!) This was not well received by the ruling Fianna Fail party and no action was taken on it. 31 years and three and a half thousand deaths in the North later, an almost identical wording was voted into the Constitution by the Irish electorate, following the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Are we done with Irish governments making grave errors in their Northern policies? I fear not. I fear that some Sinn Fein-led government in the near future will pile pressure on the British government to hold a premature, ill-prepared Border poll on unity. And people in the South need to actually want unity with the difficult Northerners, something I have doubts about after more than 50 years of conversations with Southern friends and colleagues. I believe that not much has changed since Frank McDermot, a rare independent TD who argued in the 1930s for persuading rather than coercing the unionists, said “the question of curing the evil of partition is our own job and nobody else’s job. If we are to undertake it, the first essential is that we should be in earnest about it, that we shall really want the reunion of Ireland on a voluntary basis.”7

1 Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798-1998: War, Peace and Beyond, p.277

2 Paul Bew, Ireland: the Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, p.

3 Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: Two Centuries of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1780-1980, p.136

4 Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘De Valera’s Long Shadow’, Irish Times Weekend, 23 August

5 Henry Patterson, Ireland since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p.58

6 Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, p.455

7 Clare O’Halloran, Partition and the Limits of Irish Nationalism, p.165

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

‘The hate is starting to feel like a storm’ – when they start beating Indian immigrants, I am ashamed to be Irish

Posted on Wednesday, 6 August, 2025 by andypollak

For the past fortnight I have been ashamed to be Irish. The savage beating and humiliation of an Indian IT worker – only three weeks in this country – by a teenage gang in Tallaght provoked a series of messages from other people from the Indian sub-continent who had suffered similar attacks at the hands of young Irish people.

As the son of a father who was a political refugee and an Irish mother, perhaps this affects me more deeply than many 100% born and bred native Irish people. Although probably not: I imagine (and hope) that the great majority of Irish people would have reacted to that attack, like me, with the same emotions: disgust, alarm and compassion. It is a profoundly depressing and frightening development in a country that prides itself on its friendliness, inclusivity and anti-imperialist history. We were shocked at the attacks on Roma and other immigrant families in Ballymena in June, but comforted ourselves with the complacent thought that such racist hatred and violence was the work of bigoted loyalists and could never happen here. Like hell it couldn’t!

There were shocking online images of the victim dripping with blood and walking the streets with bare legs (his assailants had torn his trousers off). He kept saying: “I came here to make a living and live in peace. I was just walking to my place of worship. What wrong have I done, why me?” Videos of the bloodied man were quickly put up, alongside claims by a so-called ‘journalist’ that he had been acting inappropriately around children before the attack. The gardai said this was a blatant untruth.1

Below is a heart-breaking letter put up on LinkedIn by the distinguished Cork-based Pakistani-born community activist, Fahmeda Naheed.

LETTER FROM AN INDIAN NURSE IN IRELAND – WHY WE’RE LEAVING

I don’t usually write things like this.
But today, I feel like I have to.
Not just for myself, but for my wife, my children, my friends, and that little Indian girl I saw being attacked yesterday.

We came to Ireland with dreams — not big ones.
We didn’t want luxury or fame.
Just a peaceful life.
Honest work.
A little respect.

My wife and I are both nurses. Like so many others, we left behind our families, our childhood homes, everything we knew — to come here and help. To work hard. To live quietly. To make a better future.

But now?

We’re planning to leave.

And we’re not the only ones.

In our circle alone, around 30 to 35 Indian nurses are talking seriously about quitting their jobs — some are applying to Australia, some going back to India. Even doctors are being targeted now. You might’ve seen it in the news. Or maybe not.

But we see it.

We feel it.

We live it.

Yesterday, I saw something that broke me.
A 8-year-old Indian girl, surrounded by a group of Irish boys and girls, maybe 15 or 16 years old.
They were pushing her. Bullying and laughing.
For no reason. Just because she looked different.
I helped her escape. They ran.
And I stood there shaking, wondering…

What kind of place is this becoming?

We came to Ireland to save lives — and now we’re scared to walk home after a shift.

We kept going during COVID.
We missed weddings and funerals back home to stay here and work.
We followed every law, paid every tax, waited for every visa.
We believed this was a country of kindness.

And now?

Now we’re afraid for our children.

Afraid to send them to school.

Afraid they’ll be treated like less than human — just because of their skin, their accent, their food, their culture.

We know not everyone here is like this.
We’ve met wonderful Irish people. Some have become like family.
But that kindness is starting to feel like a whisper…
…and the hate is starting to feel like a storm.

I don’t want to write this letter. I want to stay hopeful.
But hope starts to fade when you see that even an 8-year-old brown girl can be treated like she doesn’t belong.

To Ireland, please listen:

If we leave, it’s not because we don’t love this country.
It’s because this country stopped loving us back.

If you lose your nurses, your doctors, your care workers — don’t ask ‘why.’

You already know why.

We didn’t leave because of money.
We left because we’re tired of being afraid.
Tired of being ignored.
Tired of watching silence win.

There’s still time. But not much.
This isn’t about politics anymore. It’s about basic human decency.

If this letter reaches even one person who didn’t understand before — then it’s worth writing.

Immigration to Europe – and therefore Ireland – from the countries of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America is here to stay. Migration has rocketed worldwide, driven by warfare, climate change, rapid population growth in lower-income countries, advertising of opportunities on the Internet and the relative ease of travel. The demand for workers in the rich countries of Europe has also risen, as their populations fall well below the replacement rate at which population levels are stable. As a result, more and more countries are becoming dependent on migrant labour to sustain shrinking and ageing workforces.

A newly prosperous Ireland, with a falling birthrate, is part of this phenomenon. There are nearly 18,500 registered nurses and midwives here from the Indian sub-continent, nearly one fifth of the total. As somebody who has been visiting elderly relatives and friends in care homes in recent years, I can attest to the huge dependence of that sector on Indian and other developing world care workers. India has one of the world’s most developed IT sectors, and the man who was attacked in Tallaght is one of thousands who have come to work in our tech firms. My house was recently retrofitted and redecorated by an extraordinarily hard working and efficient team of builders from Romania and Brazil.

“As the competition for skilled workers heats up, many countries will have to move from grudging acceptance of economic migration to active efforts to recruit, causing more concerns about social and cultural change. How rich states manage this tension will be a key political dynamic in the coming decades”, wrote Sam Freedman in last weekend’s Observer.2

These people are the ‘new Irish’. We need them in our economy. Do we ‘old Irish’ welcome, respect and include them as equal and cherished fellow members of our society or do we marginalise, demonise and drive them out? That is the stark choice we face in the coming years.

PS David Atherton is the ‘journalist’ who claimed falsely that “a migrant was caught exposing himself to children. He is covered in blood after being taught some manners.” He writes for the right-wing website Muck Rack. Avoid anything written by this man. He is a liar and a hatemonger. He besmirches the usually honourable profession of journalism of which I was a member for many years.

1 ‘He kept saying: What wrong have I done? Why me? An Indian man is left stripped and bloodied on an Irish street’, Irish Times, 26 July

2 ‘The Truth about migrant workers: demonised but in demand, and few of us can live without them’, The Observer, 3 August

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Republic of Ireland | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Is it fanciful to imagine that Donegal might serve as a model for a harmonious united Ireland?

Posted on Thursday, 24 July, 2025 by andypollak

Is it totally fanciful to imagine that Donegal might serve as a model for a harmonious united Ireland? I have just returned after a week’s cycling in that beautiful northernmost county, where this unlikely notion was among my passing thoughts as I rode through interminable rain showers and occasional glimpses of sun across its high bogs and mountain passes, past its mighty cliffs and gorgeous beaches.

Donegal has a bit of everything from all parts of these islands. We stayed a night in Malin village, on the road to Malin Head, and were struck by its English-style village green and cosy encircling cottages, built in the mid-18th century by George Harvey, a Plantation landlord who owned a large estate of 10,000 acres .

The Scottish influence is very ancient. As early as the 6th century, St Colmcille founded a famous monastery on the island of Iona. When the O’Donnell chiefs ruled Donegal in the four centuries before the Flight of the Earls, their military might was based on ‘gallowglasses’, mercenary soldiers from the Scottish islands. With the establishment of cheap steamboat services to Scotland in the early 19th century, up to 25,000 men and women from the county’s poorer areas were travelling every year to the work as farm labourers, most of them in the Scottish lowlands, well into the 20th century. The musical and cultural links are still there, and a form of Ulster-Scots is still spoken in the Laggan district of east Donegal.

And of course Donegal is the most Irish of counties. In the 2022 census, nearly 60,000 people said they could speak Irish (up almost 2,400 on the 2012 census), although only 11,600 (20%) said they could speak it very well and nearly 19,000 (32%) said they could speak it well. The county contains numerous Gaeltacht areas, including Gweedore, the Rosses, Cloughaneely, Glencolmcille and surroundings, and the islands of Arranmore, Tory and Inishbofin. It is also rich in music, theatre and storytelling, with internationally celebrated playwrights like Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness, fiddlers like Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh (also a singer) and Tommy Peoples, the singers Enya and Daniel O’Donnell, the guitarist Rory Gallagher, and bands like Clannad and Altan.

Although 77% of the population in the 1992 census identified as Catholic, there are also small but active Church of Ireland and Presbyterian congregations scattered throughout the county. As somebody from a Presbyterian background, I was intrigued to see a small whitewashed Presbyterian church on the road to Malin Head, making it the northernmost Presbyterian church in Ireland. The Presbyterian Church in Donegal town is clearly a lively and outward looking congregation, with links to church initiatives in Liberia, Senegal and Uganda and the usual wide range of Presbyterian activities, from bowls to bible study, hospital visits to Boys Brigade.

Then there is the annual Orange Order march at Rossnowlagh, near Bundoran, which takes place a week before the ‘Twelfth’ in Northern Ireland, and is attended by thousands of Orangemen and women from Donegal, Cavan, Leitrim, Monaghan and the North. It is the largest Orange march in the Republic and in recent decades has been an unthreatening and friendly occasion with intrigued Catholic locals among the spectators (although it was suspended for eight years during the worst of the ‘Troubles’ in the 1970s). There are also marches in Raphoe, Manorcunningham, Newtowncunningham and St Johnston in east Donegal.

In that area there is a large Protestant enclave, and the culture of Orange halls, pipe bands and highland dancing classes reflects this. In the early 1970s there were sectarian incidents and threats against local Protestants, arson attacks against Orange Halls and even two nights of rioting in St Johnston in July 1972. But since the end of the ‘Troubles’ relations between the religious communities here have been generally relaxed and cordial. We are very far from the 1934 petition in this area, in which nearly 7,400 Protestants called for it to be incorporated into Northern Ireland. Most people here, and particularly younger people, are happy to be citizens of the newly liberal and prosperous Republic of Ireland (even if quite a lot of them still support the Northern Ireland football team!).

Every October there is a festival in Ballybofey and Stranorlar to celebrate Frances Browne, the largely forgotten 19th century blind poet and novelist from Stranorlar, best known for her collection of children’s stories, Granny’s Wonderful Chair. It is unique in that it features writers in Irish, English and Ulster-Scots, all three languages still spoken in the Finn Valley in east Donegal.

I don’t want to be accused of being a ‘Pollyanna’. The county returns two Sinn Féin TDs to Dáil Eireann. I know that there are many unreconstructed republicans who are proud of having sheltered ‘on the run’ IRA volunteers. During the ‘Troubles’ IRA men lived undisturbed by the Irish authorities in caravans in Lifford and ventured across the border to bomb and kill. On the other hand, I know of DUP politicians who happily spend their holidays in Donegal, with friends and relatives who are about as far from those republicans as one can get. Then there are the peacemakers: the late Fine Gael TD Paddy Harte from Raphoe was one, joining with the late Derry UDA leader Glen Barr to set up the Messines Peace Park in Belgium to remember the soldiers of the 16th Irish Division and 36th Ulster Division who fought and died side by side in the First World War.

There are darker sides of relations between settler and native in Donegal, as elsewhere. One of the highlights of my cycle trip was a visit to Glenveagh Castle and National Park, on a particularly rain-sodden day. This is a wondrous, hidden, mountainy place. The castle, built by Captain John George Adair, a Scots-Irish businessman from County Laois, between 1867 and 1873, and inhabited by its last American owner, Henry McIlhenny until the early 1980s, is beautifully maintained, giving a real glimpse of how the other 0.1% of the population lived in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The visitor centre, with its splendid café, is a model of its kind and a real refuge on a torrential day; the nice ladies at the reception desk even allowed me and my cycling companion, David Ward, to dry our soaking clothes in a back room.

‘Black Jack’ Adair was one of Ireland’s most notorious 19th century landlords. He had made his fortune buying up estates bankrupt after the great Irish Famine. He purchased Glenveagh and neighbouring Gartan (where Colmcille was born) in 1859, amassing an estate of 28,000 acres. Rows with his tenants over shooting rights and trespassing sheep led to the murder of his Scottish steward in 1861. On 3 April of that year Adair, helped by a large force of RIC constables, evicted 44 families, comprising 244 men, women and children, leaving them to wander the roads, to seek shelter in Letterkenny workhouse or eventually – for some of the younger ones – to emigrate to Australia. These were the infamous Derryveagh evictions. As a result of them, he cleared 11,600 acres of mountainous land adjacent to what is now Glenveagh National Park. Some claimed the evictions were part of Adair’s cruel effort to beautify the land around the castle and improve its view. His ambition was to create an estate and castle that surpassed Balmoral, Queen Victoria’s Scottish retreat.

Despite being a genuinely bad man, Adair prospered. He moved to New York where he set up a brokerage firm to place British loans in America at higher interest rates than those in Britain. In 1869 he married a wealthy American heiress and eight years later established the first cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle (the ‘sticking up’ bit in the far north of that state) in Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the USA, which had been cleared a few years earlier of the Commanche native people. He died in 1885, aged 62.

Further south, I took a short detour to Glenties to hear my daughter Sorcha, the Irish Times journalist, chair a session at the McGill summer school on ‘Fractured Communities’, featuring a sometimes fiery debate between two strong and articulate women, the Indian-Northern Irish broadcaster and performer Lata Sharma and the SDLP leader Claire Hannah.

However Donegal doesn’t strike me as a fractured community, unlike Northern Ireland. In the last century Catholics and Protestants might have lived largely parallel lives. Today people may worship in different churches (the not insignificant number who still worship). But they get on, they are good neighbours, even friends – I believe that is as much as we can ever hope for if and when this island is ever re-united in some form. And good neighbourliness is not a bad outcome to aim for in this imperfect world. Paddy Harte Jr, the former chair of the International Fund for Ireland, says: “Donegal’s geo-political position, with 93% of its land border shared with Northern Ireland, meant that people inevitably felt a responsibility to learn to live together – a measure of this is how they successfully navigated the tensions brought about by the NI ‘Troubles.”

Seamus Mallon always used to long for ‘a shared home place’ (the title of the memoir I helped him write) in Northern Ireland. Maybe that is what Donegal has now become. Donegal Protestants and Catholics will be shouting together for Michael Murphy and the Donegal football team when they face Kerry in the all-Ireland final at Croke Park this weekend. Just as they shouted together for Burtonport-born Packie Bonner when his save put the Republic of Ireland through to the quarter finals of the World Cup in Italy 35 years ago. Sport uniting people in their shared home place: that should be happiness and togetherness enough for the moment.

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism, Republic of Ireland, The island environment | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

We need to take a hard look at the Irish ‘Revolution’ and its relevance today if we’re contemplating unity

Posted on Tuesday, 8 July, 2025 by andypollak

One of the recurring themes of this blog is that the people and politicians of the Republic are utterly unprepared for the arrival of around 800,000 Northern Protestants and unionists into a united Ireland, and must do some hard thinking about what changes to their 26-county nationalist structures and symbols are needed if that eventuality is going to happen relatively harmoniously in the not too distant future.

Four years ago I wrote: “Guaranteeing unionists their British ties and identity in a post-unity scenario will be extremely challenging to the complacent nationalism of the present-day Republic (where in many circles ‘unionist’ is a dirty word). But it may be the only way of bringing a significant element of unionism on board. And it is very far from the unitary state Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail have traditionally been wedded to. It seems to me to involve a constitutional system somewhere along the spectrum between federalism and confederalism, with a key continuing role for the British government. In any case, these are the kind of ultra-complex arrangements – as nuanced as anything in the Good Friday Agreement – which we need to begin to discuss in this republic.

“In fact, there appears to be zero discussion here about the crucial issue of what happens to the unionists at the end of the Union as we have known it. Instead, we in the Republic sail blithely into an unexamined future with a brainless consensus that in the end the good guys of Irish nationalism will win out over the Northern bigots and stooges of British imperialism, and then we will live together happily ever after in harmonious unity.”1

One of the extremely difficult things we may have to do is to revisit the pieties of the so-called ‘revolutionary’ period between 1916 and 1923, with its total ignoring of the unionists. This is ‘holy grail’ territory for many people in the South, to be touched at your peril. This was clear in the debate in recent weeks about the development of the General Post Office site in O’Connell Street, the headquarters of the 1916 Easter Rising. Aontú called it “sacred ground” and Sinn Fein insisted that the government, which is proposing mixed commercial and cultural use for the site, had “turned its face against the preservation of our revolutionary history.”

Last year saw the publication an important ‘revisionist’ book which should have made at least some of us look at the ‘revolutionary’ period with new, more critical eyes. It was Confronting the Irish Past: The 1912-1923 Decade in Light of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement by Séamus Murphy, an Irish Jesuit priest and philosopher at Loyola University in Chicago. Unfortunately it was almost completely ignored by Irish newspaper and magazine book editors and reviewers (its exorbitant price didn’t help its circulation either).

This is a very rich, dense and iconoclastic book and I can only give a flavour of it in this short blog. Murphy believes the 1998 Agreement is “potentially the most important political event in 20th century Irish history.” Potentially because it is much too early to judge whether it has actually transformed relations between unionists and nationalists (the signs after 27 years are not good). Murphy argues that: “Such transformation requires the two communities to change their interpretations of the past, including the 1912-23 period.”

He goes on to make three claims about that period: a) “the [1916] Rising and War of Independence distracted attention from the primary problem that had stalled the implementation of Home Rule for several years, namely unionist resistance; b) the nationalist resort to arms exacerbated the unionist sense of being under siege and made partition more likely and more bitter. In consequence, it seems that c) Ireland experienced both a political step forward, with the advent of self-governance north and south, and a political step backwards, with the derailing of political activity by civil conflicts and exacerbation of intercommunal division.”

The 1912-1914 Home Rule crisis meant that no longer was nationalism’s primary challenge to “wrest power from Britain” (Home Rule was on the statute book, albeit postponed until the end of the First World War), but how to relate politically to the Protestant and unionist communities “so as to get their consent to being governed mainly by Catholics.” The 1916 Proclamation wrongly dismissed unionist opposition to Home Rule as something “artificially created by the British Government”, and “the Rising amounted to a denial that the unionist challenge even existed.”

Murphy believes hindsight “enables us to say that the long-term consequences of the 1916 Rising were largely bad.” He stresses that “the 1916 leaders are not responsible for what the Provisional IRA did between 1970 and 1998, but for the disruption of the Home Rule process and exacerbating the division between unionist and nationalist Ireland…The so-called War of Independence, while formally directed against British rule, in practice was a war against other Irish people: RIC constables, constitutional nationalists and Protestants in the north.”

He goes on: “The so-called War of Independence was pointless, given that by January 1919, before it began at [the] Soloheadbeg [ambush], senior British politicians were informally letting the new majority nationalist party, Sinn Fein, know that dominion status for Southern Ireland could be on the table: just what the Treaty provided three years later.”

Thus the war “merely achieved the minor good of speeding up the process of gaining total independence from Britain, at the cost of widening the gap between the south and the north, making Irish unity more unlikely, and violently traumatising the people.”

Looking back from the perspective of the Good Friday Agreement, agreed by the leaders of the unionist, nationalist and republican communities, Murphy says the failure of both nationalists and unionists in the 1912-23 decade was “their refusal to recognise the political right of the other community to exist…The nationalist failure manifested as ignoring or dismissing the unionist reality, the unionist failure manifested as contempt for and fear of Catholics.”

He also stresses the “native versus settler dynamic” which is still a factor in Northern Ireland today. “Protestants were acutely aware of nationalists’ long memories of dispossession, and sensed the nationalist gut-conviction that they really had no right to be in Ireland. On the Catholic nationalist side, there was some willingness to tolerate their presence – on nationalist terms: if they wouldn’t agree to such terms, the attitude could be summed up as ‘the colonists could go back to where they came from.”

Too many of the new nationalist/republican leaders dismissed unionist resistance as unreal or unimportant. De Valera said in 1920 that unionist Ulster was “a thing of the mind only.” Murphy comments “it is easy to summarise Sinn Fein’s policy on unionism: it didn’t have one.” Most, if not all SF leaders, had this blinkered view of the North. Ernest Blythe, a rare republican from a Northern Protestant background, was one of the few who didn’t. He criticised the fantasy of the Dail’s declaration, at its first meeting in 1919, that an all-Ireland republic existed. He called this “the beginning of a persistent campaign of make-believe and self-deception…it had become obvious that an All-Ireland Republic was utterly unattainable without the consent of the opposing Northern Protestants.”

This self-deception continued for 50 years until the outbreak of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. “From 1922 to at least 1972, the official view of successive Irish governments was that unionists had no right to refuse to be part of a united independent Ireland and that Northern Ireland ought not to exist…In the anti-partition campaign around 1950, nationalist politicians travelled the world to present their case for territorial unification to bemused governments. Haranguing the outside world while ignoring unionists achieved only one thing: it confirmed unionists’ conviction that the nationalists were besieging them.”

The official Irish government view – and, it has to be said, the overwhelming popular view – remains that the foundation of the Irish state lay in the 1916 Rising and that “Home Rule constitutionalism was valueless, contributing nothing to the birth of the Irish state and the culture of democratic republicanism.” Home Rulers and the RIC are “excommunicated from nationalist community memory…if contemporary nationalism cannot recognise those groups, its promise to recognise unionism lacks credibility.”

In parallel with this make-believe by Irish governments, “after 1922 the nationalist/unionist divide was worse, with no hope of its resolution. The alleged success of arms in the 1916-22 period has given a cultural hegemony to the armed force tradition that it did not previously have.”

Murphy urges nationalists and unionists to “acknowledge the other tradition as part of Irish society with a right to exist and be respected, even if they might wish the other tradition did not exist. That would be demanding enough for many nationalists and unionists.” He believes that “finding peace in mutual toleration is the modest limited goal to set. Speaking as if all differences can be dissolved is to engage in fantasy, which hinders the goal of live-and-let-live policy.”

“At least up to the 1970s, southern nationalists held that, while Protestants as such were welcome, unionists did not belong; that to claim to be both Irish and British was self-contradictory; and that being a unionist was at least misguided, if not morally wrong. Up to the 1970s, the unionist conviction was that Catholics were socially backward and did not fit in Northern Ireland, since they refused to own it, and hence could never be trusted as equal citizens. Education to counter those stereotypes is slow but has had some effect.”

During the Decade of Centenaries the Fine Gael-led government strongly rejected Sinn Fein claims that the Provisional IRA were the direct descendants of the old War of Independence IRA, and thus their use of violence to complete the unfinished business of Irish freedom and unity was legitimate. Seamus Murphy disagrees: “Government insistence that the foundation of the state lies in the actions of a violent and explicitly non-democratic minority in 1916 is its bowing to the ideological supremacy of the IRA tradition, and accepting its hegemony. That fact is not changed merely by the IRA ceasing operations.” He accuses Irish governments of commemorating violent events, but “neglecting the political and constitutional achievements and the peace-makers.”

He also objects to the “aura of romance and glory” talk of the ‘Irish Revolution’ conveys (quite apart from the fact that it was an extraordinarily conservative ‘revolution’ with little social change dimension). “Commemoration along revolutionary lines can be neither inclusive nor reconciliatory. Endorsing certain kinds of political killing as revolutionary and therefore justified is inconsistent with the 1998 Agreement’s commitment to compromise and recognition of the other: inherently non-revolutionary values…Commemoration should promote ‘justice, equality, parity of esteem, tolerance, a better understanding of other groups, and (to the extent possible) healing of memories.”

He is also strongly critical of memorials to republican and loyalist paramilitaries that glorify them without mentioning their victims; this inflicts “a second symbolic death” on those victims. He contrasts this with efforts to mutually recognise the suffering – murder, maiming and trauma – inflicted across the sectarian divide. He singles out the “great work” of David McKittrick and other journalists in their book, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles, which he says should be easily and cheaply available, but in fact is scandalously out of print.

Murphy finishes by asking a key question: “Does the way in which a particular historical event or figure is remembered and commemorated benefit or harm contemporary society’s cultural and political life?” His answer is that only when the events of 1912-23 are evaluated against such values as peace, democracy, pluralism, tolerance, recognition of the other, development of an identity to be proud of, and respect for the rule of law (in essence, the values of the Good Friday Agreement) “have we made serious progress in coming to terms with, confronting and adapting our history for the needs of the living.”

Murphy is a passionate advocate for the Good Friday Agreement, with its purposes of “political reconciliation, enough acceptance and mutual recognition between nationalists, unionists and others so that a live-and-let-live political community can be built.” He believes its philosophy clashes with both the 1912 Ulster Covenant and the 1916 Proclamation, both of which “implicitly rejected the identity, existence and rights of the other community” and thus are “implicated in the violence of that decade and of subsequent decades up to 1998.” There was no recognition in either of these foundational documents that two distinct, even opposed traditions existed on this island and both sides had to accept the other tradition’s right to be such a distinct community. The 1998 Agreement “represents a long-belated rejection of the resort to arms of unionists and nationalists against each other. If that resort was wrong in the 1970-98 period, it must have been wrong in the 1912-23 period.”

He says that Pearse and his fellow cultural nationalists’ “blood-soil-spirit view held that a country in principle could not contain two national identities, since a nation’s identity, land and sovereignty formed an indissoluble unity. No wonder unionists felt there would be no room for them.” He recalls the “almost apocalyptic expression of their terror of being absorbed into the rising cultural nationalism which had no place for their culture.” The Good Friday Agreement “expresses a diametrically opposed view: one can choose one’s identity, and self-identify as Irish, British or both – in effect, whatever one pleases.”

This Northern-born Protestant is proud to be Irish (while understanding some unionist fears about becoming a smallish minority in a nationalist united Ireland). In politics I like how a friend, a distinguished lawyer, chooses to describe himself as a “left-wing, peace-loving Redmondite”. I don’t think the majority of people in this republic are going to heed Seamus Murphy and me for one second when it comes to their hallowed ‘revolutionary’ period. But a few outspoken deviants are always a healthy sign in a democracy.

1 ‘My single transferable blog: the people of the South are not ready for reunification,’ 1 November 2021

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Republic of Ireland | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

My home town of Ballymena is a citadel of racism and bigotry

Posted on Friday, 13 June, 2025 by andypollak

Ballymena is my home town. I left it as a small child when my parents took me to London, and I have lived for most of the past 50 years in Dublin. But, for better or worse, it still has a special place in my affections. Like most Irish towns, it has its fair share of lovely, kind people, including some, among them members of my family, who have taken in Ukrainian refugees.

But it is also a place of ugliness, bigotry and hatred, as was shown on Monday of this week when a peaceful protest over an alleged serious sexual assault against a local girl degenerated into a full-scale race riot. Two 14 year old Romanian boys had earlier appeared in court charged with attempted rape. The charges were read to the teenagers by a Romanian interpreter (they denied them).

That was the alarm signal, quickly disseminated by social media . For the next two evenings hundreds of young men – some of them members of the UDA, many masked and hooded – attacked homes in normally peaceful streets where several immigrant families – Romanian, Bulgarian, Filipino and others – lived. They battered down doors, smashed windows and attempted to set fire to houses, some of which had families with children inside. One terrified family of eleven – including three children – barricaded themselves into an attic while attackers broke in and rampaged downstairs. On a recording played on the BBC Stephen Nolan show, listeners heard a man’s voice saying: “There’s someone in that room inside.” A female voice replied: “Aye, but are they local? If they’re local, they need out. If they’re not local, let them stay there.”

David, a 28-year-old Polish man, told Rory Carroll of the Guardian: “The crowd was banging on the door and we were all upstairs. Two Polish and Bulgarian families – about 12 people in all – had clustered together for safety and wedged a sofa against the front door when the mob smashed windows and set fire to the living room, he said. “I smelled the smoke. We came down and ran out the back door to the police station.”

The violence spread to the quiet Protestant village of Cullybackey, three and a half miles outside Ballymena. Kevin Rous, a Filipino man on the night shift in the Wrightbus factory in the town, who lives in the village, got a call at work around midnight. His wife and two small children were awoken from sleep by men burning a car and attacking the front of their house. “I don’t feel safe living in Northern Ireland now,” he said. “We feel extreme fear. I say to all of them [the rioters] – we are not here to destroy your community. We are here legally. We are are far away from the Philippines. I work here as a mechanic. We’re not here to give trouble.”

41 police officers were injured in the riots. PSNI Assistant Chief Constable, Ryan Henderson, called the attacks “racist thuggery pure and simple, and any attempt to justify or explain it as something else is misplaced.” Liam Kelly, chair of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, which represents officers, said the police had prevented “a pogrom with consequences too painful to contemplate.” As the attacks on businesses, homes and cars spread to other towns, Henderson said the under-staffed PSNI had requested support from other UK police forces, and 80 Scottish officers were due to arrive in the North.

In the event, violence decreased somewhat on Wednesday night, although a leisure centre in Larne, which had provided overnight shelter for two immigrant families fleeing Ballymena, was badly damaged when it was set on fire by masked youths. There were calls for the resignation of the DUP Minister for Communities (and MLA for the Larne area), Gordon Lyons, after he posted on Facebook that “a number of individuals” from Ballymena had been temporarily moved to Larne. PSNI Chief Constable, Jon Boutcher, warned the “bigots and racists” behind three nights of disorder that his officers “will come after you.”

In contrast, the condemnation of the violence by Ballymena’s DUP deputy mayor, Tyler Hoey, was a qualified one. He said foreigners were welcome in the town, but accused the UK government of allowing “busloads” of unvetted people to settle there. “Unfettered immigration needs to be addressed”, he said. Some locals interviewed by the Guardian accused the authorities of turning the town into a “dumping ground” for immigrants and asylum seekers.

A Queen’s University Belfast education lecturer, Dr Rebecca Loader, had a different view. She told the Belfast Telegraph‘s crime reporter, Allison Morris: “Grim scenes in Ballymena, a town that had exactly zero people in receipt of asylum support in 2024. No ‘illegals’ (not that any human should be seen that way); literally everyone was born there or was a legal migrant or refugee.”

Morris compared local immigrant families putting Union flags in their windows in an attempt to escape their houses being attacked, to the Israelites in ancient Egypt putting the blood of a sacrificial lamb on their doors so that God would “pass over” their houses, sparing their firstborn sons, while killing the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. One rioter was heard saying: “You’ve the flag up, so you should be OK.”

Blanka Harneaga, a 38 year old immigrant from the Czech Republic and mother of five, was one of those who put a British flag in her living room window. Did it work? “We’re still here”, she said with a wry smile. I couldn’t help comparing her to my father, who arrived as a political refugee at my mother’s home outside Ballymena from what was then Czechoslovakia in 1948, and was warmly welcomed by her extended family and neighbours.

These ugly happenings make me ashamed of my birthplace. The last time Ballymena hit the headlines, it was also as a result of an upsurge of bigotry and hatred. In December 1996 around 300 loyalists harassed people attending Saturday night mass in a Catholic church in the working class district of Harryville, a short distance from the scene of the latest riots. Catholics were dragged from their cars and roughed up, petrol bombs were thrown at the police and a burning bus blocked the road to Belfast. Local loyalists had picketed the church for the previous 12 weeks in protest at a police ban on an Orange parade through the largely Catholic village of Dunloy, north west of the town. I reported on that relatively minor affray – by the violent standards of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ – for the Irish Times.

Why do loyalists keep displaying this hate-filled face to the world? This latest riot stems from racial hatred, just as one of the first major acts of violence of the ‘Troubles’, the burning of Bombay Street in Catholic West Belfast in August 1969 by loyalist mobs, stemmed from sectarian hatred. Such actions only confirm the image much of the outside world has of Northern Ireland loyalists as ‘beyond the pale’ thugs and bigots. It is fair comment to say that for a community that has few friends in the world anyway, the violent goings on in Ballymena this week will have done absolutely nothing to maintain the few friendships they do have. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom – and particularly to the UK monarchy – is an entirely legitimate political position. Why do they allow it to be sullied by such extremism and violence?

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

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 , , , , , | 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

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

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | Tagged , , , , | 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 (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 12Th 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 pp

“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 12th 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 the 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.

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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?

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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

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