We have a kind of peace in the North, but ingrained hatreds live on

Posted on Monday, 15 July, 2024 by andypollak

The results of the British general election in Northern Ireland confirmed what we already know. The DUP is in deep trouble: the loss of three of its heartland seats in Lagan Valley (the constituency of its former leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, now charged with historical sexual offences), North and South Antrim is a further body blow. It is good to see the back of Ian Paisley junior, whose career, in Belfast Telegraph columnist Sam McBride’s words, was characterised by “swagger, hubris and greed.” Extraordinarily, for a statelet that was set up over a century ago specifically to carve out an interminable unionist majority, Sinn Fein – formerly the party of the IRA – are now the North’s largest party in the House of Commons (where, of course, they don’t take their seats), in the Stormont Assembly and on local councils.

So I am going to return to last month’s big Ireland’s Future rally in Belfast, which I touched on briefly in last month’s blog. I have come across three recent articles (thanks to my friend Padraig Yeates for pointing them out) which criticise that movement for Irish unity from different angles. The first is from Sam McBride, for my money the best and most thoughtful journalist in Northern Ireland.1

McBride recounts being on his way to a Belfast leisure centre to play football recently and being confronted by three young boys, aged no more than 10, chanting ‘Up the Ra’ at him. It appeared that what they were objecting to was an old England cricket jersey he was wearing. In vain did he try to explain that he had bought it when Ed Joyce, one of the greatest ever Irish batsmen, had become the first Irishman in modern times to play for England, then the only route for an Irishman to play Test cricket. Presumably they thought he was English and shouted all the louder.

“These were youngsters no older than my own children, so I didn’t feel threatened, yet it was depressing to see children born so long after the end of the Troubles chanting support for a group that slaughtered the innocent.

“Some people think because Northern Ireland is now peaceful, this is harmless – the equivalent of football supporters screaming abuse at each other at a match and then sharing the train home. It’s not. Even in the sunshine of post-Troubles Northern Ireland, there is the omnipresent shadow of darkness. For now it is mercifully faint, but only the most historically ignorant would dismiss the potential for what starts as children taught to hate ending in savagery.

“Plenty of people in Northern Ireland scarcely even comprehend their own deep prejudices. Indeed, there is a conceit that those of us who have lived most of our lives since the Good Friday Agreement are almost immune to the barbarity of our ancestors. This arrogance is not new; history records myriad cycles of bloodshed between which there has often been the sense that this time things are different and what has gone before is now unthinkable. Each time, that hope has given way to butchery.” [This is not unique to Northern Ireland: look at what is happening in much of Europe now with the rise of the far right – who are often apologists for fascists and Nazis – in countries like France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Hungary. And let’s not forget the civil war in the former Yugoslavia].

McBride goes on: “Once the killing starts, there is what the late Belfast psychiatrist Professor Ed Cairns described as a ‘welling up of deep unconscious forces’ where fear and folk history fuel a seemingly unstoppable cycle of murder and retribution. As someone who plans to spend the rest of my life in Belfast, and who remembers the final years of the Troubles, I hope my children will grow old in a Northern Ireland where that deadly cycle has for ever been broken. But hoping isn’t enough”.

He then recounts a story about a yacht which sailed recently into Portballintrae on the north Antrim coast, “a sleepy holiday village brimming with the second homes of Belfast’s upper middle classes.” Within hours, the boat’s owner, Conor Costelloe, had lost the vessel, which was also his home, after it was burnt, seemingly because it was flying the Irish flag. He feared for his life and is now homeless after what the PSNI described as ‘a sectarian hate crime.”

Such deeply ingrained prejudice leading to constant low-level sectarian attacks is “just an accepted, if regrettable, fact of life” in Northern Ireland, says McBride. He then quotes the former UDA man David Adams who in a brutally honest recent article in the Irish Times reflected: “The vast majority of young people in Northern Ireland, on both sides, regardless of personal experience, upbringing, intellect and whether they were endowed with common sense, were able to retain a clear enough sense of decency to steer well clear of paramilitaries. I wasn’t.” Looking back on what he had done, he said: “I am thoroughly ashamed of it and regrets are never too far away… Do I apologise for my past? Yes, unreservedly.”2

Adams, who has expressed himself open to Irish unity, spoke at last month’s Ireland’s Future rally. He told the meeting that Ireland’s Future was dangerously downplaying the need for reconciliation in Northern Ireland and underestimating the potential for violence if Irish unity is bungled.

He asked: “Does anyone seriously believe two million unreconciled northerners can be injected into the political and social bloodstream of the progressive, liberal democracy to the south of us, and everything will be fine?” McBride reports that Adams urged republicans “not to see reconciliation as some sort of unionist Trojan horse to delay Irish unity, but as desperately necessary if those of us now alive are to play our part in breaking the hatreds that live on, even as the guns are silent.”

Former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told the same rally that republicans should make a “stronger, specific apology for what was done” by the IRA, something, he said, that could “help to change hearts and minds.” McBride comments: “The irony is if that happened, it would probably make Irish unity easier by helping to persuade some of the centrist voters who will decide a future Border poll. But more importantly it would also maybe mean that children might be less likely to chant about killers in the face of a stranger.”

The second article was by the Northern comedian, Jake O’Kane, in the Irish News.3 He felt obliged to “highlight the elephant in the Odyssey Arena – namely, the glaring lack of participation from unionist politicians.”

“Ireland’s Future appears to view the one million citizens who continue to identify not as Irish but as British as an inconvenience to be ignored. But make no mistake: if reunification is to be achieved, reaching out to that demographic is a challenge which must be surmounted. While nowhere near as glitzy, events such as those held during the West Belfast Fleadh, where unionist politicians of all hues are invited to speak, come closer to achieving that aim. Whilst doing a show during the fleadh years ago, I noticed that practically all the door staff had disappeared. On enquiring why, the head of security explained that [DUP MP] Gregory Campbell was in a debate on Irish reunification at the same time, and they’d believed it was wise to move staff to that event.”

O’Kane was impressed by Campbell’s courage and was not surprised that he had been given a respectful hearing by the audience on the night. He said the answer to our division would never arise from “political echo chambers” such as the Ireland’s Future event.- “it will come from those who attempt, difficult as it is, to understand and reach out to their enemy.”

The third article was by Patrick Murphy, a regular Irish News commentator and former director of Belfast Institute of Further and Higher Education.4 He is sceptical of “mass rallies for constitutional change” because “they are rather like a religious belief: never mind your troubles in this life, all will be well in the heaven of a united Ireland.”

He pointed out that 32% of West Belfast’s children live in poverty, and the Audit Office reports “little sustained progress” from the NI Executive in tackling this. “Child poverty here results largely from the Tories restricting welfare benefits to the first two children in most households. Stormont introduced that policy here and two Executive parties (Sinn Fein and Alliance) spoke at the Ireland’s Future conference – neither addressed the problem. Child poverty does not represent a failed Northern state. It represents a failed Northern government. Dublin’s failed government has left one in seven children in poverty in the South” [in 2022].

He went on: “Constitutional change does not imply social or economic advancement. The last monster rallies in Ireland were held by Daniel O’Connell for Catholic emancipation. In 1829 he achieved his aim, promising a new Ireland. 20 years later a million emancipated Catholics died of starvation and another million emigrated. Their ‘freedom’ counted for little during the Famine. The rich lived and the poor died.”

Echoing W.B. Yeats during the War of Independence, Murphy forecast: “There will be rich and poor in a constitutionally-led united Ireland.”

1 ‘Guns are silent now, but ingrained hatreds live on in Northern Ireland’, Sunday Independent, 23 June

2 ‘I am ashamed of my paramilitary past. I won’t be writing about it again’, Irish Times, 10 June

3 ‘It will take more than glitzy Ireland’s Future meetings to achieve reunification – unionists and reconciliation, for a start’, Irish News, 22 June

4 ‘Ireland’s future appears more important than Ireland’s present’, Irish News, 22 June

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 2 Comments

The dreadful state of the Northern Ireland health service: an argument for unity – or convergence?

Posted on Thursday, 27 June, 2024 by andypollak

I was at the big Ireland’s Future rally in Belfast earlier this month. The line-up of speakers was impressively broad and sometimes not obviously nationalist: from former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to former Alliance leader Lord John Alderdice, from the SDLP’s Claire Hanna to DUP founder member Wallace Thompson, from Irish Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik to GAA president Jarlath Burns.

However the most powerful speech I heard was not from a politician about Irish unity, but from a doctor about the dreadful state of the Northern Ireland health service. It came from Tom Black, a GP in Derry’s Bogside for 35 years and chair of the British Medical Association in Northern Ireland (speaking in a personal capacity).

Dr Black started by quoting a recent article in the Economist. This warned: “If you are ever in Northern Ireland, pray that you never need a gallbladder removal, a neurology appointment or a hip replacement. For these treatments, patients routinely face waits of several years to be seen. Hospital waiting lists, on which the equivalent of a quarter of the population languish, are just the tip of the province’s healthcare crisis. According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, three times as many people died due to delays in emergency departments in 2022 as did during the worst year of the Troubles. General practice and social care are also on the brink. People still love the National Health Service (or Health and Social Care, as it is officially known in Northern Ireland). Increasingly, however, they admire a service that no longer exists.”1

Why is the Northern Ireland health service so bad? asked Dr Black. In the NHS in the UK as a whole, there is a 15% deficit of £32 billion annually due to many years of Tory government austerity policies and cutbacks. Half the UK’s hospital beds have been closed in the past 30 years, which means that France now has proportionately twice as many hospital beds, Germany three times and Japan four times. The UK has a below average number of doctors and nurses, and the lowest number of CT and MRI scanners per person among 16 comparable developed countries.

Northern Ireland now has the worst waiting lists in Britain and Ireland. Compared to the Republic, outpatient waiting times are twice as long (four times as long for those waiting more than 12 months); inpatient waiting times are three times as long (and an amazing 11 times as long for those waiting more than 12 months).

The North desperately needs an increase in Westminster funding for health, rather than the 2.3% cut this year which the NI Executive was forced to impose. Another factor is the very small (although growing from a low base) private healthcare sector in the North. “The biggest problem we have at the moment in Northern Ireland is that for cancer patients only 30% begin treatment within the 62 day target,” said Dr Black. “As a result we’re seeing huge numbers of late presentations with metastatic cancer [cancer which has spread to other parts of the body] where no primary cancer can be identified. As they say in Derry ‘they are riddled with it.”

Dr Black summarised the situation in NI as follows: “We can’t fix the waiting lists and they will get longer. We have no hope of competing with the Republic’s Sláintecare programme – we are East Germany and they are West. We have no hope of increased funding from the UK. We have no hope of local politicians recognising the problem and taking action. We have a collusion of anonymity with the the public, the politicians, the media and those in authority refusing to recognise the disaster that is the NHS in Northern Ireland. We need to stop pretending that we have a universal health service – it isn’t one and the only thing worse than an absent service is a pretend service.” He said many of his patients in Derry would prefer to die at home than go to the city’s Altnagelvin hospital. He said many GP practices were being forced to close because they couldn’t survive on the 5.4% share allocated to them under the province’s health budget.

One of the solutions Dr Black proposes (along with more private health insurance and the NHS to admit that it is no longer a universal service and must focus on particular specialities) is more cross-border health services. Because in contrast to the Tory cuts in the UK, investment in the Southern health service in recent years has soared, particularly since the Sláintecare programme started in 2017, and even more since the Covid pandemic. The initial impression was that the governing party, Fine Gael, were lukewarm about Sláintecare – agreed as an all-party programme – but having to deal with Covid, plus the massive inflows of corporate tax revenue into the government’s coffers in recent years, changed all that.

There are now far more doctors in the system than ever before. Consultants being paid €250,000 and more has seen a steady inflow of such senior doctors from abroad, including many from from Northern Ireland. The number of advanced nurse practitioners has also increased. The Republic’s health service now has one of the highest levels of foreign-born staff in the world, and care has only improved as a result. Care in the community, another emphasis of Sláintecare, has also improved significantly.

Cancer care is a notable success story. The number of cancer centres was reduced from 30 to eight, the quality of care has improved greatly, and Ireland now compares well with the better EU countries. The Health Service Executive is trying to develop similar integrated care strategies for other major diseases.

The Republic is not free from the challenges facing healthcare providers everywhere in the Western world: the population getting older, leading to more people with complex health needs, needing expensive treatments, with the cost of drugs sky high. Waiting lists in some hospitals are still unacceptably high, and many patients still wait long hours on trolleys before they are seen. But the Irish government has been fortunate in recent years for the sheer amount of money it can spend on its health service.

Is there an important message in Dr Black’s call for more cross-border health services for those of us who want to see the two peoples and the two jurisdictions in Ireland moving peacefully together? In a recent paper, that excellent academic researcher into Northern Ireland and the politics of Irish unity, Professor Jennifer Todd of UCD, reported on four years of conversations with groups of women, young people and migrants, north and south – who are disengaged from constitutional discussions – about constitutional change in Ireland. The participants emphasised that “issues of practical life – bread and butter issues and rights, not primarily identity and institutions” were the priorities for them. One of the research project’s findings was that “any model of a united Ireland that did not alleviate present problems of cross-border healthcare would not be good enough.”2

A small start has been made here, although it is an almost completely unsung story. The Cooperation and Working Together (CAWT) border region network of health boards and trusts has been collaborating across the border for more than 30 years on a range of services. These have included exchanges of doctors, nurses and patients (the latter crossing the border for surgery); cross-border cooperation in some mainstream services, such as Ear Nose and Throat (ENT); joint planning for services where the need exists in both jurisdictions, notably a cross-border radiotherapy centre and a cross-border emergency cardiac service at Altnagelvin hospital in Derry; and an all-island paediatric heart surgery unit at Crumlin hospital in Dublin.

Why don’t we in the Republic adopt a policy of moving towards a convergence of some of the most important medical and hospital services on the island to illustrate in the most noble and practical way possible – through the improved healthcare of the ordinary people of Ireland – that collaborating on an island basis works to the huge benefit of all? I believe that would convert incomparably more people – including those ordinary people who are unionists – to the cause of eventual Irish unity than all the nationalist rhetoric and vague promises coming from the likes of Ireland’s Future.

A final word from Dr Black on the importance of the National Health Service in Northern Ireland: “The NHS is about more than just healthcare. It is part of our social fabric, part of the glue that holds society together – it’s how we look after the vulnerable, those suffering and dying. Failure to provide a high quality health service will undermine confidence in our democratic society. Why would you pay your taxes if the sick and vulnerable are not being looked after in this way? Why would you vote for parties who are not prepared to look after the vulnerable?”

1 ‘Half of Northern Irish patients wait over a year for treatment, The Economist, 30 May

2 ‘Introduction: Democracy, disengagement and disjunctures. publicpolicy.ie/governance/Irish-policy-making-and-planning-for-a-possible-future-united-Ireland/

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 1 Comment

Why I am glad to see the Sinn Féin vote cratering in the Republic

Posted on Thursday, 13 June, 2024 by andypollak

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised when I say that I am glad to see the Sinn Féin vote cratering in the local and (to a lesser extent) European elections in the Republic. 12% in those local elections is some dive downwards from the mid-30s high of opinion polls in recent years. I do not see this development through the eyes of the Dublin resident that I am, but from the viewpoint of a non-republican Northerner.

I have never believed that the militarists and ultra-nationalists of Sinn Féin were the people to lead us towards a relatively consensual and harmonious Irish unity. With their absolute lack of contrition for the hundreds of people killed by the Provisional IRA – indeed their glorification of that sanguinary organisation – they are the last people to persuade any element of unionism, the main continuing obstacle to that hoped-for outcome, to come on board. The idea that Sinn Féin can lead Ireland to unity is simply magical thinking.

To give one illustrative example: a Northern Protestant friend, who is that incredibly rare thing, an Irish republican from Belfast’s loyalist Shankill Road, says: “When casting my PR votes, I always place the DUP last, not least because they have never disowned the bitter sectarian hatred of ‘that man of sin’, Ian Paisley. Why should I make an exception for Sinn Féin, who have never criticized the ‘armed struggle’ that led to the deaths of so many innocents? I’ll tell you this, as one with a close ear to
unionist opinion, the prospect of Sinn Féin in government in the South will set back my longing for unity by generations.”

The best people to lead us towards unity are the moderate nationalists of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. Tánaiste Micheál Martin has showed us the way with his Shared Island project. With a bit of luck, the coalition of those parties with the Greens will be returned to power in an election later this year (or early next at the latest), and that important initiative, based on practical projects for the mutual social and economic benefit of the people of both jurisdictions, will continue, expand and slowly make more converts in the unionist community.

In contrast Mary Lou McDonald’s judgement is deeply flawed, and this is before we even consider Northern Ireland. She and her senior Sinn Féin colleagues have made a lot of mistakes in recent months and years: her support for the criminal (and briefly Dublin Sinn Féin councillor) Jonathan Dowdall; the decision to run too few candidates in the 2020 general election and too many in some constituencies this time; the rash of lawsuits by her and other senior party figures against the media and political opponents; the pointless motion of no confidence in Justice Minister Helen McEntee after the Dublin riots last November; her proposal to bring down house prices in Dublin to an average of €300,000 (now abandoned); the party’s support for the government’s disastrous family and care referendums in March and promise to hold them again if defeated (now reversed). It is little wonder that for the first time in this fiercely hierarchical party there are open grass roots rumblings about her leadership.

Returning to the North, I am reminded of the wise words of Brian Barrington, the Dublin lawyer who was Seamus Mallon’s legal advisor when he was Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister. Barrington said in 2018: “Just as it was important in 1998 [when negotiating the Good Friday Agreement] to ensure institutions in Northern Ireland in which nationalists participated as equals, so it is vital to design institutions of government in which unionists participate as equals in a future united Ireland. Everything that nationalists sought to reflect their identity and ethos in the North as part of the United Kingdom, they must equally afford to unionists in a united Ireland. That makes sense because whether we are in a United Kingdom or a united Ireland, we will have hundreds of thousands of people who are British and unionist and – as of moral and legal right – will continue to be so. These people are entitled to the reassurance of knowing – now – what a united Ireland will mean for them.” He urged that the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement should continue in a united Ireland unless and until nationalists and unionists by cross-community consent agreed to change them. This would mean the British government continuing to have a say in matters that are not devolved to a future Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly in the way the Irish government does now.

Barrington went on: “This is not just about planning for a united Ireland that may never happen, but also about sending a message to both main communities now: whether in a united Ireland or a United Kingdom, the need for nationalists and unionists to live and govern together as neighbours and partners will remain.”

“It is also urgent that this message comes from constitutional nationalists, and especially the main Southern parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, and that it comes now. Because uncertainly breeds fear and suspicion, and given the violent history of this island, unionists have reason to be afraid. Moreover promises from Sinn Fein hold no value for unionists…Sinn Féin may see this as unfair, but it is the toxic legacy of the armed struggle that they supported for so long. This commitment will only have value if it is given by the constitutional parties. It is they, not Sinn Féin, who must write the policy for the protection of British people on this island. And they should start doing it now.”1

Of course none of this is of any interest to the vast majority of Southern electors. Most people here now see Sinn Féin as just another left-of-centre nationalist party, not unlike Fianna Fail in the 1920s and 1930s. They see the former party of the IRA moving towards the centre on issues like the economy, the EU and immigration, and leaving the space at the radical end of the political spectrum to conservative independents and small far-left and far-right parties.

The significance of the appearance for the first time of the far-right in the Republic – while obviously not as terrifyingly evident as on the continent – is a matter for debate. That debate was summed up by two contributions on the same page of the Irish Times on 11th June. Fintan O’Toole pointed out that anti-immigrant candidates took around 15% of the vote between them in Dublin, and that Dublin City Council will now have three councillors elected on anti-immigrant platforms. He said the main reason Ireland did not have a significant far-right party was “not because we are a peculiarly lovely people. It was (mostly) because Sinn Féin was occupying the space where a far-right party would be.”

He called this “the doubleness of Sinn Féin. On the one hand it drew on the same kind of ethno-nationalist identity politics that now fuel the far-right across Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Yet on the other, it thought of itself as a progressive, socialist party, committed to equality and inclusion.” He gave credit to the party for not exploiting the growing resentment against immigrants in recent years. However he warned that sectarian fanaticism and violent tribalism have always been present in Ireland, and “there’s as much of a market for the zero-sum politics of scapegoating and tribal resentment in Ireland as there is in Britain, the US or continental Europe.”

Underneath his column, the former Irish ambassador to Britain, Bobby McDonagh, was more sanguine. He wrote about the “exaggerated attention” to and “marginal support” of the far-right, and “conservative nationalist candidates who have foregrounded the immigration issue [and] have performed somewhat better, but not spectacularly.” He concluded that “the growth here in support for what might reasonably be called the ‘trenchant right’ is nothing like as significant as support for the far-right in countries like France, Italy and Austria. It seems to be, at most, a temporarily disruptive force.”2 I hope and pray he is right.

I will finish with a slightly wacky but insightful comment from my former Irish Times colleague Seamus Martin on Facebook. He reports that he has been lurking on X (formerly Twitter) to see what the far-right are up to. “They have spent even more of their time targeting Sinn Féin than they have targeting immigrants. The word most used by when referring to Sinn Féin is ‘traitors’.

“Now this sort of thing will have no effect on SF’s core supporters. The attacks are, in my view, aimed at voters belonging to a group I have previously described as CAE (Citizens against Everything). These are people who are permanently disgruntled. They switch their support depending on how disgruntled they are at any given time. This is likely to manifest itself in transfers, with some far-left People before Profit voters transferring to the far-right and vice versa.

“All opposition parties have their share of CAE voters in addition to their core supporters, but obviously the professional backers of the far-right, mainly in the American ‘alt right’ and QAnon groups, have identified Sinn Fein’s CAE voters as their prime target.”

Obviously such people exist everywhere: in France many Le Pen supporters once voted for the Communist Party. But are they becoming an electorally significant force in Europe, and dangerously so, for the first time?

1 A Shared Home Place, Seamus Mallon (with Andy Pollak), pp.183-84

2 Fintan O’Toole, ‘Sinn Féin provided buffer zone but that has now gone’, and Bobby McDonagh, ‘Deep divisions in Europe between far-right parties’.

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein | 3 Comments

Something is happening in Ireland and it’s not pretty: the rise of an anti-immigration movement

Posted on Wednesday, 22 May, 2024 by andypollak

There is something happening in Ireland (the Republic) and it is not pretty. It is the mobilisation by far-right actors of anti-immigration sentiment in response to a sharp increase (from a low base) in the number of asylum seekers arriving in the country. 5,160 asylum seekers came to Ireland in the first three months of this year, up nearly 78% on the same period last year. This compares with 4,780 in the whole of 2019, 3,670 in the whole of 2018 and 2,240 in the whole of 2016. The chair of the Dail’s Public Accounts Committee, Sinn Fein’s Brian Stanley, said last month that if the current pace continued it was likely there would be 20,000 for the whole of 2024, which would be a record by a considerable distance.

The reasons for this rise are complex, but there is little doubt that increasing numbers are coming from Britain, a country whose ruthless ‘stop the boats’ policy is meant to deter refugees and asylum seekers (something it has singularly failed to do). But the numbers are still very small when compared to countries like Germany (nearly 352,000 asylum claims last year, up 51% on 2022), France (167,000) and Spain (162,000). In 2023 over 270,000 migrants arrived by sea in Europe, the great majority across the Mediterranean, with Italy receiving 60 per cent of these.

So Ireland is not full – not by any wider European measure. Housing specialist Lorcan Sirr of Technological University Dublin points out that we have well over 100,000 usable empty houses and holiday homes around the country, some of them in the same cities, towns and villages where protesting locals are claiming they are full. The Department of Defence has over 20,000 acres, and local councils between them have many thousands of acres of development land. The Health Service Executive has hundreds of empty buildings. As a country, Ireland has fewer than 71 people per square kilometre. In Germany this figure is 233 people per square kilometre; in the Netherlands it is 422; in the UK it is 277.1 The Church of Ireland primate, Archbishop John McDowell, said earlier this month that populists are “playing with paranoia” on the issue of migration, but that “Ireland is not full”.

The trigger for the latest ‘moral panic’ about asylum seekers and refugees has been twofold. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee put the cat among the pigeons last month when she claimed that 80% of recent arrivals were originating in Britain and coming across the border from Northern Ireland. Tánaiste Micheál Martin, usually the most careful of men, doubled down on her comment, linking the rise in numbers crossing the Irish border to the UK’s policy (much feared among asylum seekers in Britain) of forcibly sending migrants who have entered the country without legal papers to Rwanda. British prime minister Rishi Sunak leapt on Martin’s remarks, which he interpreted as proof the Rwanda plan was already working, despite no flights to the African country having yet taken off.

Secondly, there was the growing ‘tent city’ of of asylum seekers in the streets outside and around the International Protection Office in Dublin’s Mount Street. On 1st May around 200 of these men were moved out of their tents to various sites on the outskirts of the city, notably the grounds of a former nursing home at Crooksling in the Dublin hills. The following day more tents appeared around the corner on the Grand Canal. Within days these too were moved to Crooksling and other places.The grassy banks of the canal were blocked off by security fences, but this did not stop another hundred or so tents reappearing.

The impression given was that the authorities, with no proper government plan, were making it up as they went along. Government planning in the asylum area has been either wrong-headed or non-existent ever since the discredited private sector-led (and highly profitable) Direct Provision system was introduced over 20 years ago. Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik, in whose constituency the Grand Canal is situated, said the government’s approach to single, male asylum seekers was “a complete mess”.”The current approach is causing misery to these men, it’s unsustainable and unacceptable for communities – albeit that there are brilliant local volunteers and residents supporting the men,” she said. “It is a gift to the far right.”2 [She could have added that the “brilliant volunteers” helping the men in the tents – most of them women – come mainly from the prosperous middle class suburbs of Dublin 4 and Dublin 6.]

And the far right is seizing its opportunity. Young thugs were seen abusing the men on the canal, videoing them and trying to kick down their tents. They were understandably terrified. Several far right leaders – men like Gavin Pepper and Philip Dwyer – were among those seen making videos.

On the May bank holiday I joined a counter-protest at the GPO in O’Connell Street to an anti-immigration march through the city centre. It was a depressingly big march, far larger than the “several hundred people” reported in the Irish Times, with the marchers carrying a veritable forest of Irish tricolours. I would estimate the numbers at around 3-4,000 people; it took around 45 minutes to pass the GPO. This was real evidence that fear of immigration has started to strike a chord with many ordinary Irish people who are unhappy at the chronic lack of affordable housing, the stretched health service and the high cost of living. In this, as in so many other things – good and bad – we have become mainstream Europeans, blaming immigrants and refugees for our government’s failure to provide adequate public services. Fortunately, it is unlikely that this will be reflected in the results of next month’s local and European elections, because there are simply too many small anti-immigration parties and independents fighting these (I counted 14 in the European election alone).

The tougher new public mood was confirmed by an Irish Times opinion poll in the middle of May. 63% of people polled said they favoured a “more closed policy” to deal with asylum seekers/people seeking international protection; 73% said the government should do more “to deport asylum seekers whose applications have failed”; 79% said that the government should do more “to manage the issue of immigration”; and 38% said they were likely to vote for “a candidate who voiced concerns about immigration.” However almost half of the people (46%) who expressed a view said immigration had been a positive for Ireland.3

Sinn Fein are in a particularly invidious position as asylum and immigration become a major issue in the run-up to next month’s elections, and as its support in opinion polls falls to levels last seen before the 2020 general election. The Irish Times poll showed that 44% of its supporters are likely to be impressed by a candidate voicing concerns about immigration; 70% want to see a more closed asylum policy. Sinn Fein’s problem is that – as a populist nationalist party – it contains, and is supported by, both right-wing ‘nativists’ and left-wing progressives.

Meanwhile some strange election posters have been going up in central Dublin. The Irish People, a new party registered last year, which has apocalyptic visions about “fulfilling our historic role in saving European civilisation as Irish monks did during the last dark age”, is responsible for some of the strangest. “Something is very wrong with Ireland. It’s up to the Irish people to fix it,” says one. Another, with distinct echoes of Russia and Hungary, asks “How did NGOs capture government policy and the media narrative?” A third, clearly meant to appeal to conservative Catholics, declares “a spiritual battle for the soul of Ireland.”

The picketing of politicians homes (sometimes with their wives and children alone inside) is another relatively recent phenomenon, with Leo Varadkar, Simon Harris and the Green integration minister, Roderick O’Gorman (a thoroughly decent if dreadfully overworked politician) in the firing line. The gardai seem powerless to do anything about it. Una Mullally had an alarming piece in the Irish Times in which she named three woman local election candidates from the Green party, the Social Democrats and an independent who had respectively received a death threat, been punched in the head, been screamed at while being videoed, and been called a ‘Nazi’, all while out canvassing.

Mullally correctly pointed out that “immigration is not the underlying issue. Immigration is a reality without which the very functioning of Irish society would collapse. An asylum-seeker and refugee accommodation crisis underpinned by the broader housing and rental crisis is one issue. Unaddressed racism and bigotry is another. Identity-based hatred and violence is an issue. The growth of the far-right ecosystem is an issue. The spread of online hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories, while the tech companies platforming this bile [and] headquartered here send their lobbyists to Oireachtas committees to spout spin, is an issue. Resentment over a perceived or real scarcity of resources in communities that is manipulated by far-right grifters is an issue.”4 Weak policing and lack of arrests is another issue, she added.

Refugees and asylum seekers are far more than an Irish issue, of course. The rise of the anti-immigration right is a Europe-wide phenomenon. 16 out of 27 radical right parties are polling over 20% in national opinion polls in advance of the forthcoming European Parliament elections. In nine of these, the far right party is leading in the opinion polls. Marine Le Pen’s party, National Rally (RN), is leading President Emmanuel Macron’s party by 13 points in France. Alternativ fur Deutschland is likely to come a strong second in Germany.

What can we in little Ireland do about this? Not very much, except show a little compassion and common sense to these vulnerable people who have come to live among us, some of whom will make a major contribution to the well-being of our society (as immigrants everywhere do). That fine British writer on Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, while contemplating the high security fence surrounding Spain’s African enclave of Ceuta to keep Moroccans and other Africans out, recalled impoverished farmers’ sons from Sicily and Ireland trying to reach a better life in America in times past. “We must surely accept that extreme poverty, disease and illiteracy in sub-Saharan Africa constitute constraints on individual liberty that can be every bit as life-deforming as political or religious persecution. There is a continuum, not a bright line, between the categories of refugee and migrant. In any case, with its rapidly ageing population, most of Europe needs more migrants to sustain its welfare states. At the beginning of the 2020s, Germany’s economic need for immigrants was calculated at some 400,000 a year.”

He went on: “If the gulf between global North and South widened further as a result of climate change, population growth and bad governance, no defensive fortifications would suffice. Ever more people would clamber over those fences, however high, and launch themselves onto the high seas, however rough, crying ‘Europe or death.’ What would Europe do then? Build even higher walls? Add death strips? Just let them drown? Europe’s own interests and values demand that it strive to close the huge gap between North and South.”5

N.B. A few definitions are needed here. Asylum seekers (people seeking ‘international protection’) are those who arrive in a country and claim asylum on the basis that they are suffering from political or religious persecution, usually under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Refugees are people from war-torn countries who arrive here under recognised UN, EU and other national and international schemes, and also asylum seekers whose claims have been successful and are therefore recognised as refugees. Migrants are economic migrants who come for work and a new life.

1 ‘Migration debate means nothing without housing’, Irish Times, 2 May

2 Kitty Holland, ‘A Day on the Grand Canal’, Irish Times, 11 May

13 Pat Leahy, ‘Public mood on asylum seekers hardening’, Irish Times, 17 May

4 ‘Rising threat of violence against politicians needs to be tackled’, 20 May

5 Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, pp.318-320

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 2 Comments

One fan’s view of the farcical shenanigans of the Football Association of Ireland

Posted on Tuesday, 30 April, 2024 by andypollak

This blog is about football: not Gaelic football, but football as it is played by many millions of men and women around the world, the ‘beautiful game’ as it is played by Brazil and France and Argentina, at Real Madrid and Paris St Germain and Bayern Munich. I have been a passionate Irish football fan since I was 10 years old, when I followed the great Northern Ireland team of Danny Blanchflower, Peter McParland, Jimmy McIlroy, Billy Bingham and Harry Gregg as they beat Italy, Argentina and Czechoslovakia to reach the quarter finals of the 1958 World Cup (I didn’t have the hang-ups of Irish republicans: I was quite happy to have two Irish football teams to support: one representing my birthplace, the other representing my citizenship and eventual place of residence).

But what a mess football in the Republic of Ireland is in these days! We are very, very far from the halcyon years when Jack Charlton managed the national team, and the whole nation was enthralled by its exploits in the 1988 European championship and the 1990 and 1994 World Cups. I was a travelling supporter at those last two tournaments. After the Republic beat the Netherlands, Germany and Italy (the last of these in New York in our opening match at the 1994 World Cup), we were ranked by FIFA the sixth best team in the world. We are now ranked 60th, behind such giants of world football as Jamaica, Paraguay and Iraq.

The governing body, the Football Association of Ireland, appears to be mired in a malign cycle of mismanagement, incompetence and corruption. Last month its English CEO, Jonathan Hill, was forced to resign after humiliating appearances before the Dail’s Public Accounts Committee, where he was confronted with various illicit holiday and travel payments (he had carried on living in England and commuting to Dublin on weekdays) and breaches of his permitted (extremely high) salary limit.

As Ken Early wrote in the Irish Times, Hill’s task had been straightforward: “to be a plausible frontman to represent the interests of Irish football after the chaos and shame of the John Delaney era. In Ireland we have an absurd and unjust situation where the government lavishes support on the elitist sport of horse-racing and the moribund entity of greyhound racing, while keeping the mass participation sport of football on subsistence rations. In this context, the main job of the FAI CEO is to lobby the government for more investment. But Hill blew his own credibility over the ‘accidental’ holiday pay chicanery. Instead of Hill pressuring government over the big-picture injustice of how funding is allocated across sports, politicians were pressuring Hill over his petty financial shenanigans.”1 There was absolutely no chance of the organisation getting the €517 million in state funds it was looking for to enhance the poor soccer facilities across the country.

But the most farcical process of all has been the seemingly endless saga of the appointment of a new national team manager to succeed the hapless Stephen Kenny, who oversaw a disastrous European qualifying campaign in which the Republic lost home and away to France, Netherlands and Greece, and beat only Gibraltar. Kenny was let go last November (although he was clearly doomed as long ago as last summer) and the FAI’s director of football, Marc Canham, another Englishman, promised an appointment in early April, after two earlier deadlines for announcing a new manager were missed.

In the event his deadline was missed again. Canham did not dare face the media, but newspaper reports said he was now hoping to have a manager in place for the visit of England to Dublin for a Nations League match in early September, nearly 10 months after Kenny’s last match. Those reports said that at least four people had already turned the FAI down: former internationals Lee Carsley, now managing the England under-21 team and Chris Hughton, managing Ghana; Portuguese assistant coach Anthony Barry and former Greek manager Gus Poyet. Former international John O’Shea – who had been Kenny’s number three – took over temporarily for matches in March against Belgium (a 0-0 draw) and Switzerland (a 0-1 loss).

Is this lack of interest the manager’s job (despite its €600,000 annual salary, more than what one-third of coaches at this summer’s Euro 2024 are earning) any surprise given the double whammy of the chaos at the top of Ireland’s football administration and the poor quality of the players in the current Irish team? A glance at the Irish footballers regularly playing in the English Premier League shows the dearth of talent: in recent weeks the number of those players has varied from six down to two. What a contrast with the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when League and Cup winning teams like Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United had two, three or sometimes even four first team Irish players each (in the 1978 Cup Final Arsenal and Ipswich Town fielded no fewer than seven Irish players from North and South; in the 1979 final between Arsenal and Manchester United there were eight).

Malachy Clerkin in the Irish Times has calculated that in 2012-2013 30 Irishmen played just over 44,200 minutes in the top five European leagues; last season 16 Irish players registered just over 9,800 minutes between them at that elite level.2 And the numbers in 2012-2013 were already way down on those playing at top level in the heyday of Irish football in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Here’s another uncomfortable question: is Marc Canham qualified to be the FAI’s director of football? Columnist Kevin Kilbane, another former international, asked whether he was over-promoted to his present position. Why did he only spend a year as the Premier League’s director of football?3 He had an extremely undistinguished career as a professional footballer. A quick look at his entry in Wikipedia (if it’s correct) will show that that he played precisely four matches for second division Colchester United (in the fourth tier of English football) and spent the rest of his career with ‘non-league’ sides.

It must have been hard enough for Stephen Kenny, a John Delaney appointee who had spent all but two seasons as a manager in the League of Ireland, to motivate highly-paid Premier League footballers. How are they going to have any respect for a director of football who has spent his entire career in the lower levels of English football? Certainly the former women’s team manager, Vera Pauw, had little confidence in him last summer after the Women’s World Cup finals, when she queried his competence to carry out a review of her largely successful period in charge of the Irish team (she was sacked).

Here’s another problem: the Republic has very few promising young players coming through the FAI’s rickety under-age system. There are currently just nine Irish footballers aged 17-18 who are receiving full-time professional coaching. Theoretically there are 24 soccer academies for such youngsters, but only 10 full-time coaching staff to run them. Only three other European countries have fewer than one coach per academy: Northern Ireland, Andorra and Luxembourg. Compare that to Portugal, which has seven academies and 315 full-time professional staff. Back in pre-Brexit times around 30-50 players aged 16-17 went to England every year to become full-time professionals, writes Clerkin. “We don’t have English football to do that for us any more. We have to do it for ourselves.”

Is the FAI up to the huge job of overseeing the total makeover of Irish football that is so desperately needed? The GAA and the IRFU have shown the way in recent years with superb leaders like Peter Quinn, Páraic Duffy, and Mick Dawson turning them into modern sporting organisations that are the envy of all. But in its present lamentable state, rotten with tinpot egos and toxic internal politics, the FAI has a huge distance to travel. Gareth Farrelly, another former international, now a lawyer, proposes a nuclear solution to the FAI and its multiplicity of problems: “I’d raze it to the ground and start again,” he says bluntly.4

1 ‘New manager staring FAI in the face’, Irish Times, 22 April 2024

2 ‘Rare dose of FAI truth reveals the game here is in a worse state than you think, Irish Times, 27 April

3 ‘Why is director of football Canham hiding behind FAI TV? Irish Times, 20 April

4 Gavin Cummiskey, ‘What to do with the FAI? ‘Raze it to the ground and start again’, Irish Times, 20 April

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 1 Comment

Two states, one system: a novel idea worth considering

Posted on Wednesday, 17 April, 2024 by andypollak

Regular readers of this blog will know that I like new ideas which go beyond the binary unionist-nationalist straitjacket which has dominated (and constrained) debate about the future of this island for most of the past hundred years. Thus over the past few years I have published the heterodox ideas of people like political scientist Padraig O’Malley, reconciliation activist Duncan Morrow, social researcher Paul Nolan, socialist writer Daniel Finn, Derry Protestant community worker Brian Dougherty, and Newry business and community leader Conor Patterson.

I dislike the crude majoritarian thinking of groups like Ireland’s Future, with their insistence that the people of the disputed and divided northern province of this country have to choose between one – and only one – of two diametrically opposed future constitutional options: continued membership of the United Kingdom or Irish territorial unity. I have insisted – although my insistence usually falls on deaf ears – that we also have to consider more flexible options like federalism, confederalism and joint authority (and even Seamus Mallon’s idea of ‘parallel consent,’ although I have come to believe that this is neither democratic nor practicable).

There’s a predictable sameness about the usual reaction from nationalist quarters to such propositions: they denounce them as another version of the unionist ‘veto’ and demand that any discussion of them be closed down. The only veto this results in is a veto on constructive thinking! The claim is also made that such ideas are in breach of the ‘holy grail’ of the Good Friday Agreement, even though Ireland’s Future can also be cavalier with the GFA (as I pointed out in my last blog), and anyway that mould-breaking accord has a specific section allowing for a review by the two governments in the event of difficulties arising.

So I was interested to come across a recent publication called ‘Two states, One system’ by Jarlath Kearney, a Belfast-based strategy adviser and former policy adviser to Sinn Fein’s NI Deputy First Minister, the late Martin McGuinness. Kearney is from strong Northern nationalist/republican stock: his father was prominent as a campaigner for the McBride fair employment principles in the 1980s and his brother is chair of Sinn Fein. His paper is based on a series of articles first published in the Irish News, and he spoke further about his ideas at an Institute of International and European Affairs event in Dublin (sponsored by the Hume Foundation) in February.

Kearney ended any association with party politics a decade ago, spending the interim period working in senior public service roles in the North, and has independently developed some interesting and open-minded ideas about a possible future for Northern Ireland. He opens by setting out his stall, and it is a broadly nationalist one: “We must prioritise the aisling (vision) of reconciliation under the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and of uniting Ireland’s people by consent under the solemn mantle and ‘firm will’ of Article 3 of the Constitution of Ireland.”

However, he says that the ground rules for these discussions should be “patience, prudence and partnership, built around a ‘two states, one system’ philosophy.” He emphasises the broad consensus among policy makers and civic leaders across Ireland and the UK that the two states will continue on the island of Ireland for the foreseeable future. In his paper he says this structure will exist “at least into the 2030s – notwithstanding any Border poll. There is no viable short-to-medium term alternative.” During February’s IIEA event, he emphasised that Ireland is entering a long period of evolution that requires a need to think differently, including being aware of unionist fears.

He writes that Ireland and the UK are “inextricably linked in a deeply complex, always oscillating, and ultimately infinite cross-cultural journey. The longstanding status quo is steadily destabilising. Evolution is, by definition, inevitable. But stable foundations are a prerequisite for the sustainability of future arrangements”. The alternative to a patient, prudent partnership between the British and Irish governments to plan the next stage of this evolution would be to “plunge Ireland into further societal chaos.” This political thinker is no simplistic ‘Brits Out’ republican.

If there is a Border poll vote for unity, Kearney suggests an ingenious constitutional compromise. This would involve “Northern Ireland continuing as a state but, post referendum, moving under the constitutional sovereignty of Ireland and its presidency (including full European Union membership) whilst concurrently maintaining its full membership with the Commonwealth (which retains the UK monarch as its head).” Would this even be workable? It is certainly worth further discussion.

However he warns that before any Border poll there will be “relentless hard yards of unspectacular work” which will have to go into “steadily developing systems of rights, respect, rapprochement and reconciliation; a policy culture of economic opportunity, social equality, public inclusion and participation, delivered by creative public sector expertise. It cannot be achieved by artificial deadlines for Border polls with peremptory demands for predetermined destinations.” On the other hand, nor can reconciliation be achieved by “anyone believing that the current constitutional framework will exist for ever, fossilised through some kind of political cryonics” [meaning ‘deep freezing the bodies of those who have just died, in the hope that scientific advances may allow them to be revived in the future.’]

Kearney also warns against nationalist triumphalism, suggesting that nationalists continually presenting Irish unity as the automatic answer to Brexit risks becoming a mirror image of extremist English nationalism. It would promote “an underlying swagger and arrogance replete with the sulphuric stench of Irish nationalistic purity. The risk of that ‘swagger’ is more worrying, prevalent and potent than many have yet acknowledged or even understood in Irish society. Much greater self-awareness is needed.”

He asks that parties seeking unity “now publish their specific proposed changes for the [Irish] Constitution. The difficulty with abstract concepts, such as a headline Brexit demand or a Border poll on Northern Ireland’s future constitutional status, is that they sometimes impair effective outcomes.” He asks proponents of unity to be clear and precise in their proposals. “How else can informed consent precede the exercise of the principle of majority voting consent, unless citizens have clarity about the concepts being put to them? What do proponents practically mean, in the deepest and most detailed terms, by blank promissory notes of a ‘new Ireland’? A ‘united Ireland’? A ‘shared Ireland’? The ‘end of partition’? Six years after Brexit [this was originally written in 2022], detail is a reasonable ask.”

He stresses that reconciliation is not only something that Northern Protestants and Catholics have to strenuously engage with, but, even more importantly, the now largely estranged Irish and British governments must re-energise. He looks back to the courageous efforts by the late Queen Elizabeth and Martin McGuinness genuinely to reach out to opponents they could be forgiven for seeing as enemies. “The pathway ahead must be the careful re-establishment of relationships of partnership between both sovereign governments, especially at official and technical level.”

He proposes a “new Treaty-based rapprochement” between Ireland and the UK. Such a new agreement is “many years off, with bilateral politics first requiring a much more settled EU-UK relationship leading to the return of a stable partner in London later in this decade.” By this he obviously means a Keir Starmer-led Labour government. He believes such an inter-governmental partnership (as existed in the 1990s and early 2000s) is an essential prerequisite if we are going to develop the “unfulfilled reconciliation strand” of the Good Friday Agreement, which still has “substantial potential to deliver societal improvements – and genuine unity of people – across Ireland based on a firm foundation of equal rights and mutual respect.”

At the IIEA event, Kearney outlined that the Ireland-UK partnership needs to come “from the top” in both Dublin and London, and this inter-governmental leadership can then provide the authority for civil servants to do things within that framework. In recommending this path, he emphasised the importance of fully respecting the differing sovereignties, while prioritising North-South cooperation based on pragmatism.

He also says that people coming out of decades of armed conflict require “actual bread and butter on the table today, not just the promised scent of constitutional roses for tomorrow.” He writes: “If proponents of change cannot deliver real social reform at a local level in cities and towns [in NI] by using targeted budgets to address longstanding patterns of structural deprivation and exclusion affecting the sectors of greatest inequality within the areas of greatest objective need, how then do they intend to effect macro-societal transformation with mature public institutions of a neighbouring state at national level?”

Kearney sees the Irish government’s non-threatening Shared Island initiative – and the Shared Island dialogues it includes – as possible “foundation stones” for patiently rebuilding the cross-border process which will be required to bring together politicians, civil society, business and the wider public to discuss Northern Ireland’s future role on the island of Ireland. He says this initiative “deserves much greater credit for its long-sighted, iterative understanding about the need to steadily build bases of genuine dialogue with empirical evidence and creative policy innovation across Ireland.” Far better Micheál Martin’s Shared Island as a forum for this kind of important and open-ended deliberation than Sinn Fein and Ireland’s Future’s proposed all-Ireland Citizens Assembly with its single predetermined outcome.

He cites fair employment in the North – “a steady work in progress” – as an example of “policy patience (with persistence)” which over a 50 year period brought about positive reform in an area in which discrimination was “historically an accelerant for armed conflict.” “Northern Ireland’s workplaces are today increasingly shared and diverse, especially across the public sector. This has directly encouraged much greater societal integration and grassroots reconciliation than was seen in previous generations.”

In the final pages of his 36 page paper, Kearney elaborates further on the interesting idea which gives the paper its title: ”Two states, one system.” He cites all-island sporting organisations like the GAA and the IRFU as examples of all-island bodies which successfully oversee ‘two states/one system’ administrations, thus “creatively transcending any notion of a divisive cultural border.” He could have added post-1998 all-island bodies like Waterways Ireland, the Loughs Agency and Tourism Ireland, or the post-2008 all-island wholesale electricity network. He cites health as another area of great potential for all-island cooperation, but also one with massive resource demands and coordination problems – although I would suggest there is currently less all-island cooperation in this sector than he argues.

Kearney urges that, operating within the Good Friday Agreement, the approach should be one of “maximum joint administration (not joint authority) and joint systems (not joint sovereignty) between both sovereign governments, necessarily involving – where appropriate – the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly and other institutional north-south and east-west elements of the 1998 Agreement.” He concludes: “The next decade should be one in which the fallout from Brexit is faced collectively by encouraging the systematic enhancement of all-island policy cooperation across Ireland in practical and technical terms.” The focus should be “on ensuring that the basic delivery of public policy reforms can become exemplars of good practice by government in Northern Ireland and thereby positive indicators of what might be achieved in any new future arrangements.” At the IIEA event Kearney said what was needed to manage constitutional evolution, including to run Northern Ireland over the next generation, was a “joint management framework” between the two governments.

That was largely the message I was preaching during my 14 years running the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh (1999-2013). It begs some questions: notably whether an incoming British Labour government would be up to playing its part in such a major programme of all-Ireland cooperation. And whether at least some more pragmatic unionist politicians might buy into it. Jarlath Kearney would do us all a great service by researching a follow-up paper on these issues – this first one is an impressively thought-provoking beginning.

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Leo Varadkar and Ireland’s Future have very different ideas of reconciliation and consent

Posted on Thursday, 28 March, 2024 by andypollak

I wouldn’t have said this seven years ago, when he first became Taoiseach, but I am sorry to see Leo Varadkar stepping down from that post. I do not agree with many of his right-of-centre policies on economic and social issues. But this straight half-Czech Irishman liked having a leader who was a gay half-Indian Irishman, a symbol of the new openness and multiculturalism of the country.

More importantly, as someone from a Northern Protestant background who would one day like to see a peaceful, harmonious and united Ireland, I believe Varadkar has played a progressive role when it came to the thorny issues associated with my home place and its difficult unionist inhabitants. I remember his reconciling gestures: attending ceremonies to remember the 1987 Enniskillen atrocity by the IRA, walking alongside the unionist Lord Mayor of Belfast at First World War commemorations and visiting the headquarters of the Orange Order. He was rightly steely in his fierce opposition to a post-Brexit hard Border which would have damaged the interests of Ireland, North as well as South (although he won few unionist friends for this stand, and for the resultant trade border down the Irish Sea).

I particularly remember a speech he gave to the big rally by the pro-unity campaigning group Ireland’s Future in Dublin’s 3 arena in October 2022.While saying he believed in a united Ireland, Varadkar suggested that the existing structures of the Good Friday Agreement – internal power-sharing, North-South bodies and East-West cooperation – should be strengthened and deepened after reunification.

He said some other eminently sensible things. “There is a distinct danger that we could focus too much on a Border poll and on future constitutional models, and not enough on how we enhance engagement, build trust and create the conditions for a convincing majority for change.” (He was booed by a section of the nearly 5,000 strong audience, many of them Northern nationalists, when he said this).

“So we need to engage with unionists and that growing group who identify as Northern Irish rather than British or Irish, and indeed those who identify as both. We also need to acknowledge the right of Northern nationalists to have equal recognition in the debate.

“We can’t build our future based on narrow majorities or on the wishes of just one community. For these reasons, I believe the objective should be to secure as large a majority as possible in both jurisdictions in any future poll. 50% plus one may be enough on paper, but won’t be a success in practice. Our only hope depends on presenting a proposal – North and South – that will be able to achieve democratic consent. This will involve compromise.

“It involves accepting a form of unification that is more inclusive and imaginative, one that can achieve the greatest measure of democratic support, and therefore legitimacy, and have the greatest chance of success. We need something that can evolve and deepen in time. And we need to remember that the next step doesn’t have to be the final word.”1

After that rally I said to Neale Richmond, then a backbench TD from a Church of Ireland background, now likely to become a minister in new Fine Gael leader Simon Harris’s cabinet, that Varadkar was “my kind of moderate nationalist”. I remain convinced that his balanced, humane approach to the North and to the slow and careful steps that will be necessary if the ‘new Ireland’ is to be more harmonious than the old divided island is the correct one, rather than the ‘bring it on’ approach to a Border poll adopted by the militarists and ideologues of Sinn Féin and the passionate nationalists of Ireland’s Future.

I was reminded of this when I read the latest Ireland’s Future report – Proposals for the period between 2024 and 20302 – the latter year being when the group wants to see a Border poll being held. I was forcibly struck in particular by the following paragraph in this paper: “There is no requirement to achieve ‘reconciliation’ (however this concept is defined) in advance of a referendum being held, and our view is that any such objective will only follow the transition to a new constitutional arrangement on our shared island. Reunification is a reconciliation project.”

That is an extraordinary dismissal of the need for reconciliation in such a deeply divided society as Northern Ireland. How on earth are nationalists going to get unionist consent for unity one day if they don’t actively work for reconciliation with that community? I don’t believe reunification in the short term (after a narrow vote for it in a Border poll) will be ‘a reconciliation project’. I believe it will be ‘a victory for nationalism project’, and will be seen as such by the great majority of unionists. Unfortunately, I also fear it will be seen by many Northern nationalists as a ‘boot’s on the other foot now’ project, a triumphant turning of the tables after more a century of discrimination against and repression of their community by the unionists.

Any move to a united Ireland, according to the Good Friday Agreement, is explicitly conditional on the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland. But reconciliation in that agreement has no conditions set on it: “We firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of the human rights of all…We will endeavour to strive in every practical way towards reconciliation and rapprochement within the framework of democratic and agreed arrangements”, the two governments and the North’s political parties pledged in 1998.

Ireland’s Future also engages in hypocritical doublethink when it comes to the roles of the British and Irish governments in the run-up to any Border poll. It demands that limitations are placed on the British government to ensure its “rigorous impartiality.” However it calls on the Irish government unilaterally to set up an all-Ireland Citizens Assembly or similar body (thus intruding into another state’s jurisdiction) “to assist in the promotion of inclusive deliberation before, during and after constitutional change.” It stresses that “the template used for Citizens Assemblies in Ireland will need to be adjusted to achieve our basic objectives.” How can one run an exercise in deliberative democracy like a Citizens Assembly (which would normally produce a range of recommendations) when the aim is to have one outcome only – a united Ireland?

As Newton Emerson wrote in the Irish Times, the people who will have the casting vote on the timing and outcome of a Border Poll will be the middle ground voters who support the Alliance party. “They are unlikely to be impressed by the belligerence of Monday’s report from the Ireland’s Future campaign, with its downplaying of reconciliation and disturbingly post-Agreement demand for a Border poll compelled by international pressure.”3

This last comment refers to the following paragraph in the Ireland’s Future report: “In our view, the British government is unlikely to enable a Border poll without a formal request from the Irish government, reinforced by widespread international support. The Irish government must therefore mobilise its international partnerships and networks – within all relevant international and supranational forums – to secure cooperation and support for its desired outcome.”

Ireland’s Future then goes on to recommend a “binding Declaration” to be adopted by the two governments “in the context of wider consultations with relevant international/supranational organisations such as the UN, the Council of Europe and the EU in line with new [Irish] Programme for Government commitments [i.e. on moving towards an early Border Poll]…each government should then commence preparations for the required referendums.” This sounds to me suspiciously like a whole new British-Irish agreement to supersede and negate the ultra-careful checks and balances of the Good Friday Agreement.

Emerson said that Tánaiste Micheál Martin’s speech to Alliance’s annual conference a few days earlier, with its emphasis on the need for Stormont reform and on his pragmatic Shared Island initiative, made more sense than this contentious and misleading proposal. Martin was specific about the reforms needed: ending the ability of the DUP and Sinn Féin to collapse the NI Executive and block Executive decisions; a reset of the NI Assembly’s petition of concern veto mechanism; the replacement of cross-community voting with weighted majority voting; reversal of the St Andrews Agreement changes on appointing the First and Deputy First Ministers, and renaming both posts Joint First Ministers because that is “what they are.”

I might also suggest to Ireland’s Future that there are some very clear defining markers of progress towards reconciliation in Northern Ireland. One is a power-sharing government lasting its full five years in office, agreeing a programme for government and successfully carrying out a significant part of it in areas of real substance: notably tackling sectarianism and inequality and laying some foundations for a flourishing economy. Another would be some dismantling of the nearly 100 so-called ‘peace walls’ still dividing poor Catholic and Protestant communities in Belfast and elsewhere.

1 ‘Is Ireland’s Future effectively a front for Sinn Fein? Or is that the wrong question?’ http://www.2irelands2gether.com, 10 October 2022

2 Published on 4 March 2024

3 ‘Martin shrewd enough to play Shared Island unification game’, 7 March

xxxx

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | 2 Comments

Ireland in 2024 is a rather good country, despite the begrudgers

Posted on Wednesday, 13 March, 2024 by andypollak

Maybe because St Patrick’s Day is coming up and we’re in the middle of Seachtain na Gaeilge, I’m feeling a bit patriotic – so am going to write about why I think the Republic of Ireland is a rather good country now, despite the many begrudgers.  Firstly, there are the well-known demographic and economic indicators: in the 50 years of EU membership, life expectancy has risen from 71 to 81.5 years; incomes per head have increased fourfold; the number of people at work has grown from just over one million to more than 2.5 million; since 1999 over 1.6 million immigrants have come to live and work here; and we are now in the top five countries in the world for scientific research in numerous areas ranging from agricultural sciences to immunology, pharmacology to neuroscience. These are the signs of a successful country.

According to the UN’s Human Development Index (which combines life expectancy, education levels and GDP per capita), Ireland was the 20th best country in the world in 2001, and the eighth best in 2021. Tom Arnold, the distinguished Irish public servant and former CEO of the aid organisation Concern, says that the world’s poorest countries where Concern worked had “many disadvantages, ranging from the legacy of colonialism, conflict, poor health and education standards of their peoples, and, increasingly, the impact of climate change. But the single most important factor which explains their poverty and its persistence is the quality and honesty of governance and the capacity to implement consistent policy to improve living standards.”1 That is what the Republic of Ireland, despite the vagaries of globalised capitalism’s boom and slump cycles and some continuing major policy shortcomings, has achieved spectacularly in recent decades.

We have a fully working democracy here. The electorate telling the government decisively in a referendum last weekend that it would not accept the wording of its constitutional amendments on the role of women, “durable relationships” and care in the family was a powerful sign of that (although it was also a sign of voter disgruntlement with the Dublin-centred governing class). There has been no sign here of any significant electoral surge to the hard right, as has been happening in so many other European countries.

We have been fortunate in our politicians. In more than a hundred years of independence – through the dangerously fascist 1930s, the economic crashes of the early 1970s and the post-2008 crisis, and the anti-immigration 2020s – there has been no sign of any significant dictatorial or authoritarian political figure moving to capitalise on popular discontent. We have lively, heated and occasionally acrimonious political debate on our media. Our Taoiseach and Tánaiste live in modest, middle-class houses in city suburbs with few security precautions.

Compare that with our closest neighbours, where the Prime Minister is a super-rich plutocrat and two MPs have been murdered in the past eight years. Rishi Sunak said last month that Britain was descending into “mob rule”, appearing to blame largely peaceful protests (including pickets on MPs’ houses) against Israel’s war in Gaza. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss shared a platform with Donald Trump’s wicked former adviser, Steve Bannon, the organiser of international far-right networks, who called English fascist agitator Tommy Robinson a “hero”. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman said Islamists, extremists and anti-Semites are now in charge of Britain. The deputy chair of the Conservative Party said Islamists have “got control of London” and its Lord Mayor, Sadiq Khan. And the economic background is the government budget watchdog’s warning that Brexit is still dragging down the economy (0.8% growth forecast this year) and the impact is set to get worse due to new trade barriers.

When I grew up in London in the 1950s and 1960s, it was Britain that was a rather good country, with a fast-growing postwar economy, the Welfare State and the National Health Service, the huge expansion of free secondary and third level education, and the coming of a reformist Labour government in 1964. Now they have post-Brexit stasis and uncertainty, deep economic divides between north and south, and moves to the hard right represented by English nationalism and nostalgia for the exploitation and violence of the British empire.

Of course we have in Ireland our continuing problems. The lack of housing is a running sore. Because of our governing parties’ addiction to the private sector, a sclerotic Department of Housing and planning system and big capacity challenges (including shortages of skilled labour) in housebuilding firms, we had the third lowest investment in housing in the EU in 2022 (after Greece and Poland). Astonishingly, at the end of last year there were nearly 29,000 houses stuck in An Bord Pleanala or awaiting High Court judicial review decisions, not far off the 32,000 completions.2 Our government’s inability to reduce hospital waiting lists and complete major hospital building projects on time and without exploding budgets is legendary. Our public transport system is creaking and unintegrated. In common with other European countries, the government has been caught almost completely unprepared by the sharp increase in the number of asylum-seekers from a low base, and the now frequent arson attacks on buildings meant to become temporary shelters for such refugees are a national disgrace (and why can’t the gardai catch and charge these criminals?).

Like the great majority of Western countries, we have the scandal of growing inequality (although a progressive tax system takes some of the sting out of this). Ireland has the fifth largest number of billionaires per capita in the world, according to Oxfam. I suppose this is part of our country’s success story in today’s multinational capitalist world, but I agree with the left-wing US senator Bernie Sanders that the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few extremely rich people while so many people are in poverty, in Ireland as in the world, is an obscenity. Recently I have been reading Who really owns Ireland? by the journalist Matt Cooper, about the eye-popping wealth of multi-billionaires like the retail empire owner Galen Weston, the financier Dermot Desmond, the gambler J.P. McManus, the horse breeder John Magnier, the telecoms entrepreneur Denis O’Brien, the developer Johnny Ronan, the hotelier Paddy McKillen, and the ‘beef baron’ Larry Goodman, among others. Some of these men were wiped out in the 2008-2010 crash, but now, a decade and a half later, have become richer than ever by employing financial instruments that are an utter mystery to the ordinary Irish citizen. This is the ‘Wild West’ side of the Irish success story.

But to return to my main thesis. I tend to agree with the former Irish Times political editor, Stephen Collins, writing in the aftermath of last November’s anti-immigration riot, that “the contempt for civilised values displayed by the rioters in Dublin echoes in extreme form the pervasive narrative that has taken a grip on public discourse over the past few years, portraying this country as a failed state.” He said it was the “default setting of Opposition politicians [he singled out Sinn Fein for special mention] and much of the media that everything about this country is wrong.”

“The relatively comfortable circumstances in which the vast majority of us live are due to the way politicians and public servants over a number of decades created the conditions for the prosperous modern Irish State to emerge. Of course, lots of people feel they should be doing better in one way or another, but international comparisons show that this country is one of the best places on Earth to live….The fact that so many immigrants have flocked to our shores over the past two decades to work at all levels of society from top to bottom is in itself enough to debunk the narrative of endless misery that so many native-born citizens are prone to accept.”3

Dublin in particular is an extraordinarily vibrant and multicultural city these days (although also extraordinarily expensive). This was summed up for me in an incident on O’Connell Street a fortnight ago. I was part of a small group called ‘Grandfathers against Racism’, who stand with a banner outside the GPO every Tuesday lunchtime. A man came up to see what we were doing and introduced himself as a tennis coach from Kazakhstan (of Korean origin), who lived in Blanchardstown with his Belarussian wife, his elder daughter who had recently become a solicitor and his younger daughter who had just graduated with a degree in chemistry from UCD. He said that in 25 years in Blanchardstown he had never experienced racism or any kind of hostility.

I hope for two things in the future. In the South that voters in the next election will remember that our prosperity and stability owe much to decisions made over the years by the ‘establishment’ parties – Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens (although the last two would reject that description) – and nothing to Sinn Fein. In the North that my fellow Protestants will start to look honestly at this remarkable ‘new Ireland’ and decide that, despite the toxic legacy of four centuries of internecine strife between the religious ‘tribes’ on this island, they too can play a role in it. The first thing they need to do is to rid themselves of the antiquated, 1950s-era image so many of them have in their heads about the Republic as some kind of narrow, Catholic Church-dominated, impoverished and inward-looking society. Nothing could be further from the truth these days.

PS As a non-political coda, I asked my wife Doireann, a Dubliner and native Irish speaker, what she liked most about present day Ireland. These are the things she listed:

  • “Free travel for over those over 66. An enormous gift which I am grateful for every day.
  • The visibility of the Irish language and the increasing (it seems to me, compared with my childhood) enthusiasm of people of all ages for learning it.
  • The informality with which we connect with others. Of course there are hidden class divides (not so hidden when it comes to poverty), but in general anyone will chat with anyone else with ease on the street, in the shops, on public transport.  We smile at each other and greet each other in a way that is not so common in other developed countries.
  • The fact that our traditional music is so vibrant, and is played by so many young people with comfort and ease. It’s wonderful to see it being passed on from generation to generation.
  • We value artistic expression: whether it’s writers, film and theatre makers, visual artists or musicians; we sense that their work adds value to the way we live, and we respect their choice to be artists. Of course we must support them better in practical ways; if they can’t make a decent living or afford a place to live, that undermines any value we may claim to put on their role.”

She added one characteristic which has nothing to do with modernity, but with the extraordinary beauty and nearness of nature in this island (and with which I enthusiastically agree). “The ease with which we can travel to beautiful, wild places. It doesn’t take more than a few hours from anywhere in Ireland to reach the mountains and the sea.  We don’t realise what a huge privilege that is.”

1 Introduction to TASC – Reflections on Equality, December 2022

2 Cliff Taylor, ‘Can State deliver 50,000 new homes a year? Irish Times, 24 February

3 ‘Too many people have swallowed the ‘failed state’ narrative’, Irish Times, 1 December 2023

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 4 Comments

Why the Republic of Ireland needs a new John Bruton

Posted on Tuesday, 20 February, 2024 by andypollak

With the death earlier this month of former Taoiseach John Bruton, we have lost an important and courageous voice in the Republic of Ireland. We will need a new John Bruton to appear from somewhere: a nationalist leader who will not allow people to forget Sinn Fein’s continuing support for the murderous violence of the Provisional IRA and who goes out of his way to try to understand the concerns of unionism. Bruton bravely went even further: he criticised this country’s near-sacred foundation myth, that the bloodshed of the Easter Rising was justified and necessary for the birth of the independent Irish state. Not even Micheál Martin, another rare Southern politician to regularly remind us of the unacceptability of the IRA’s campaign, has ever gone as far as that (he would immediately lose the Fianna Fail party if he did!).

Interestingly, the unionist Belfast News Letter marked Bruton’s death by reprinting his 2016 anniversary of the Rising speech: ‘The 1916 Rising was not a Just War’.1 Bruton argued this on a number of grounds. Firstly, he noted that Rising was launched on a platform that left no room for compromise or democratic negotiation. The Irish Republic was proclaimed on the steps of the GPO not in the name of “a living Irish people” but in the name of “God and the dead generations.” But obviously neither God nor the dead generations were there to be consulted. “The rights of the proclaimed Republic were not conditional on consent, but were ‘sovereign and indefeasible’. By definition, the Irish people would thus have no right to compromise the ‘sovereign and indefeasible’ rights of the Nation, which was treated, in the chosen wording of the Proclamation, as something separate from the people.”

It was in the pursuit of this “absolute and unqualified claim” that thousands of people then continued to be killed in the War of Independence, the Civil War and the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. Bruton quoted P.S. O’Hegarty, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s Supreme Council at the time of the Rising, in 1924: “We turned the whole thoughts and passion of a generation upon blood and revenge and death; we placed gunmen, mostly half educated and totally inexperienced, as dictators with powers of life and death over large areas. We derided the Moral Law and said there was no law but the law of force.”

Bruton noted that for every Irish Volunteer killed in the Rising (including those executed afterwards) three Dublin civilians died as a result of the fighting. “The first casualty to die on Easter Monday was James O’Brien, an unarmed DMP policeman from Limerick, shot in the face at the gate of Dublin Castle. Another early unarmed DMP casualty of the Volunteers was Michael Lahiff, a 28 year old Irish speaker from the West of Ireland, shot in cold blood on St Stephen’s Green. Michael Cavanagh, a Dublin carter who tried to retrieve his cart from a Volunteer barricade, was executed by the Volunteers. These were not ‘Brits’. They were Irishmen. They were the first to die. Their pictures adorn no public building this Easter in Dublin, but they should.”

Bruton asked if the decision to take up arms in 1916 was in accordance with the Catholic Church’s natural ‘Moral Law’ with its emphasis on the ‘just war.’ “It is especially important to ask that question now, because the Irish State has chosen to place such a huge emphasis on implanting the 1916 Rebellion as the supposed foundation event of our democracy in the minds of today’s schoolchildren. Given that one of the purposes of education is to pass on a moral sense to the next generation, it is vitally important that the morality of that decision, to initiate killing and dying in 1916, be examined by, and for, those schoolchildren. That is the responsibility of the Irish State, and if it fails to discharge it, is is failing the next generation.”

Bruton then outlined some ‘just war’ principles to ask ‘Who is entitled to launch a war?’ “Only a competent authority, or popular representatives, has the right to start a war or insurrection….By no stretch of the imagination could that criterion said to have been met before the killing was started on Easter Monday.” “War required a just cause: armed aggression or governmental policies (e.g. genocide) threatening the civilian population”. Bruton pointed out that Ireland was not being attacked in 1916; in fact the Volunteers were allowed by the authorities to drill freely, something that would not be allowed today. The British government’s policies had been in many ways beneficial to Ireland: old age pensions and social insurance, from which Ireland was a net financial beneficiary, had been introduced, and the unjust landlord system had been overturned to a significant extent. “Furthermore, the principle of legislative independence had already been won from the Imperial Parliament in September 1914 by the passage into law, and signature by the King, of the Home Rule Bill.”

“Another criterion for a just war, is that war should be a last resort, not a first recourse. All other methods of redressing grievances ought to have been first exhausted. Given that the principle of Irish legislative independence had already been conceded, in a Bill passed into law only a year and a half previously, it is hard to argue that starting a rebellion in 1916, and the War of Independence of 1919 to 1921, were, either of them, a “last resort”. In fact much of what was being sought had already been conceded, in principle and in law. Home Rule was law and there was no going back on it. For example, Home Rule was accepted even by the Conservatives as a ‘fundamental fact’, the only issue outstanding being that there be no ‘forcible coercion of Ulster’ to go in under it.”

The only open question, said Bruton, was whether Home Rule might apply or not to Antrim, Down, Armagh and Derry (and perhaps to Fermanagh and Tyrone, which had narrow nationalist majorities). “But after all the killing and dying of the 1916 to 1923 period, and the Treaty of 1921, the Free State did not have jurisdiction over those counties…Nor after the ‘armed struggle’ from 1970 to 1998 does this State have such jurisdiction today. Indeed, under the Good Friday Agreement we no longer claim it, and respect the right of the people of Northern Ireland to decide their own future in that regard.”

The 1916 rebels knew only too well the fierce opposition of Protestant Ulster even to a Home Rule administration, let alone a republic. “But in what they wrote in their Proclamation, this reality was swept aside, as it if did not matter at all…The wish of Ulster Unionists not to be governed from Dublin, was assumed by the Proclamation’s signatories not to have been a conclusion they had come to freely themselves, but only the result of ‘careful fostering’ by an ‘alien government”.

Bruton expressed his strong belief that “if we ever do have a United Ireland, it will not be achieved by the methods used in 1916.” Canada and Australia had proceeded to full sovereignty “without the suffering and bitterness of war.” He said it was not credible to say that the UK would have denied to a Home Rule Ireland the powers it freely granted to those countries under the 1931 Statute of Westminster. “The suffering of the War of Independence was thus not needed to achieve Dominion Status”, which is what Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and the Irish negotiators got in 1921 (and which had been the policy of the Irish Parliamentary Party, heavily defeated by Sinn Fein, in the 1918 general election).

Why does all this matter 108 years after the event, when what might have happened differently is just a matter of conjecture? It matters because Sinn Fein may be heading the next government in Dublin, and they are fanatically attached to the belief that the Provisional IRA were the rightful inheritors of what they call the ‘physical force’ tradition in Irish nationalism/republicanism, and thus the violence of their late 20th century campaign of killing and bombing was fully justified. For obvious reasons, Sinn Fein are constantly linking that campaign to the War of Independence, with its democratic legitimacy rooted in old Sinn Fein’s victory in the 1918 election, and the central involvement in that guerrilla war of the founders of the two largest constitutional (or ‘slightly constitutional’) parties in the independent state, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.

It matters because even the most moderate of unionists trace the violence of the Provisional IRA against their community back to the 20th century’s first upsurge of republican violence in 1916 (and continue to believe that Irish republicans “stabbed Britain in the back” at a time when tens of thousands of Irishmen, unionist and nationalist, were fighting side by side in the First World War). And because all parties in the Republic who claim to want a peaceful ‘new Ireland’ still agree on celebrating that anti-British rebellion, supported by a small minority of Irish people at the time, as their state’s foundational act. In the words of that most liberal and pro-Irish of unionists, former rugby international and reconciliation activist Trevor Ringland: “If you take the ambitions of the violent republican movement a hundred years ago, they certainly weren’t about including those Irish who also feel British as part of the island. The identity they drove at that time was very much an exclusive identity, as opposed to the one promoted by John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party.”

It matters because the ‘north blindness’ of the 1916 revolutionaries led to successive mistakes which set back the cause of Irish unity: the almost complete absence of the North from the 1922 Dail debates on the Treaty; the development of the Free State along Catholic and Gaelic lines with zero reference to how this would affect partition; the rejection by De Valera of the 1940 offer by Churchill of a British declaration accepting the principle of a united Ireland and a North-South body to work out the practical details in return for the Free State joining the Allies in the war against Nazi Germany (future Unionist prime minister Basil Brooke said that if the choice was between Western civilisation and Irish reunification, he would accept unity); and the idiotic 1949 departure from the Commonwealth, a year before India declared itself a republic and stayed in the Commonwealth. The continuing popularity of Sinn Fein’s simplistic anti-British imperialism in the Republic (particularly among young people), rather than a more nuanced understanding of the historical intermingling of the peoples of these islands, makes me think that more such mistakes are on the way under a Sinn Fein-led government.

I may be a hopeless voice in the wilderness, but I would love to see one of the non-nationalist parties in the Republic – the Greens, Labour or the Social Democrats – having the courage to break with the overwhelming consensus in the South that ‘physical force’ republicanism played a unique and noble role in gaining Irish independence, and with the less overwhelming – but growing – consensus (again, particularly among the young) that the inheritors of that tradition can lead the way to unity. Knowing the ferocious opposition to Sinn Fein by unionists as I do, I believe this is fundamentally mistaken. I would like them to argue that such violent republicanism was always the wrong way to unite the peoples of this island, and to recognise that power-sharing in Northern Ireland along with close cooperation with the Irish Government is the way forward for the foreseeable future: the Good Friday Agreement model, in other words.

In a period of political consolidation and economic growth, I would like to see that party (or parties) adopt a policy of ‘from cooperation to confederation’, recognising that – as the Northern business leader, the late Sir George Quigley, put it – there are in Northern Ireland “two mutually opposed ‘principles of legitimacy’ which are strongly held – one nationalist and one unionist – and that some common ground would have to be found on which the divergent aspirations are transcended in a general consensus….If there is ever a new constitutional configuration for the island, my guess is that the model by far the likeliest to secure consent is the confederal model…On this basis the final agreed Ireland would be a joint, equal venture between North and South, with each having its own governance structure, and with policies related to the powers to be specifically delegated to confederal level by representatives from North and South.”

I put this argument to a meeting of Social Democrats some years ago, but it was clear from the blank faces that greeted me that it was going nowhere. Perhaps it would be electoral suicide to put such a policy to “republicanism is good” Irish voters, who recent opinion polls have shown are not willing to give up one iota of nationalist iconography (changes to the flag and anthem; re-joining the Commonwealth) in exchange for unity. I suggest that electorate also haven’t given one iota of serious thought to how the party of the Provisional IRA are going to bring about a harmonious ‘new Ireland’ that will include hundreds of thousands of abandoned and alienated unionists.

However, those non-nationalist parties might be surprised by the number of people who would vote for a party which proposed putting some distance between the Republic and the troublesome North, while maintaining a strong all-island framework for partnership and mutual action. Similarly, I believe there will be open-minded unionists who would be attracted to the confederal model as the least worst option as Britain’s commitment to the North declines.

1 https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/full-version-of-a-2016-speech-by-the-late-john-bruton-the-former-taoiseach-the-1916-easter-rising-was-not-a-just-war/ar-BB1hSuJP

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 7 Comments

Nobody can deny that Michelle O’Neill’s elevation was an historic moment

Posted on Tuesday, 6 February, 2024 by andypollak

Nobody can deny that the installation of Michelle O’Neill as the first nationalist First Minister of Northern Ireland last Saturday was an historic moment. For a statelet that was set up over a century ago specifically to ensure that NI had an inbuilt unionist majority and thus to exclude it from the newly independent Irish state, to elect not only a nationalist, but an IRA-supporting republican woman as its leader, will be seen by most Northern nationalists as something of a miracle.

O’Neill was smart, gracious and stateswomanlike in her moment of victory. She avoided triumphalism and made no explicit mention of either Irish unity or a Border Poll in an inaugural address that focused on reconciliation and bread-and-butter issues. “I will serve everyone equally and be a First Minister for all,” she said. “Wherever we come from, whatever our aspirations, we can and must build our future together. We must make power-sharing work because collectively we are charged with leading and delivering for all our people, for every community.”

Not so her party leader, Mary Lou McDonald. A united Ireland, she said, was now “within touching distance.” My doubts about McDonald’s judgement (which I outlined in my last blog) are only confirmed. These are the words of a fantasist, an ultra-nationalist ideologue who doesn’t live in the real world. Does she really believe the long, hard grind – a work of many years, decades even – of persuading enough middle ground people and moderate unionists that unity is the answer to the North’s many problems, can be by-passed? Or was she just intent on goading unionists at their point of maximum sensitivity – kicking them when they had lost the First Minister’s post and their hopes of overturning the Windsor Framework and ending the Irish Sea ‘border’ were down (despite Jeffrey Donaldson’s claims to the contrary)?

Because I am not a working journalist these days, I usually turn to the two sharpest political commentators in Ireland – Pat Leahy of the Irish Times and Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph – for insightful analysis of key events. Leahy wondered what Mary Lou McDonald was up to with her provocative (but clearly considered) statement. Was it just the old republican adage that Northern Ireland can never be anything but a failed state and they were certainly not going to do anything to make it a successful one? Leahy thought not. He preferred the argument that at a time when Sinn Fein’s opinion poll figures are down in the Republic, and the party is on the back foot on issues like immigration, she was trying to reassure her base.

The problem is that Sinn Fein has two bases and thus two often conflicting messages (one aimed at people in the Republic who’ve never voted for them before): “that Sinn Fein will be a massive change in the government of the South, but also that it would not change things that voters like; that the Republic is a basket-case, misruled for 100 years, but that a Sinn Fein government would not change its economic model; that things under Sinn Fein will be simultaneously different and the same; that we will get both change and continuity”. It’s a tricky message to sell, he said.1

McBride wrote that the deal negotiated by Jeffrey Donaldson with the British government was not what he claimed it to be. It was “better practically for Northern Ireland, and more constitutionally bearable for unionists, than the original Northern Ireland Protocol. If goodwill persists between Brussels and London, and if blind eyes are turned liberally to continued bureaucratic absurdities, then what has happened this week can work, after a fashion…

“But while the Irish Sea border has been softened, it unquestionably remains. For Jeffrey Donaldson to claim he’s swept away the sea border for goods which are staying in Northern Ireland is as palpably absurd as Donald Trump claiming he won the last US Presidential election… Donaldson should try moving a cherry tree from Leeds to Lisburn, or try moving any other commercial item between Birmingham and Ballymena on the same basis as Birmingham to Brighton.” The British government is still planning to “take direct powers at Westminster to direct NI bodies” in relation to checks on goods. And the continuation of the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over Northern Ireland – “not acceptable”, Donaldson has said in the past – will continue.2

Donaldson showed considerable political courage in facing down his opponents – both in the DUP and to the right of it – to get his deal through. However his party’s base – which largely supported the boycott of Stormont over the Irish Sea ‘border’ – will be uneasy and potentially rebellious if it is seen not to work. Jim Allister of Traditional Unionist Voice and that toxic little agitator, Jamie Bryson, will be working hard to stir up trouble for him.

Last Monday, a few hours before Donaldson faced his party faithful and successfully persuaded them to back his less than perfect deal with Whitehall, I had an interesting conversation with two Belfast businessmen. These were men of moderate views (Alliance and SDLP-inclined respectively), but they were frustrated and angry at what they saw as the DUP – a party which had received a quarter of the vote in the last Assembly election – forcing Northern Ireland into the freezer for the past two years. They were “sick of a minority party holding the whole society to ransom, sick of having to kowtow to the DUP because of their paranoia about the Irish Sea ‘border’ destroying their sense of the Union.”

They were worried that young people – and especially young unionist people – had lost faith in politics as it was conducted in Northern Ireland: “It’s very dangerous, they have no regard for politics or politicians here – they never see politics producing any positive results. If the DUP don’t go along with the social changes they think are important – things like equality, women’s rights and gay rights – they will just leave Northern Ireland. The DUP are going to have to come to terms with the liberal culture of a young, modern society.” One man said it was already happening: he knew at least one young gay member of that deeply conservative party.

In contrast, young nationalists could see that Sinn Fein got things done at constituency level (unlike the DUP) and believed the republican party was committed to equality and fairness. They would chant ‘Ooh, aah, Up the Ra’ at public events to give two fingers to the DUP in particular and the Northern political system in general.

The businessmen echoed Sam McBride in worrying that Northern Ireland’s infrastructure was falling apart: houses not being able to be put on the market because Northern Ireland Water can’t connect them to the mains; offshore wind companies not able to set up because of the sclerotic planning system; and major roads full of potholes (“Look at the dreadful state of the Sydenham by-pass, the road to Belfast City Airport – even in Africa they make sure they have a decent road to the airport”).

One cited the head of the Southern business and employers body IBEC, Danny McCoy, who has been forecasting for some time an island population of 10 million by 2050 (today the island’s population is seven million, with just under two million of these in Northern Ireland). This will be “a new Ireland in which our children will have a good future.” He said the challenge for the North would be to absorb around one million of these people.  “By 2050 there might be only 250,000 hard-line ‘traditional’ unionists left. It will be a very different place to Northern Ireland in the last century – if it is still in existence.”

There is no doubt that the plates are shifting in Northern Ireland. Last month I was talking to half a dozen people from broadly unionist backgrounds in Fermanagh, and all but one of them said they were no longer comfortable calling themselves British. The man who still called himself British said he was “a very, very, soft unionist.” However he stressed that he wouldn’t say ‘Yes’ to a united Ireland. “I’d want to know exactly what it is we’re looking at. I’d want to be informed, to be consulted. I wouldn’t want to be driven in at the end of an armalite or even surreptitiously coerced into it.”

We should be careful that we do not listen to young people exclusively (this is a man in his seventies talking!). In an Irish Times interview in December, that wise old owl, former Tánaiste and Irish Labour Party leader Dick Spring, warned that young people had no understanding of the 1969-1998 Troubles, and didn’t give them any thought.

He said it would take “an awful long time, as we see in other war zones, for people to recover from all those tragedies and the loss of loved ones down through the years. It has left a long, long memory bank for people, and people have to dig very deep if they are to overcome that and work with people who are, you know, responsible for, or supporting, that campaign of violence.”3 And that includes Michelle O’Neill.

1 ‘McDonald and Sinn Fein have tricky message to sell’, Irish Times, 3 February

2 ‘Despite the DUP’s Trumpian claims, this deal has embedded the sea border rather than removed it’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 February

3 ’Dick Spring interview: I don’t want to be lecturing young people’, Irish Times, 16 December

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment