Fintan O’Toole: Ireland, land of a 32-county hockey team and a 26-county rail system

On the day the Irish women's hockey team beat Spain to become the first Irish side in history to qualify for a world cup final in any sport, I tried to book online a train ticket from Dublin to Derry.

The Irish Rail website had a nervous breakdown. First, it repeatedly told me that I didn't want to go to Derry – I wanted to go to Park West and Cherry Orchard, presumably because this station name contains a rhyme for my actual destination. When I persisted, the system relented and offered me a ticket for Skerries – not quite a rhyme but close enough. And definitely enough to underline the message: the "Irish" in Irish Rail does not include the city where the Troubles started almost 50 years ago. If you want to get a ticket for the Derry train, you have to buy it in Belfast.

I mention this because if you were watching the hockey game with one eye and trying to book such a ticket with the other, you would experience a dizzying double vision. The fabulous women who mesmerised us all on both sides of the Border are from Coleraine and Cork, from Belfast and Dublin, from Derry and Larne.

It is not an aggressive political claim to say that they are obviously comfortable representing a place called Ireland. It would be easy to conclude from watching their togetherness that the island is, in a simple sense, increasingly united. But there is no simple sense in all of this: as Irish Rail could tell you, there are also very real ways in which there is no such singular place as Ireland. Sometimes, the Border seems barely to exist; simultaneously, it can seem immediately and inescapably present.

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The idea of a united Ireland is in the air again because of Brexit and the fiendish complications it creates for the Border

These are ordinary things – sports and travel – not the big existential and historic questions. But perhaps those big questions might ultimately hinge on such ordinary things.

Fiendish complications

The idea of a united Ireland is in the air again because of Brexit and the fiendish complications it creates for the Border. And so is the idea of Northern Irish identity: Gerry Adams told the audience at a Féile an Phobail event in west Belfast on Monday night that they should choose either a British or an Irish identity but not opt for anything in between: "There's a census coming up and please don't let anyone put 'Northern Irish'."

Given that almost half of people in the last census, taken in 2011, chose “Northern Irish” as at least part of their nationality, this seems a strange demand. Why is it wrong for people to own up on a census form to their own identity? Is it, one wonders, because “Northern Irish” complicates things too much? And if so, why should we be so uncomfortable with fluidity, complexity and uncertainty?

In principle, we shouldn’t be uncomfortable with it. In thinking about the political future of Ireland, we’re supposed to be thinking, not about territory, but about that most fluid of all things: people.

Twenty years ago, the Belfast Agreement and the radical revision of articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution redefined the aspirations of Irish nationalism. It is now supposed to recognise that people in Northern Ireland are entitled to a hybrid identity – the “or both” part of the guarantee that they can be Irish or British or both as they may so choose.

It is also supposed to be about recognising that the “Irish” part of this range of options is itself plural, that Irishness exists in the hearts and minds of what the Constitution now calls “all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions”. And whatever that ends up meaning, it surely cannot be something singular or monolithic that forces people into a zero-sum choice between Britishness and Irishness.

Partition

Before we even get to some real idea of “Irish unity”, moreover, we have to ask how much we currently share the island. Is it as much as the hockey team or merely as much as Irish Rail?

One of the things we have to recognise is that partition didn’t just institutionalise existing divisions on the island – it created new ones. At the time of partition, most of the Catholic population of the South saw itself as essentially the same political community that Northern Catholics belong to.

We all know that the Troubles spilled over the Border, sometimes with horrendous consequences

But the fact is that Catholics on either side of the Border now have had almost a century of radically different experiences: a different Civil War, a different relationship to the state, a different second World War, a different experience of education, health and welfare. And above all a very different experience of the Troubles themselves.

We all know that the Troubles spilled over the Border, sometimes with horrendous consequences. But there is a very profound difference: most of the time, people in the South had the luxury of turning away while people in the North did not.

One of the great secrets of contemporary Irishness is that the response of very many people in the Republic to the Troubles was simply to switch off. In a major ESRI study of southern attitudes in 1979, just 48 per cent declared themselves either “very interested” or “quite interested” in the problems of the North. Much of this was probably not mere indifference – it was a psychological wall erected to keep the pain and fear at bay.

Another secret is that Catholics on either side of the Border thought very differently about the very thing that was supposed to bring them together: a United Ireland. In that 1979 survey, people were asked for their preferred solutions to the problems of Northern Ireland. In the Republic, 68 per cent chose some form of united Ireland. But this was way out of line with what Catholics in the North said they wanted: just 39 per cent of them supported a United Ireland.

Deep repercussions

Conversely, there was almost 50 per cent support for remaining part of the United Kingdom among Northern Ireland Catholics, compared with just 9 per cent support for this option among the population of the Republic.

Things have changed in the intervening decades and they are still changing. But the work of a century is not undone in a generation. The idea of “all the people who share” the island is real and tangible. But the deep repercussions of history mean that this is complicated, fragile and ambiguous.

There is a slow, gradual thickening of daily connections that might in time create an all-island life. But it can be reversed in either direction, either by hardening the Border again or by pretending that its consequences can be ignored in the rush to impose unity on a complicated sense of place and belonging.

As I write this, I’m on the train north and have just crossed the Border. My mobile phone operator sent me the message that is currently the only warning I get that I have crossed the great frontier: “You are now roaming in Europe.” Roaming in Europe is still surely the best way for Irish people to find each other.