Stephen Collins: Higgins has put the Government in an invidious position

The President’s refusal to attend the Northern Ireland centenary service organised by the main churches, and the public reaction it has generated, threatens to undermine the carefully calibrated approach of successive governments towards the future of this island.

All of the fine talk about respecting the British identity of the unionist population in a future united Ireland appeared to go out the window in the furore which followed the President’s demarche. It is as if the Belfast Agreement, and the principle of consent around which it was framed, never happened.

Much of the debate over the past week has taken place as if the old articles two and three of the Constitution, which contained the territorial claim to the North, had not been amended in the referendum which followed on from the Belfast Agreement.

It took a very long time for nationalist Ireland to get to grips with the reality that partition was not simply imposed by the British government on an unwilling population in 1922, but arose from the fact that one million unionists in the North were prepared to resist by arms incorporation in the new State.

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Following partition the Northern state became a sectarian entity, which as David Trimble acknowledged in his Nobel peace prize acceptance speech was “a cold house for Catholics”. The other side of the coin was that the Southern State was dominated by a Catholic ethos and was for a long time hardly a warm house for Protestants.

By refusing to attend President Higgins [...] has adopted a line that is clearly at odds with the policy of successive Irish governments

For half a century the response of most politicians south of the Border was to rail against partition but do little or nothing of a practical nature either to help Northern nationalists or try to win over unionists. It was not until the outbreak of the Troubles in 1968 that the government in Dublin began a serious reassessment of its strategy.

It prompted Jack Lynch to make a defining speech in Tralee in September 1969, in which he stated unequivocally that the Irish government was committed to a united Ireland achieved by peaceful means. “The unity we seek is not something forced but a free and genuine union of those living in Ireland based on mutual respect and tolerance.”

In subsequent decades that doctrine was developed by Garret Fitzgerald, Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern to flesh out the principle of consent. It meant the acceptance of the right of unionists to maintain their British identity either as part of a United Kingdom or as part of a future united Ireland.

The commemorative event in Armagh organised by the churches attempted to reflect the complex reality of what happened a century ago, and the differing contemporary views of it, by referring not simply to the founding the Northern state but to partition. It was clearly an effort to be as all-inclusive as possible.

The irony, of course, is that a reversion to the green-flag-waving version of nationalism makes the achievement of a united Ireland in the foreseeable future even less likely

By refusing to attend President Higgins has not simply insulted the Catholic and Church of Ireland archbishops of Armagh, he has adopted a line that is clearly at odds with the policy of successive Irish governments. The apparent public support for the President’s stance raises troubling questions about whether the majority of people in the Republic are more comfortable with the old pre-Belfast Agreement version of aggressive nationalism than they are with the more nuanced “shared island” approach of the Taoiseach and the Government.

The irony, of course, is that a reversion to the green-flag-waving version of nationalism makes the achievement of a united Ireland in the foreseeable future even less likely than it might otherwise be. Back 100 years ago, during the emotional Dáil debate on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, partition was barely mentioned, but one TD who did raise it was WT Cosgrave, who later became the leader of the independent Irish State for its first decade.

“One question that has not been put at all is this: If you could have a choice for a republic with 26 counties, would you have it, or a dominion for the whole of Ireland. If such a choice were put up my money would be on the dominion, not per se on the dominion, but because it would effect that unification that ought to be effected in Ireland.”

A century later the same fundamental questions confront Irish nationalism about what, if any, concessions it is prepared to make to the British identity of one million Irish people. The evidence of the past week suggests that the answer is none.

A more immediate and practical question is how the Government should respond to the President’s decision. Privately, Government sources say that they would have liked him to attend the Armagh event but they did not wish to put him in an embarrassing position by formally insisting that he should go.

However, he has now put them in an invidious position. One way to counter that would be for the Taoiseach and Tánaiste to make it clear to the church leaders that they are prepared attend the Armagh event, if invited. That would be more difficult for Micheál Martin than Leo Varadkar, but they need to do something to make the point that it is the Government and not the President who decides policy on an issue of this importance.