Among other things, Easter is a season of remembering in Ireland. President Michael D Higgins led events at the GPO for the final time at the State’s official 1916 commemoration last Sunday, placing the wreath after the customary reading of the proclamation by an officer of the Defence Forces.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin presides over his party’s event on Sunday at Arbour Hill. Fianna Fáil has always felt a special connection with the Rising, with a long list of 1916 veterans – DeValera, Lemass, et al – who occupied prominent positions in the party for decades afterwards.
Sinn Féin also does its commemorations and as you might expect they have a different character and historiography to the others. The party always seeks to link the Rising and the War of Independence with the Provisional IRA’s campaign in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s – and highlights what it sees as the moral and political continuity between the executed leaders in 1916 with the 10 men who died on hunger strike in the H-Blocks in 1981. It’s a link that is as important to Sinn Féin and many people in the North as it is offensive to many in the political mainstream down South. The past is never dead and all that.
Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the party’s jump back to first place in The Irish Times/Ipsos B&A poll last week, Sinn Féiners had a pep in their step at this week’s commemorations. Speeches by Mary Lou McDonald in Tyrone, Pearse Doherty in Belfast and Matt Carthy in Co Waterford were similar in tone and content: fierce criticism of the Government, with plenty of digs at Martin, advocacy for Palestine, defence of neutrality and lots and lots of ol’ time religion about the inevitability of a united Ireland and the need for a referendum by 2030.
“We are living in the end days of partition as a new generation looks to the possibilities of unity with fresh hearts,” McDonald told her audience. “We must prepare for unity referendums this decade.”
It’s not that Sinn Féin has ever resiled from unity as a key political goal, but it does seem to be giving the issue more va-va-voom of late. It looks like part of a back-to-basics response to the electoral disappointments of last year, a return to the playbook that enabled the party to enjoy unprecedented support – as measured by the polls anyway – in the 2021-23 period. Sinn Féin seems keen to reassert its republican, anti-establishment, working-class identity – and none of your “preparing to be responsible in government” messing.
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But the prominence of the united Ireland rhetoric vies with the reality that a Border poll is nowhere near the political agenda for the Irish and British governments.
In an interview with Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph before Easter, Martin dismissed suggestions of a Border poll before 2030, putting the emphasis on reconciliation and co-operation between North and South (largely through his Shared Island initiative) in advance of eliminating the Border. Asked what Northern Ireland would look like in 50 years, he expressly avoided predicting unity.
Meanwhile, despite the recent predictions from former Fine Gael leader and taoiseach Leo Varadkar about the imminence of unity – Mary Lou memorably welcomed the discovery of Varadkar’s “inner shinner” – the issue seems even less of a concern for the presumed next taoiseach, Simon Harris. “That is not where my priority is today,” he said recently on a visit to Stormont.
British prime minister Keir Starmer’s government is equally uninterested, according to its public and private statements. One person familiar with that government’s thinking told me recently that it is simply not on the Downing Street radar.
The admission by junior Northern Ireland Office Minister Fleur Anderson this week that opinion polls would play a role in the British government’s decision about holding a Border poll was no more than a statement of the obvious. While that government has been obtuse in refusing to spell out exactly how it would decide on a Border poll, the idea that one or two favourable opinion polls would trigger a referendum is naive. Moreover, those polls still indicate a solid “No” in the North.
Let’s face it: if the Irish and British governments are saying there will not be a referendum before 2030, there’s not likely to be a referendum before then. So when Sinn Féin and other united Ireland campaigners insist that Border polls will happen by 2030, you’d wonder: how real is their confidence?
Nonetheless, the enduring strength of Sinn Féin and its leadership of the Opposition means that the unity question is likely to remain part of the mood music of politics in the Republic, even if it is not central to political debate.
We know that a great majority of people in the South are in favour of unity – though there are reasons to suspect that for many of them, the commitment is a mile wide and an inch deep – but we also know from surveys that it just doesn’t register as an important political issue for more than a tiny minority.
In a recent poll, just 1 per cent said it was the most important issue for them. Meanwhile, the question of the economic costs of unification for the Republic, greater than the 2008 crash, economist John FitzGerald wrote in Friday’s Irish Times, will continue to weigh on the minds of Southern voters.
In other words, at least for this Government’s term of office and the four Easters to come during it, there is likely to be plenty of talk about unity – but not, I am afraid, much more than that.
