Cognitive dissonance is the normal Irish state of mind. We hold in our heads beliefs that fundamentally conflict with each other. And it makes a weird kind of sense that this mental partitioning is most obvious when it comes to partition itself. A united Ireland is both deeply desired and consigned to Irish dreamtime. It is utterly imperative and entirely discounted.
This dissonance is now official. Last week, the Department of Finance published a 238-page document called Future Forty, mapping the challenges the State is most likely to face between now and 2065. The most startling thing it tells us is the State has no capacity even to imagine the possibility that partition might end in the next 40 years.
According to the report, its authors have considered over two thousand “alternative scenarios”. Not one of those two thousand involves a united Ireland. The thing that, according to the Constitution, the nation most desires, is literally inconceivable.
Here’s what Future Forty has to say on the subject: “it is vital to acknowledge that there are potential developments in our economy and society that cannot be foreseen with any clarity or certainty. Among the most impact (sic) of these potential developments is the future relationship between Ireland and Northern Ireland. While any shift in this relationship would have significant implications for the economic and fiscal landscape, Future Forty is conducted on a no-policy change basis. Thus, it is assumed in all scenarios that no change occurs to the current constitutional and political arrangements in both jurisdictions.”
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The language here is telling. Usually, when someone writes that it is vital to acknowledge something they go on to, um, acknowledge it. But here the official mind is acknowledging only its own cognitive dissonance – it is crucial for us to confront this huge possibility but please, please don’t ask us to think about it. Is it mere coincidence that the language itself actually falls apart in that “among the most impact” lapse into gibberish?
I recently did a piece of work for the ARINS Project and the Royal Irish Academy, a short book called For and Against a United Ireland. In it, the brilliant Belfast-based journalist Sam McBride and I attempt to lay out, as objectively as flawed humanity allows, the cases for and against an end to partition. We each argue both cases, an approach that rests on just one implicit assumption: that there are legitimate reasons both to embrace this possibility and to fear it.
In doing this work, Sam and I consciously imposed on ourselves a duty not to take sides or express our personal beliefs. But the thing we do want to convince readers of is the need for serious engagement. Seriousness is not the same thing as passion. There is and will be plenty of emotion – many people on the island know exactly how they feel about a united Ireland.
But in the battle for hearts and minds, this question is nearly all heart and too little mind. If a united Ireland is to be taken seriously – and both the Belfast Agreement and the Constitution say it must be – then there has to be a sustained commitment to thinking it through. What does it really mean for the economy, for health, education and welfare, for governance and identity? What are the risks and do the potential benefits outweigh them?
Most people probably prefer not to have to think about this stuff. It does not occupy the same mental terrain as the housing crisis or hospital overcrowding or the strains of migration. It is easier, even for most Irish nationalists, to keep it in the same storeroom of aspirations where we all think we should be speaking Irish but can’t quite get round to doing so.
But this is not a luxury we can afford. Political identities on the archipelago we share with Britain are in flux. English, Scottish and Welsh nationalisms are playing out in unpredictable ways. The party systems that have maintained a bedrock of stability may be fragmenting. Brexit was a seismic shock that should act as a warning of how the shifting of tectonic plates can be almost imperceptible until the earth starts to crack beneath our feet.
It is, for example, not ridiculous to imagine that Nigel Farage could be prime minister of the UK before the end of this decade. If that happens, the implications for the future of the union will be existential. And if the UK starts to break up, Northern Ireland in its current form will be over.
This is why we have to separate desires from plans. We are used to thinking of partition as a question that will ultimately be resolved by those of us who live on this island. But Brexit showed us that this may well not be the case. We could again be plunged into a crisis that is not primarily of our own making.
This is why preparation is, to use the Department of Finance’s word, “vital”. We don’t need to know right now what the final answer is going to be. But we do need to know what the hell the question is. If it’s a mere thumbs up/thumbs down without a concrete sense of what those options mean for the lives of all of us who share this space, the consequences could be disastrous.
Future Forty’s refusal to engage with Irish unity, even as a speculative scenario, is staggering because one of those primary consequences is fiscal. Whatever the long-term economic benefits of unity, the costs to the exchequer would certainly be formidable. A rushed and botched end to partition is, even in narrow financial terms, a tangible risk that should be weighing heavily on any responsible state.
Yet it is now the official position of the State that the consequences of Irish unity “cannot be foreseen with any clarity”. This is a self-fulfilling lack of prophecy. The forecast is for brain fog to remain general all over Ireland.
