Diarmaid Ferriter: Would Brexit fallout push EU to advocate for Irish unity?

When the Department of Foreign Affairs sought public backing for Ireland’s membership of the EEC in the referendum held 50 years ago this month, it decided to focus on our insignificance. As was stated in its referendum publication, Into Europe, the Republic was “a small country with little capacity at present to influence events abroad that affect our interests”.

The “interests” at stake for most advocates of membership were primarily economic at a time when Irish GDP was 58 per cent of the European average. Promoting the message of membership as an economic necessity was easier than getting tangled up in the knots of sovereignty and identity.

That approach seemed vindicated by a Eurobarometer in 1974 measuring public attitudes to the EEC that revealed 82 per cent of Irish respondents considered the most important aspect of the Community was economic, almost identical to the 83 per cent who voted in favour in May 1972.

Fifty years on from opposing EEC membership, Sinn Féin's demand is that the EU champions Irish unity

Nonetheless, that level of support was not, during most of the campaign, regarded as inevitable at a time when polling was new and distrusted and various opponents of membership sought to wage vigorous campaigns centred on loss of sovereignty and the potential for economic wipe out.

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Few will be familiar with the small Irish Antigonish Movement, with its focus on national purity, self-help, co-operatives and concern about economic inequality.

In opposing membership, it wanted to rally people around the idea, as stated at its convention in Castlebar in 1971, of preserving “the dignity and the identity of the Irish people which can only be ensured within the indivisible island of Ireland”. The agricultural policy of the EEC, it insisted, was “a sentence of eviction on 120,000 farmers and their dependents”.

Media bias

Others opposing EEC membership included the Common Market Defence Campaign (CMDC), trade unionists and the Labour Party, though there was tension within Labour and the unions over their stance. There was much focus on expected increases in food prices, inability to withstand competition in industry, violation of neutrality and accusations of media bias in favour of entry. The Irish Council of the European Movement retaliated with its own positive predictions as pamphlets abounded.

Both wings of Sinn Féin, then divided between Officials and Provisionals, opposed membership, predicting conscription to an EEC army by an “imperial” EEC whose “purpose is to exploit”. A new Ireland needed to be built at home, they argued, and “this is what the struggle in Northern Ireland is all about”.

But then taoiseach Jack Lynch maintained voting against membership would cement the Border, as with Britain joining the EEC and Ireland remaining outside, the Border would be a frontier between Ireland and the EEC. In the aftermath of the referendum Lynch tentatively suggested “the whole Irish problem” would become “in a certain sense, a European problem as well as an Anglo-Irish one.”

A more robust interpretation had been privately communicated in 1970 to minister for foreign affairs Patrick Hillery by Seán Kennan, Irish ambassador to the EEC, who believed “membership would obviously contribute significantly towards the ending of partition”, the idea being that the Border would, in the long-term, become an anachronism within a European project to break down barriers.

One of the interesting questions 50 years on is the extent to which Kennan’s assertion carries new weight. The EEC, later the EU, was not going to get directly involved in the Troubles but was vocal and financially generous in support of the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and more recently, would not negotiate for the return of a hard border on the island.

There was also a significant intervention in 2017 with a declaration from the European Council (EC) that a future united Ireland would automatically become a member of the EU.

Irish reunification

Fifty years on from opposing EEC membership, Sinn Féin’s demand is that the EU champions Irish unity. Mary Lou McDonald argues “the EU needs to become a vehicle and persuader for Irish reunification” as it now “emphatically has skin in the game”.

The Irish nationalist case for the EU to back unification was comprehensively outlined by legal academic Colin Harvey of QUB and barrister Mark Bassett in a 2019 paper commissioned by the European Left Group of the European Parliament.

They argue Irish unity could be an “attractive constitutional scenario for the EU” (and cite the case of German unification) but that it is not enough for it to just cite support for the GFA; it must seek to provide “a pluralist European roof for the process of Irish unification”.

These perspectives, however, are very different from the preferred interpretation of the 2017 EC statement, which is that it was designed to ensure Brexit would not undermine any provision of the GFA, rather than advocating a push towards Irish unity. Whether or not the tortuous Brexit fallout will change that interpretation remains one of the intriguing questions of Ireland’s ongoing relationship with the EU.