Fintan O’Toole: Nationalists must have an honest conversation with themselves on a United Ireland

Talking about a United Ireland is not just legitimate. With all the long-term uncertainties created by Brexit, it may be unavoidable.

But while we’re talking about it, we have to bear in mind a great complication: the fabulous Irish capacity for doublethink. The biggest mistake is to confuse what Irish people say they want with how they regard what happens in the real world.

Over the past decade or so, the term “virtue signalling” has entered public discourse, usually as a right-wing insult aimed at liberals. But we Irish were world-champion virtue signallers long before there was a phrase for it.

A lot of this was to do with religion, and the need to proclaim ourselves, as the title of Derek Scally’s terrific recent book has it, The Best Catholics in the World.

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What, for example, was the 1983 referendum on banning abortion forever and ever, amen, about?

Thirty nine per cent said that they could not speak Irish at all. Of those who had Irish, 67 per cent agreed 'ach ní labhraíonn riamh' – but I never speak it

Not actually stopping all Irish women and girls from having abortions in England or elsewhere – when that consequence unfolded in the X Case, there was general horror, even among those who voted for the Eighth Amendment.

It was, rather, a statement of how “we” (the narrowly defined collective Catholic self) wished, at that time, to define how we ought to feel. It created a virtual world of virtues in which the physical realities of Irish bodies and behaviours disappeared. It was antithetical to the actual.

Perhaps an even more pertinent example – because it was so entangled with the development of Irish nationalism – is the Irish language. It’s something “we” care passionately about, so long as our love does not have to speak its name in the native tongue.

A survey I find intriguing is the big exit poll that was done for RTÉ and TG4 during the vote on the European and local elections in the Republic in 2019. It's very useful because, as part of it, the same people were asked at the same time about two big identity questions: the Irish language and a United Ireland.

They were equally positive about both. And if I was pushing for a Border poll right now, I’d be very worried about that. Because at least one of these attitudes is demonstrably unreal.

If you look at the headline figures in that exit survey, you’d be sure that we are a nation of Irish-language enthusiasts. Asked to rank, on a scale of one to 10, how important An Gaeilge is to them, 60 per cent chose seven or above. By far the biggest preference was for the perfect 10 – fíorthábhachtach, extremely important.

Even more impressive is that this was true regardless of age, gender, social class, the rural-urban divide and (mostly) party affiliation. This is a value that could, therefore, be regarded as genuinely national.

But dig down into the responses and you’ll find a very different set of questions – what do you actually do with this fíorthábhachtach thing? Do you, for example, actually speak it?

Thirty-nine per cent said that they could not speak Irish at all. Of those who had Irish, 67 per cent agreed “ach ní labhraíonn riamh” – but I never speak it.

So here we have one “extremely important” component of national identity that enjoys very wide assent – so long as it does not affect the way we actually live our lives.

At the same time, these voters were asked about how they would vote “if there was a referendum on a United Ireland tomorrow”. A similar proportion – in this case 65 per cent – were all in favour, and this support was similarly strong across demographic and geographic divides.

Before there can be an honest conversation with unionists, Irish nationalists have to have one with themselves

Now, the intriguing question is this: if one of these attitudes is demonstrably virtue signalling, might this not be equally true of the other one? It’s hard to say.

With the language question, it’s very easy to measure the gap between what people say and what they do. Ending partition is a more complex proposition, and it is harder to define a living reality against which to measure the aspiration.

But it is worth remembering just how central the language was to modern Irish nationalism. For most of the revolutionaries who created the State, it was definitive. Ireland could not be a nation if it did not revive the language and it could not do this without being an independent state.

Neither of these things was really true – British prime minister David Lloyd George, a native Welsh speaker, needled Éamon de Valera by pointing out that his language was doing rather well within the United Kingdom. But they were passionately held beliefs nonetheless, and they had a huge bearing on Irish statehood.

And yet, when it comes down to it, most of us can’t be bothered. I wonder is there a language anywhere in the world for which a smaller proportion of those who can speak it actually do so? The last census counted 1.8 million people able to speak Irish, but only 74,000 who claimed to do so daily outside the education system.

Which shows a collective genius for cognitive dissonance. Hypocrisy is far too simple a term for how it works – the belief that Irish is extremely important to us is, for the most part, quite sincere. It just so happens that the belief that other people should be the ones to speak it is at least equally heartfelt.

At issue in all of this is the difference between what people want and what they think they ought to want. A United Ireland, like the Irish language now or like banning abortion in the 1980s, is something most people in the Republic feel they should desire. But does that make it a concrete goal?

I’m not sure it does. Polls have consistently shown that support for a United Ireland drops very sharply (perhaps by as much as half) if the question comes with a real world qualification, such as paying higher taxes to sustain it.

That seems to be a real passion killer. The lust for virtue does not outlast the glimpse of a price tag.

This is one of the reasons why there needs to be a calm, open, generous and above all honest discussion about the future of the island – not just between North and South but within the Republic.

Every society has huge gaps between its stated ideals and its daily realities. But, for all sorts of cultural, religious and historical reasons, the collective formerly known as Catholic Ireland is especially good, not just at living simultaneously in two worlds, but at keeping them well apart from each other.

Sooner or later, the world of fine aspiration has to be forced into contact with the world of concrete desires. Before there can be an honest conversation with unionists, Irish nationalists have to have one with themselves. Top of the agenda is to separate what they feel they must wish for from what they really, really, want.