Sir, – I have two concerns about Conor Kelly and David Kenny’s otherwise sensible discussion of the criteria that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland might use to determine if there is likely majority support for a united Ireland (“How would a Border poll on Irish unity get called in Northern Ireland?“, September 22nd).
The authors overestimate the vagueness of the Belfast Agreement’s Border poll provision. And they underestimate how much the court’s intervention damages their case for appropriate criteria.
The imprecision in the agreement partly dissipates if context is taken into account.
To determine what kind of evidence may lead the secretary of state to believe there is likely majority support for Irish unity, a fair and reasonable person reading the agreement would turn to history to reveal the kind of evidence that did lead the British government to believe there was actual majority support for union.
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There are three kinds of such evidence. An elected majority in the Northern legislature endorsing maintenance of the union, majority support for union in opinion polls or census data showing a Protestant majority in the North have at various times served as incontrovertible indicators of majority support for the North’s place in the United Kingdom.
These are the very indicators of “likely majority” that Kelly and Kenny utilise, suitably adjusted to show preference for unity instead of union. They do not emerge from abstract academic formulation but from the concrete historical experience of constitutional politics in the North.
The agreement’s language on likely majority support for unity was constructed in a political environment in which everyone plainly understood what counted as evidence of majority support for union.
Kelly and Kenny do not appreciate the extent to which court interpretations of the agreement’s Border poll clause undermine their argument. Judicial rulings devalue census demographic data and, more worryingly, electoral outcomes and representative opinion surveys as hard evidence of a “likely majority” for unity.
In the end, the court abandons a fair and reasonable reading of the agreement and leaves the determination as to what constitutes a “likely majority” for unity – and consequently when a Border poll must be called – to the whimsy of the secretary of state. – Yours, etc,
MIKE BURKE,
Associate professor emeritus,
Toronto Metropolitan University,
Canada.
