Sir, – There is little new in Kevin Meagher's article "There has never been a better time for the North to sever links with Britain" (News Agenda, December 28th). It is a rehash of old left-wing Labour arguments that have changed little over 50 years: British politicians and people care little about Northern Ireland; it costs the British exchequer a huge amount of money; the Irish Border is artificial; so let's have Irish reunification as soon as possible.
Its most extraordinary omission is any consideration of the principle of consent for unity, including unionist consent, which is enshrined in the Belfast Agreement. This is dismissed as not part of any “first principles case coming from anyone in British politics about why Northern Ireland should remain part of the UK”.
Instead of Mr Meagher’s blunt instrument of Brits Out ASAP, I suggest that a far more nuanced re-examination of unity is called for at this time, and one that pays more attention to the greatest block to that unification, the question of the consent of 900,000 Northern unionists.
At the moment both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil’s policies on this foundational issue are a paler version of Sinn Féin’s: Irish unity to be achieved with as much or as little unionist consent as is necessary to push it over the line.
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But why should this be the case? For those of us who are not unionists, but who believe that Britain deciding to sever its links with Northern Ireland by 2030 – as Mr Meagher proposes – is a recipe for a return to violent conflict, are there any alternatives?
I would suggest that there is one. In a recent Irish Times article, the young playwright Sian Ní Mhuirí wrote: "I'm not nationalistic, but Ireland is my home and I love the communities here. 'Irishness' has little meaning in itself; it has value when people who are sharing this island come together and build communities that tackle the problems we have and create a more inclusive, fair and equitable place for everyone in the Republic and our sister state of Northern Ireland."
That phrase caught my eye. Why shouldn’t we in the Republic start treating our fellow Irish people in the North as citizens of a legitimate and equal “sister state”? After all this is not the bigoted, discriminatory Orange statelet of 50 years ago. It is a modern region with a power-sharing government in which nationalists enjoy a new equality and confidence at all levels of society and the economy. Its smartest political leaders are nationalists, as are some of its top civil society and business leaders. Its health and education systems are in many ways superior to ours in the Republic.
So here’s my suggestion for 2017. Fine Gael and/or Fianna Fáil should adopt a policy of treating Northern Ireland as an equal rather than a failed and unreformable state. “Parity of esteem” should be extended to the two states on the island. This would make a change from the “parity of contempt” that has been practised by most politicians and people in the two jurisdictions for most of the past century: Northern unionists treating Southerners as benighted and ignorant bogmen, Southern nationalists treating Northerners – and particularly Northern unionists – as bigoted and violent extremists.
This doesn’t mean giving up on reunification. Rather it moves the emphasis from unity coming about by the North being assimilated into the Irish state, to real unity of people coming together in a relationship of mutual aid and understanding. This may sound utterly utopian, but is it any more outlandish than believing that the unionists will roll over and accept Irish unity in the next 14 years? And isn’t it more realistic to begin to talk about how we can work together as “sister states” with important interests in common at the precise moment when external events are conspiring to raise a higher post-Brexit border between us that we will have to learn to overcome in imaginative new ways?
Such a new policy turn could move us towards a more rational alternative to traditional Irish unity: some form of confederation. I incline to the view of the late Sir George Quigley, who believed that before there can be any future constitutional coming together in Ireland, there must be a recognition that there are “two mutually opposed ‘principles of legitimacy’ which are strongly held – one nationalist and one unionist – and some common ground would have to be found on which the divergent aspirations are transcended in a general consensus.” He saw the model most likely to secure such consent as a confederal one, which he called the “most persuasively argued” of the three options in the 1984 New Ireland Forum report. “On this basis the final agreed Ireland would be a joint, equal venture between North and South, with each having its own governance structure, and with policies to be specifically delegated to confederal level determined jointly by representatives from North and South.‘
Is it time to revisit the New Ireland Forum report? A joint, equal venture between sister states. Wouldn’t this be a better basis for beginning a discussion on Irish reunification than tired old “Brits Out” arguments from the British left? – Yours, etc,
ANDY POLLAK,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.