Newton Emerson: A New Ireland, or just a bigger Republic?

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has been having a good week in Northern Ireland, pressing the flesh at numerous engagements and striking the right tone in interviews and statements. Of most significance for the immediate future was an encounter with DUP chief whip Jeffrey Donaldson at Hillsborough Castle, the queen’s official residence.

Donaldson is MP for the area so the meeting was a formal courtesy, but it had the optics of a leadership summit and both men encouraged that appearance. Dublin and the DUP are working on a Brexit understanding.

Of much greater long-term significance were the Taoiseach's comments at a debate in Belfast on Tuesday that a united Ireland would be "a different state" with a "new constitution".

Varadkar referred to the reunification of Germany, where the West absorbed the East, as a model Ireland should not follow.

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This felt like a pointed reference to his predecessor Enda Kenny, who reached an agreement with Brussels and European heads of government in 2017 that Irish unification would automatically re-admit Northern Ireland to the EU without the Republic having to reapply. In effect, the Irish State would simply acquire new territory.

Undiplomatic

Kenny cited the German precedent in seeking this assurance, which was considered a great success for Irish diplomacy. However, it was undiplomatic to unionists to imply they would be absorbed.

The implication was unintended, but neither was it debunked. Kenny did not go out of his way to explain that a united Ireland was almost certainly always going to be regarded as the legal successor to the present Republic, or that any EU member state can change its constitution within the bounds of EU law.

At Tuesday’s debate, Varadkar spelled that out. Speaking to a mainly republican audience, he said that accommodating unionists would require a new constitution, leading to what would be a different state, if not a new one.

The example he gave was of Irish being the first official language. This is usually seen as an issue of compulsory Irish in schools or Irish-language qualifications for jobs but it is a far more fundamental problem. Under the present Constitution, the Irish-language version of all laws, including the Constitution itself, takes precedence over the English-language version. Case law has been established accordingly. This would be unacceptable in a country with, in principle, two linguistic communities. The convention in multilingual states across Europe, as well as in the institutions of the EU, is for all official versions of all laws to have equal standing. So the legal basis of a united Ireland would have to be rewritten from the top down and the ground up.

‘New Ireland’

The idea that unification would require a de facto “New Ireland” has been a nationalist and republican cliche for generations. Many people will have considered Varadkar to be merely stating the obvious.

But this assumption has been challenged by the Sinn Féin-linked civic nationalist campaign in Northern Ireland.

Prof Colin Harvey of Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Law is the campaign’s most prominent figure. In a paper published in February and circulated by the campaign, he argued that unity should be promoted as requiring few changes to the Constitution and little sense that a united Ireland would be much different from an enlarged Republic.

Under the Belfast Agreement, separate border polls must be held North and South.

The objective nationalist case for accommodating unionists is to avoid acquiring a disgruntled minority

Noting “there are two different audiences that will require persuasion”, Harvey warned that in the Republic: “arguments which seek to denigrate the Constitution or the State and suggest that this is a ‘blank page’ discussion are likely to be unattractive. It is arguable that a majority of the target audience is proud of the State and the Constitution – that should be noted and it should be harnessed not challenged.”

For the Northern audience, Harvey said unity should be promoted on the straightforward basis of a united Ireland’s superiority to the UK, as British politics is “highly unpredictable, divisive and against the basic interests of most in the North”.

The civic nationalist campaign has fizzled out in recent months, but Harvey’s argument is not going away. In fact, it is likely to be the defining argument of the unification debate. If unionists will not engage with that debate, as also seems likely, nationalists may see increasingly little need to make allowances for them, especially if those allowances are seen as jeopardising support for unification in the Republic.

The objective nationalist case for accommodating unionists is to avoid acquiring a disgruntled minority. But nationalism is always more about the heart than the head and few prospects would cause more heartache than a new flag and anthem, the introduction of British symbols, quotas in public offices or any of the other compromises a New Ireland is generally taken to mean.

With unification suddenly a credible goal, many nationalists are going to decide that what they really want is just a bigger Republic.

Unionists should be thankful the Taoiseach is taking a firmly opposite view.