Rejoining debate not a monarchy fantasy trip

In her last significant speech as President, Mary Robinson suggested that the question "should Ireland rejoin the Commonwealth?", would be "a good way of assessing the insecurities we still have" after 75 years of Irish independence. As if to prove her right, my colleague John Waters wrote this week that, apart from Mrs Robinson and Eamon O Cuiv, the only people who support the idea are "certified lunatics or descendants of Blueshirts who have wet dreams about shaking hands with the queen of England". My own lunacy has yet to be properly certified. Teams of researchers at the Genealogical Office have failed to uncover any evidence that any ancestor of mine since the time of the Fir Bolgs ever wore a shirt, never mind a blue one. Long years of expensive psychoanalysis have yet to discover any erotic fantasy regarding the hands or any other part of the person of either Elizabeth Windsor or any member, male or female, dead or alive, of her peculiarly unattractive family.

Yet I do think that Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth. And I think that rhetoric about the very idea being an insult to the patriot dead is stark evidence of what Mrs Robinson, in the same speech, referred to as "the lack of a firm sense of ourselves so that we cannot address that question without a great deal of hesitation and emotion". The citizens of the Republic are proud of their independence and rightly wary of what might be seen as a return to the Britannic fold. This is, moreover, hardly a good time for suggesting that anyone would choose to be associated with the British monarchy. Yet there are good reasons, both historical and contemporary, for reopening the question. The Commonwealth played a critical role in shaping modern Ireland and independent Ireland played a vital part in shaping the contemporary Commonwealth.

At the Commonwealth Conference of 1930, the Irish Free State, together with Canada, helped shape the organisation as a community of equal nations by establishing that British laws would not apply to the dominions without their consent. That agreement, in turn, transformed the equivocal independence granted to Ireland in 1922 into an effective sovereignty.

There is, too, another and perhaps more intriguing historical paradox. It is often assumed that Ireland's withdrawal from the Commonwealth was a logical outcome of the advance of nationalism. But in fact there is good reason to believe that Eamon de Valera, for long the embodiment of hardline Irish republicanism, wanted to stay in.

In 1953, Winston Churchill asked de Valera a question not unlike that which Mary Robinson put to the Irish people in August: "If you had remained head of the Irish Government, would you have taken the country out of the Commonwealth?"

De Valera's answer was a firm "No". Frederick Boland, the leading Irish diplomat of the time, wrote that de Valera would have kept Ireland in the Commonwealth, while making it clear that Ireland recognised the British monarch only as its titular head. By pulling out in 1948, the then government, theoretically committed to a United Ireland, actually deepened the divisions between North and South. It should have been obvious even then that closer ties between the Republic and Northern Ireland would always require some formal way in which British unionists, Irish nationalists and those of us who choose to belong to neither camp could acknowledge a common historical and cultural experience.

That experience is one of Irishness and Britishness being, not opposed, but intertwined identities. Ireland and Britain patently share a language and a history.

The relations between the two islands are too deeply rooted for either's existence to be imaginable without the other's. Britain may have shaped Ireland, but let's remember that Ireland also shaped Britain's sense of itself. The Britishness forcibly exported to Africa and Asia contained more than a few Irish strands.

When Ireland was a weak, bullied and resentful junior partner in the relationship, we were, understandably, not too anxious to be reminded of our deep links to Britain. Gestures like leaving the Commonwealth were perhaps a necessary assertion of a fragile independence. But, these days, post-colonial angst belongs in the Mother Country, not the old colonies. Surely the Republic no longer feels like John Bull's Other Island. Surely our sense of identity is not so very fragile that it will crumble at the first taste of a cucumber sandwich with the crusts cut off.

For most Irish people (including myself), the big source of instinctive revulsion when we contemplate the Commonwealth is the thought of having anything to do with the royals. But if democrats and republicans around the world can live with the occasional effort to be polite to the Windsors why can't we? We have recently shown that we can smirk blandly at the egregious Prince Philip and no royal ordeal is likely to be any more painful than that. Nowadays, in any case, the role of the monarchy in the Commonwealth has been diluted to a degree that goes well beyond even de Valera's demands. The Commonwealth is no longer the Empire in drag. If Nelson Mandela can lead South Africa back to the moral centre of the organisation, it is hard to see how even the most militant Irish nationalist can persist in seeing it as a neo-imperial conspiracy. Mandela, to take John Waters's criteria, may be one of the few people in the world who is certifiably sane. His parents' associations with Gen Eoin O'Duffy seem to have escaped most historians. And if he does from time to time shake the hand of the queen, the honour is all hers.

However sceptical most Irish people may be of monarchy itself, the fact is that the queen remains an important symbol of identity for Northern Protestants. For the Republic to recognise the queen as the symbol for the time being of the "free association" of a diverse group of countries would hardly constitute an endorsement of monarchical principles. What it would do is to send a powerful message to unionists that the Republic really does respect their political identity. There are other attractions, too. Ireland, being both western and post-colonial, has long regarded itself as a European nation with a special relationship to the developing world. But the old sources of that connection are gradually losing their significance. On the one hand, the Catholic missionary tradition is fading. And on the other, the newly rich Republic can hardly continue to claim membership of the oppressed, impoverished postcolonial world.

Rejoining the Commonwealth could be a way of reinventing that relationship, providing a means for the Republic simultaneously to make peace with its nearest neighbour and to make connections with a wider world. If we really cannot consider that possibility without digging up the patriot dead, we can hardly claim to be a free, sovereign nation.