Rhun ap Iorwerth, the leader of Plaid Cymru in Wales, offered a video message to open Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill’s fireside-style conversation with party delegates in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.
He was joined, also by video, by the leader of the Scottish National Party, John Swinney, since both were too busy campaigning for the May 7th elections to the Senedd in Cardiff and Holyrood in Edinburgh.
In just a fortnight’s time, Swinney should be Scotland’s first minister, while the leader of the pro-independence Plaid could become Wales’s first minister, if the party can secure votes from Labour and the Greens, since neither will want to back Reform.
“We have a momentous election ahead of us on May 7th, an election where the traditional UK parties are in rapid decline,” ap Iorwerth told the gathered Sinn Féin delegates.
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Welsh voters, he told them, are ready to reject Welsh Labour, “the party that’s won every election for 100 years and led every government in the history of devolution”, by “choosing hope and ambition over the same old tired politics”.
In Scotland, Swinney said SNP, Plaid and Sinn Féin “may not agree on everything, but what we do agree on is that the people who should decide the future of our nations are the people who live in our respective nations”.
The prospect of pro-independence leaders in both Cardiff and Edinburgh clearly, in the eyes of Sinn Féin’s McDonald, offers a new platform to push the unity argument in the months ahead.
“Anybody listening to those messages can’t miss the fact that we are in really a very special moment,” she declared. “We’ve always had a sense that there is a potential to build something really significant and strong, like Celtic cousins.”
If the SNP are victorious, and, less likely, Plaid, one can expect that Sinn Féin will seek to leverage a collective voice that will support the independence campaigns in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
[ Irish unity must let Protestants stay British if they want, says GAA presidentOpens in new window ]
The question, perhaps, is whether any of this will make any difference. Throughout the weekend at the Sinn Féin ardfheis in Belfast, senior SF figures from McDonald downwards insisted on the need for a unity referendum by 2030.
Repeatedly, Sinn Féin argues that the British government is failing to honour its obligations under the 1998 Belfast Agreement by not ordering the holding of a unity referendum.
However, the agreement signed by Sinn Féin clearly states that a referendum shall be called when the Northern Ireland secretary of state judges that a unity question, if put, would be passed with a majority of support.
Up to now, a series of opinion polls show that support for unity in Northern Ireland has grown significantly since Brexit, especially amongst the young, but none of them record a majority in favour of it.
And there is little evidence that support would pass that mark in the next few years, bar the election of a Nigel Farage-led administration to take over in No 10 Downing Street, when all bets would be off.
During a debate on unity on Saturday evening, speaker after speaker condemned Taoiseach Micheál Martin, insisting that the Irish Government should be planning seriously for unification and pressing London to call a referendum.
Asked if the 2030 referendum target was “an aspiration, or actually realistic”, McDonald declared it was, arguing that “Micheál Martin and the Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil Government are a real problem now in respect of this process”.
“Not alone have they buried their heads in the sand, they seem to have it as their objective to actually stop the conversation, to stop the process and to get in the way,” she went on.
Martin’s focus on the need for reconciliation ahead of a unity referendum was rejected by McDonald. “Arguably, we’re not reconciled because we’re partitioned. Yes, reconciliation is important.
“We have to work for that, we’re very well aware of that. But the conversation should be around how we build the future together. How we live together. How we make everybody’s life better,” she went on.
Both McDonald and O’Neill argued repeatedly that partition has for a century hurt not just Northern nationalists, or people living south of the Border, but Northern Protestants, too.
“We are given the opportunity to fix those problems. We have this historic moment and this process where we can redesign things, where we can make things better. I think that’s incredible.”
Elsewhere in the Waterfront Hall, hundreds crowded into a debate in which Sam McBride, the co-author of For and Against a United Ireland, outlined the arguments on both sides of the question, and fielded questions from the floor.
However, there is a third side to the question, too, as Dr Raied Al-Wazzan, who has lived in Northern Ireland for nearly 40 years, outlined, when he expressed fears about what a unity referendum could mean for Northern Ireland’s immigrant community.
“What scares me is that if we call for a border poll tomorrow, we will be targeted from both sides. If we vote for unification, and unification wins, Loyalist paramilitaries will attack the ethnic minorities group because we swung the vote this way.
“And if the vote goes for the United Kingdom, dissident republicans will attack ethnic minorities because they swung the vote in that direction,” he said, adding that he sees little evidence that either side is talking to immigrants.
Long-standing Sinn Féin figure Jim Gibney asked McBride for his view on how unionists are viewing the debate surrounding independence.
How should Republicans engage with unionists, Protestants and those who do not want to see a united Ireland, he asked, and how can they make such people “feel comfortable and part of any new Ireland that may emerge the other side of that”?
The question was put to McBride, though one could be forgiven for thinking that Gibney, one of the central figures in Sinn Féin 40 years and more, was not addressing the journalist, but rather the audience.
