Back in 2007, as a fresher, I wrote a letter to Trinity News on the preferendum Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) was holding on whether the Irish tricolour should be flown over Front Arch on a daily basis. As a northern nationalist, I felt that I should make my views clear that it should be a policy to fly the national flag on a daily basis. I’m sure that if I did some archival trawling I could find the full text of the letter, and I’m equally sure that both my stance and the language I used would probably embarrass me now.
I can save the rest of this nostalgia for my rejected contribution to Trinity Tales 2000s. But if you told me in 2007 that in 10 years there would be a unionist minority in the North, that Donald Trump was US President, and that the UK were leaving the EU by popular vote, I would probably have laughed. Since then, I have realised that there are more important issues than who Rory McIlroy or James McClean play for, or what colour or style of flag flies from a building in Belfast or Dublin. I largely have my university education and the friends I’ve met on the way to thank for that. But as the more pressing terms of the latest preferendum on Irish unity show, this is now about much more than flags and football teams.
A united Ireland would significantly alter the Republic of Ireland’s economy and its electoral landscape, necessitating an entire constitutional reorganisation
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It’s also not just about the North. The claim that a united Ireland would not change the jurisdiction of the southern state is not true. It would increase the jurisdiction’s land mass by approximately 4,130 km, and its population by around 1.8 million people. A united Ireland would significantly alter the Republic of Ireland’s economy and its electoral landscape, necessitating an entire constitutional reorganisation. In other words, the issue would not be a matter solely for the electorate of the six counties. Pigeonholing the issue as a “Northern” one or describing it as “high politics” is obscuring the serious ramifications that it would have in the South, as well as the situation that Trinity students from the North already face. It is somewhat predictable that in the wake of the greatest electoral victory that nationalism has ever had in a state explicitly constructed to guarantee their marginalisation, the situation is deemed “unpredictable”.
This is not a matter of “Northern Ireland joining Ireland” as one of the contributors at TCDSU’s preferendum hustings put it, but a new and fully integrated society which will blend aspects of both north and south. For all that, many exchanges and comments about a potential border poll have consistently referred to the north and Sinn Féin rather than to southern political parties, or to the new state which would follow a united Ireland. This reflects the lack of a political strategy towards partition or its end in the south, which is odd considering that every major political party in the south sees a united Ireland as a long-term goal. In the context of nearly a century of lip-service, the eruption of soundbites and clichés and what we are now met with is hardly surprising. These include the claim that the north is “exceptional”, or the description of the “irresolvable”’ nature of its current constitutional crisis.
Such analyses do not add anything valuable to the debate, but instead divide the “parochial” or “vastly different” North from a seemingly outward-looking south. But even if this description of backwardness and/or parochialism were true, then a united Ireland would surely be a solution rather than an exacerbation. The negative implications of a hard border hardly need to be stated, but an independent survey on economic modelling of a united Ireland led by Dr Kurt Hübner suggests that both north and south would benefit significantly from the end of partition. This is hardly any surprise, since Northern Ireland is a state ostensibly based on industrial production but which has been economically unequal from the outset. For all those who protest that the wishes of northern unionists will be lost in a united Ireland, then, few tears have been shed over the state’s consistent economic failure. In fact, only last year Leo Varadkar and Aodhán Ó Riordáin – whose parties do not stand in the north – decided to make the socioeconomic deprivation of West Belfast a political football in the 2016 general election. But then again, given the British Secretary of State for International Trade, Liam Fox, is making plans for an “Empire 2.0”, we have little to worry about in the wake of a Brexit vote which was rejected by a 12 per cent majority in the north, along with the longer shadow of a Tory austerity government…
While sympathy with the losing side on a border poll is only natural given the high stakes involved, it’s important to remember that northern nationalists have been on the losing side since at least 1920
Instead of a proper discussion about these impracticalities, about the looming prospect of a hard border, or about the consistent failure of the British state to implement a strategy for dealing with the past (just to give a few examples), the wider issue is often reduced to an “irresolvable complexity”. What this frequent recourse to abstracts, clichés, and neutrality masks is a continual pandering to the potentially hurt feelings of unionists in a united Ireland, thereby consigning nationalists and republicans to the familiar role of historical collateral. While sympathy with the losing side on a border poll is only natural given the high stakes involved, it’s important to remember that northern nationalists have been on the losing side since at least 1920. The Brexit vote is just another example.
Whatever the vote’s outcome, it is long since time that a practical rather than an abstract conversation about a united Ireland is had, from a fuller range of perspectives than that of “parochial” northern politics. It should also have an eye on more intricate aspects of an agreed Ireland than what the national flag is. Either way, the controversy and complexity of this are things that a university student should embrace, not something that they should demur from, especially as it directly impacts the world outside them. As a case in point, TCDSU operates from a building called Mandela House – it has not, and should not, shy away from informed stances on divisive and, if you like, “complex” political situations which are changing minute by minute. In any case, you can’t be neutral, as Howard Zinn said, on a moving train. The foremost university on this island should not be neutral on the prospect of that moving train having passport and customs checks either.
