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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
For over two centuries, the 'Irish question' has dogged UK politics. Though the Good Friday Agreement carved a fragile peace from the bloodshed of the Troubles, the Brexit process has shown a largely uncomprehending British audience just how uneasy that peace always was – and thrown new light on Northern Ireland's uncertain constitutional status. Remote from the British mainland in its politics, economy and cultural attitudes, Northern Ireland is, in effect, in an antechamber, its place within the UK conditional on the border poll guaranteed by the peace process. As shifting demographic trends erode the once-dominant Protestant–Unionist majority, making a future referendum a racing certainty, the reunification of Ireland becomes a question not of if but when – and how. In this new, fully updated edition of A United Ireland, Kevin Meagher argues that a reasoned, pragmatic discussion about Britain's relationship with its nearest neighbour is now long overdue, and questions that have remained unasked (and perhaps unthought) must now be answered.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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“A provocative and valuable appraisal of the existential question facing Ireland and the UK. Not everyone will agree with Meagher’s answers, but this thoughtful book provides a roadmap to what may lie ahead.”
Rory Carroll, The Guardian
“The conversation on constitutional change in Ireland is moving into a much more focused new phase. Preparations have commenced, with the expectation that there will be a managed transition to new arrangements – perhaps sooner than many imagine. This book is a welcome and significant contribution to the debate about a united Ireland, from an author who spotted some time ago where trends were leading.”
Professor Colin Harvey, Queen’s University Belfast
“Provocative, persuasive and one of the biggest Brexit stories you’ve yet to read about in the mainstream British media.”
Atul Hatwal, editor, Labour Uncut
For Lucy, Elizabeth and James, and for my mum and dad
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Undoubtedly, this book will divide opinion. For every person who finds themselves in agreement with the arguments I set out, there will be others who strongly disagree.
The point, however, is to generate debate. To open up a discussion that has lain dormant for too long. To set out the truth as I see it. Others may have theirs.
But what is surely beyond contention is that Brexit, the ongoing threat of a Scottish breakaway and the growth of provincial English centres of power present very real challenges to Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. Quite apart from the compelling empirical evidence that Irish unity now makes overwhelming economic sense.
In the time-honoured tradition, any omissions or inaccuracies over subsequent pages remain entirely my own.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
It is five years since I wrote the first edition of this book. It feels like another world and much has happened in that time. I had just completed my first draft of the manuscript as Brexit occurred. The necessary second draft required me to process the biggest change in British political and economic life in a generation in real time. A political ‘Big Bang’ event, epic in its scale, dispersing debris across the political universe. Even now, the full implications of that decision have yet to be felt. Back in the summer of 2016, though, it was clear that it would alter everything, and that the effects felt in Northern Ireland would be greatest of all.
There had been warnings during the referendum campaign that the border between the British and Irish states – stretching 310 miles along the north-easternmost counties of Ireland – would present its own problems. A hard land border would be disastrous. A betrayal of the freedoms won xii by the Good Friday Agreement, which included an open border. Why put that at risk? John Major and Tony Blair, emeritus British Prime Ministers both, went to Northern Ireland during the campaign and said as much. No one was really listening, though. Brexit was, and is, chiefly an English phenomenon that was driven by concerns about mass immigration and a pervasive, but ill-defined, sense of malaise about the direction of the country. A yearning for old certainties. What the writer David Goodhart incisively referred to as a split between the people from ‘anywhere’, who embraced personal autonomy and consumerism, and the people from ‘somewhere’, who instead prided tradition, certainty and place. In the Brexit argot, the former group were ardent remainers, citizens of the world, instinctively socially liberal, at ease with societal and economic change. The latter were staunch leavers, social conservatives, unhappy by the pace of change and uncomfortable with where things were heading.
It sounds trite, but no one in the Westminster village entertained serious doubts about the result. All the main parties were campaigning to remain in the EU. There was an assumption baked into the campaign that voters would come round in the end. Better the devil they knew. Some might flirt with leaving but would not, ultimately, slip the leash of party xiii allegiance. And if that did not quite do it, figures outside politics were urging them to remain. If David Cameron could not persuade voters, then perhaps David Beckham could. The view, then, was that the centre ground of British politics would not yield to what they regarded to be the anti-EU nutty fringe – romantic Tory nationalists (invariably English) and the remnants of the hard left, who still saw the EU as a ‘capitalists’ club’. They were roundly beaten in 1975, during the last referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, and the same would happen again in 2016. At any rate, this was the script. Brexit might have been an iceberg to these modern-day executives of the White Star Line, but it could not sink the European ideal.
Ultimately, the remain campaign capsized, and the result has been a source of contention ever since. Brexit was carried by 52 per cent to 48 per cent – narrow, but clear enough. Disaggregate it, though, and the row intensifies. In Scotland, 62 per cent voted to remain, reviving separatist demands following the 2014 independence referendum, where 45 per cent of Scots voted to leave the UK. Just two years later and they now had a fresh reason for demanding a second attempt.
In Northern Ireland, 56 per cent of voters chose to stay in the European Union. Again, the result has been a fillip xiv for those demanding a border poll – the colloquial term for a referendum on Northern Ireland’s constitutional position. Indeed, hardly a week goes by without someone from the non-Unionist parties pointing out that there is no mandate for Brexit in Northern Ireland. But this was a national referendum. There are no opt-outs for constituent parts of the UK. The result stands, as, indeed, do the implications. But were Northern Ireland to join the Irish Republic, readmission to the European Union would be automatic.
This has created a new and compelling argument for Irish unity. The benefits of EU membership are considerable, not least the €710 million in funding that Northern Ireland received each year. There are not many people from ‘anywhere’ in Northern Ireland – national identity is massively important for both Unionists and Irish Nationalists – however, there are many younger people who appear to be moving beyond the confines of this binary choice, looking outwards with optimism, who deplore the implications of Brexit. Might this group – particularly those from a Protestant–Unionist background – now tip the balance? Any vote on Irish unity now has an implicit second question: ‘Do you want to rejoin the EU?’ Could this group combine with farmers and business owners to vote for a united Ireland on purely utilitarian grounds? Do the benefits of a single Irish xv state within the EU now outweigh the costs? Are jobs, prosperity and the opportunities they bring more important than tradition and identity? While politics is about voting for the things you want to see happen, it is also about accepting the things you can live with.
At least initially, the Democratic Unionists were happy with the Brexit result. Their reductive thought process was that anything that made Northern Ireland less European also made it less Irish. Perhaps it seemed like that in the immediate aftermath; alas, for them, that is hardly how things have panned out. As I write, Unionists across the spectrum, from harrumphing grandees like David Trimble through to Loyalist corner boys, petrol bombs in hand, are muttering darkly about the Northern Ireland Protocol. This is the part of Boris Johnson’s Brexit Withdrawal Agreement that ensures there is no hard border across the island of Ireland by checking goods and collecting customs at the ports instead, creating, in effect, a border in the Irish Sea.
So, Brexit represents an accelerant poured over the dry tinder of a host of underlying factors that were already pushing us towards Irish unification. The effects of Brexit – both political and economic – now intersect with the slow, grinding demographic changes that are set to see a further decline in the share of Northern Ireland’s population that xvi identifies as Protestant when the 2021 census reports. We then have an assembly election in May 2022 in which Sinn Féin may well top the poll, depriving Unionists of the role of First Minister in the process. (We have already seen a Sinn Féin surge in the south, winning the popular vote and coming within a seat of being the largest party in Dáil Éireann in the 2020 Irish general election.) Meanwhile, a raft of opinion polls have shown that support for Irish unity is growing, fuelling media coverage, both at home and around the world, speculating that Northern Ireland’s future is now time-limited.
Over on the other side of the Irish Sea, supporters of independence have a majority in the Scottish Parliament, adding to the likelihood that there will be a second referendum there. Indeed, some Scottish independence campaigners have cited the Good Friday Agreement and a provision contained therein that a border poll cannot be held until seven years have elapsed from the previous one. It is a valuable and timely legal precedent, given Scotland’s first independence referendum was in September 2014.
How will Unionists respond to these symbolic changes? Having seen Northern Ireland created to lock in a Protestant– Unionist ascendancy, how will it feel to them when that advantage is gone? What will they make of having a xvii Sinn Féin First Minister in charge of their ‘wee country’, especially if the party is also in power in Dublin at the next Irish general election? If Scotland leaves the UK, is there even any point in Northern Ireland remaining? Unionism, it seems, cannot break its losing streak. In chess, they call it ‘zugzwang’. The losing player cannot turn things around. Every move weakens their overall position. The game is irretrievable.
* * *
A second edition is an invitation for the author to wallow in self-congratulation or to lament their folly. Like the curate’s egg, my arguments back in 2016 were good in parts. The overall shape of my contention that Irish unification is inevitable remains intact, representing, as it does, a realistic and evidence-based proposition. Many will still cleave towards it because they consider it the righting of a historical injustice, but the issue is now also a sensible, practical and workable response to the times we are in – and this will entice many more to support it.
Over the past five years, the chatter about a border poll has become incessant. Campaign groups. Blogs. Podcasts. Events. Conferences. The debate, so long a marginal xviiiconcern among Republicans, has moved centre-stage. A self-confident ‘civic Nationalist’ community leads the charge. People from business, professional life, charities and the arts are holding the ring on the discussion. The subject is a constant source of speculation among columnists, writers and broadcasters. (Since the publication of the first edition of this book, I must have conducted nearly 200 interviews about the subject, mostly with British and international broadcasters.)
As with the first edition, I am not setting out to provide the reader with a definitive history of Northern Ireland or the Troubles. Where I have made historical references, I have done so to illuminate a point. Clearly, when delving into the political affairs of Ireland, it is impossible for historical events not to play a significant part. Quite unavoidably, they soak onto every page, serving as context for the present and, all too often, a warning to the future.
Nor have I embarked on a work of political science. Northern Ireland has an erudite community of academics who pore over every event and nuance with diligence and expertise, with various sub-academic fields analysing the conflict. (Northern Ireland, with its idiosyncratic politics and troubled history, must be one of the most studied places on earth.) So, my intention is not to compete with xix the scholars. This book is intended to be an extended political argument. The aim is to raise questions that have been unsaid and unheard (and perhaps, even, unthought) in British politics for too long. I am trying to encourage a discussion about the most elemental issues in relation to Northern Ireland. Why are we still there? Will we ever leave? What are the circumstances that could propel us to do so? And what arrangements would we put in place instead?
And when I use the royal ‘we’ I mean Britain, or, more precisely, the British political class. This is a book about British politics. I am trying to assess the issues involved for what they mean for the British public and British public debate. Physically, socially and politically remote from the rest of the UK, and unviable as an economic entity in its own right, Northern Ireland’s endurance for 100 years is merely testament to the indolence of a British political class that has been content to keep the place at arm’s length whenever possible. A somewhat anomalous response given that the governance of Ireland and latterly Northern Ireland is probably the longest-running fault line in British politics. Indeed, the ‘Irish question’ (or, more often, the ‘Irish problem’) has dogged British politics, in one form or another, since at least the time of the 1800 Act of Union and the abolition of the Irish Parliament (if not for centuries before that), as the English crown and then the British xxstate struggled – and invariably failed – to establish a popular mandate to govern the Irish. It is a question/problem that has rolled on into the modern age. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, it took the form of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ (an epic piece of understatement for what amounted to a major secessionist uprising that cost the lives of 3,600 people) and although the past twenty years have seen intensive efforts to secure a devolved local settlement via the Good Friday Agreement, the constitutional status of Northern Ireland remains moot.
How could it not? British–Irish relations over much of the past millennium are a grisly tale of invasion, subjugation, ethnic cleansing, famine, disease, insurrection, counter-insurrection, retreats, partial victories and brooding stalemates. The province of Northern Ireland was created as a back-foot political compromise to split the difference between Republicans vying for national self-determination and Loyalists determined to have their identity and local hegemony rewarded.
Yet here we are, a century on, still in possession of the north-east corner of the island of Ireland – six counties of the historical province of Ulster – long past the point when there was any rational reason to remain. Rational, certainly, from the perspective of the British public. We have paid a xxi heavy price, in both blood and treasure, for the failures of successive governments to oversee an orderly retreat from our oldest colony, a faraway land of which we know and seemingly care little. Now, two decades’ worth of incremental political progress since the Good Friday Agreement is creating space where the long-term future of Northern Ireland can and should be openly discussed. We should seize the chance.
This book is a modest attempt to contribute to that debate. It will explore the historical context – how we have ended up where we are and why – before moving on to discuss how different Northern Ireland is to the rest of the UK; the role of economics in driving an all-Ireland future; the mood of the Irish Republic towards the question of unity; how the once-difficult relationship between Britain and Ireland has been transformed in recent years, providing a stable context for any change of sovereignty over the north; and it will offer an examination of the scenarios in which British political elites will be presented with a compelling case for Irish unity in the years to come, whether or not they choose to drive the agenda.
Kevin Meagher
November 2021
CHAPTER ONE
WHY WE ARE WHERE WE ARE
It is quite impossible to write anything about Ireland without providing the reader with a historical precis. The trouble comes in deciding where to begin. There is so much history, so much context and so much political strife that it’s comparable to explaining Coronation Street from the very beginning to a visiting Martian. Do we start with Strongbow? The Flight of the Earls? The Ulster Plantation? Cromwell? The suspension of the Irish Parliament? Wolfe Tone? The Fenians? Easter 1916? The War of Independence? Partition? The Irish Civil War? The sheer scale of it, to the uninitiated, which, in this case, is pretty much everyone in Britain, is bamboozling, with personalities, references and terms that are entirely unfamiliar. But it all matters. Each tumultuous event in Irish history, those mentioned above 2 and dozens more besides, feed into one another, becoming symbiotic as one failed uprising against British rule simply inspires a repeat event. Each atrocity committed by the British state resulting in a backlash. Each rising being put down in brutal fashion. Historical grievances echo down the generations.
The fraught relationship between Britain and Ireland dates from the twelfth-century Norman invasion, beginning a sequence of rebellions, truces, stalemates, repressions and further rebellions that stretches into the modern era. The ambitious English King Henry II set foot in Ireland in 1171, but, although he secured bases in the east of Ireland, he did not manage to dominate the country. A century later, a Gaelic revival undermined this Norman conquest, aided by military victories for the native Gaels and the impact of the Black Death (which hit the Normans harder as they lived in towns while the rural Irish were more sparsely populated). England’s grip over Ireland weakened and was reduced to the fortified parts of Dublin on the east coast known as the Pale, with its writ not running in the rest of the country (‘beyond the Pale’).
Under Henry VIII, there was a more concerted attempt to force Ireland’s submission. Wary of the country being used as a backdoor to strike against England, Henry prosecuted 3 a typically bloody campaign to centralise control under the Crown but was less successful in converting the native Irish to Protestantism. In order to consolidate his advances (and to avoid a similar fate to the Normans), lands were confiscated and a loyal garrison from England and Scotland would be brought to Ireland as part of the policy of ‘plantation’. To bolster this new Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, a series of Penal Laws were introduced with the intention of killing off Catholicism altogether. They included a ban on Catholics sitting in the Irish Parliament, voting, practising law or serving as officers in the army or navy. Catholics were not allowed their own schools, or to send their children abroad to be educated. They could not marry Protestants and any priest who conducted such a ceremony faced death for his trouble. No Catholic could own a horse with a value of more than £5. Ingeniously, this law allowed a Protestant the right to buy any horse from any Catholic for that amount. The philosopher Edmund Burke described the system of Penal Laws as ‘a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man’.
It’s fair to say the Tudors left their mark on Ireland. In 4 English folklore, Sir Walter Raleigh is famed for the apocryphal tale of his chivalry, laying his cloak over a puddle for Elizabeth I to walk across. In Irish history, he is remembered as the English officer responsible for the massacre of 700 Spanish and Italian troops at the Siege of Smerwick in County Kerry in 1580. The soldiers, part of a papal force sent to assist the Irish nobles in resisting English rule, found themselves cut off and surrendered. Despite assurances to the contrary, and with the exception of a few officers, every man was killed.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English control of Ireland waxed and waned. One of the periodic bouts of rebellion led to the creation of the Irish Catholic Confederation, a seven-year period between 1642 and 1649 during which Irish nobles and the Catholic Church governed their own affairs through an assembly in Kilkenny. This flame of freedom was snuffed out when Oliver Cromwell began his conquest of Ireland in 1649. There is surely no figure in British and Irish history that so divides opinion in these isles. For the Irish, Cromwell is a fiend. An ethnic cleanser. A tyrant.
His notoriety was well earned. Landing in Ireland in 1649 with a force of 20,000 troops, Cromwell crushed all opposition before him, ordering the execution of more than 3,500 5 men, women and children loyal to King Charles I in Drogheda. The bloodlust continued in Wexford and a similar massacre ensued. Shortly after, word of Cromwell’s atrocities spread, and opposition crumbled. This allowed him to seize the assets of the Catholic Church and sack its churches and monasteries. Catholic landowners were dispossessed and forcibly relocated to Connaught, Ireland’s westernmost province (and, in agricultural terms, its least propitious). ‘To Hell or to Connaught’ was the choice. Cromwell’s officers were paid in confiscated land, which many sold to the English and Scottish gentry, creating a class of absentee landlords. To top it off, Cromwell sold off defeated soldiers, women and children, exiling them to the West Indies.
The Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 under Charles II brought little relief for the Irish. The one thing uniting Roundhead and Cavalier, parliamentarian and monarchist, was utter contempt for the Irish. In 1685, James II came to the throne. As a convert to Catholicism, Protestants feared the emergence of a Catholic restoration. Lord Danby, leader of the Whigs, encouraged James’s son-in-law, the Dutch Prince William of Orange, to rise up against him. James was forced to flee to France before heading for Ireland in the hope of rallying support there to regain his throne. In 1690, his Jacobite army faced William’s at the river Boyne 6 in County Meath in southern Ireland. Outnumbered and outclassed by William’s professional soldiers, James was defeated, again taking refuge in France from his estranged son-in-law. (Reliving this event remains the high point of the Orange Order’s annual calendar.) William was eventually halted at Limerick by the Irish general Patrick Sarsfield, who forced William to agree to terms and in exchange agreed to disband his own army. The Treaty of Limerick of 1691 was to see religious freedom and the rights of the native Irish restored, while Sarsfield’s army went into exile, forming brigades in many continental armies (somewhere in the region of 500,000 Irishmen – so-called ‘wild geese’ – would do the same over the next century, denied, by the Penal Laws, the right to serve in the English army). Sarsfield kept his part of the bargain. The English Parliament, however, did not.
By the late eighteenth century, only 5 per cent of Irish land was owned by Catholics, even though they made up three-quarters of the population. The ongoing and unjust effects of the Penal Laws led to a further rebellion. The Society of United Irishmen, led by Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Kildare lawyer, took inspiration from the American War of Independence and the French Revolution to champion a non-sectarian, independent Irish Republic, uniting ‘Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter’. His call found a ready 7 audience among Catholics but also Presbyterians (who were also subject to the Penal Laws, although not as harshly dealt with as Catholics). A rising in 1798 led by Tone was eventually put down and Prime Minister William Pitt moved to abolish the Irish Parliament and make Ireland part of the United Kingdom. The Act of Union became law in 1801. For his part, Tone is still revered as a theorist-martyr, providing an intellectual lodestar for contemporary Irish Republicans who seek to emulate his call for national self-determination on the basis of equality and liberty for all.
