For and against a united Ireland E-Book

Fintan O'Toole

• Herausgeber: Royal Irish Academy
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 290

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The prospect of Irish unification is now stronger than at any point since partition in 1921. Voters on both sides of the Irish border may soon have to confront for themselves what the answer to a referendum question would mean - for themselves, for their neighbours, and for their society. Journalists Fintan O'Toole and Sam McBride examine the strongest arguments for and against a united Ireland. What do the words 'united Ireland' even mean? Would it be better for Northern Ireland? Would it improve lives in the Republic of Ireland? And could it be brought about without bloodshed? O'Toole and McBride each argue the case for and against unity, questioning received wisdom and bringing fresh thinking to one of Ireland's most intractable questions.

Leseprobe

For and against a united Ireland

For and against a united Ireland

First published 2025

Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2

ria.ie

© Royal Irish Academy

Text © Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride, illustrations © Fergus Boylan

ISBN 9781802050356 (PB)

ISBN 9781802050363 (pdf)

ISBN 9781802050370 (epub)

ISBN 9781802050387 (audio)

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Editors: Fiona Dunne and Brendan O’Brien

Cover design: Graham Thew

Index: Lisa Scholey

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5 4 3 2 1

For Philip Pettit.

FINTAN O’TOOLE

For Kate and Patrick.

May you grow old in a land at peace in which you are respected and respect your neighbours, whatever its flag.

SAM McBRIDE

Introduction

1. The case against a united IrelandFINTAN O’TOOLE

2. The case for a united IrelandSAM McBRIDE

3. The case for a united IrelandFINTAN O’TOOLE

4. The case against a united IrelandSAM McBRIDE

Postscript

Endnotes

Further reading

Acknowledgements

Index

Introduction

Usually, a book like this carries a disclaimer: the views expressed in it are strictly those of the authors. In this case, however, the opposite applies. In what follows, we have tried, in so far as is humanly possible, to keep our own views out of it. As journalists and newspaper columnists we know very well that complete objectivity is an impossible ideal. The subject of this book is often an emotive one and we each come to it with the conscious and unconscious biases we have inherited and inhabited. We grew up in different generations, one of us in Northern Ireland in a broadly unionist environment, the other in the Republic of Ireland in a broadly nationalist one. But we are emphatically not writing as representatives of those perspectives.

Necessarily, many of the arguments here do not express our personal views – they could not do so because they are purposefully self-contradictory. Rather, we are seeking to present what seem to us to be the most important arguments on each side. We made a very deliberate decision that, rather than one of us arguing for a united Ireland and the other against, we would each try to present, as fairly as we can, what we feel to be the best arguments for and against a united Ireland. We have tried not to put our fingers on the scales or to tilt the balance towards any outcome. In writing each case for and against, we have in mind the most contradictory of aims: that the reader will finish each of the chapters persuaded of the merits of their reasoning even though their logic has been directed towards opposing conclusions. Our hope is that seeing merit in arguments we do not instinctively like might be the basis for the kind of debate Ireland needs to have about its future: one founded on a respect for difference.

To say that these are what we perceive to be the best cases to be made for and against a united Ireland is not to say that they are the only ones. This is a short and, we hope, user-friendly overview of a complex set of issues surrounding the prospects of unification. It draws on very detailed work by many experts, especially those involved with the nonpartisan ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South) project established in 2020 as a partnership between the Royal Irish Academy and the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. All of that work is available free of charge to the public and we recommend that those who want to go deeper into these questions should explore it.1

It is of course reasonable to ask: what is the point of embarking, as we have done here, on an intellectual journey that leads in opposite directions? We have to admit that for those who merely want to have their pre-existing opinions confirmed, there probably isn’t one. Views about a united Ireland are, for many people, ciphers for other feelings about identity and belonging. The ghosts of history, religion, family and community hover around them. The traumas of the Troubles, and the still unreconciled bitterness they generated, continue to shape attitudes and give all of these questions a sharp emotional edge.

We respect those feelings and accept that they will always have a heavy bearing on the conduct of these debates. But we have one overarching shared feeling of our own, which is that emotion is not enough. Unification is not an inevitability, but it is a concrete possibility. Sooner or later, it is a question that everyone on the island – and everyone with any interest in Ireland – will likely have to engage with. And it is vital that this engagement is as rational as any political contest ever can be. The stakes – both positive and negative – are very high and we all need to have some idea as to what cards are on each side of the table.

Many people state with unbending assurance that a referendum on Irish unity will be held within a short number of years. Others hold with equal confidence that a border poll will not be held for some decades. (We use the terms ‘referendum’ and ‘border poll’ interchangeably – the first tends to be used more often in the South, the second in the North. It is important to note, however, that in reality there would be two votes, one on each side of the border.) Neither side is sure of what it claims to know. But the possibility of a referendum is ever-present. It is not just on the horizon – it affects the way people think about a wide range of political, social and cultural issues in the here and now.

Yet it is shot through with uncertainty. The secretary of state for Northern Ireland retains the power to call a referendum at any point and for any reason. Much debate focuses on the Good Friday Agreement’s compulsion on that minister to consult voters if it seems to her or him that the public would vote for a united Ireland. But in an increasingly unpredictable world, we should be aware of the possibility that a mad or bad or impulsive secretary of state could decide at any moment to bring this debate to a head.

Anyone who cares for the future of this island ought to wish that such a campaign will be conducted so as to encourage honest debate and to enable both sides to believe they were able fairly and honestly to make the best case they could. Whatever happens, ‘loser’s consent’ – the willingness of those disappointed by the outcome to live with it because they accept that it is the freely expressed desire of the majority – will be vital to the future peace and prosperity of everyone on the island.

There are ideologues on both sides who don’t share this view. They want to win at all costs. In some cases, they have been – or remain – willing to kill their neighbours to advance their political goal. In a referendum campaign, they will shout loudest, and their voice will be heard. That is right, because this decision will involve all of society. But if only the most tribally partisan arguments were considered, that campaign would be a failure, regardless of who won.

This book is for everyone who has a stake in this momentous decision. But it is especially for the undecideds – the broad and growing body of citizens on both sides of the border who are open to the best rational arguments, rather than being already irreversibly committed to backing one side or the other regardless of whether that is to their material, social or cultural benefit.

In this book, each of us separately sets out what to him seem like the strongest arguments in favour of a united Ireland and the best arguments in favour of continuing with partition. We are not pushing you to change your mind, but we are urging you to open it. Unlike an election, the consequences of which will rest on our heads alone, this plebiscite will decide the future for generations yet unborn. It deserves to be treated with the respectful knowledge that our offspring and our neighbours will live or die, prosper or be impoverished, flourish or be repressed based not just on what is decided, but on how the decision is taken.

The tone of the debate will shape the decades after a border poll. A triumphal or sectarian approach is stupid not just from the perspective of the two sides involved. It would deposit a residue of instability and resentment that could result not in the desired settlement of historically vexed questions, but in a continuing sense of unsettlement that would leave profound problems for future generations to grapple with.

For any society to advance, it needs honestly to confront reality. Irrespective of how difficult that reality might be, the alternative is make-believe. Comforting as ignorance may be in the short term, it ultimately can’t supplant facts.

As authors, we share a belief in rational enquiry, in honest debate, and above all in deciding this island’s future by peaceful, democratic means.

What we have written will have errors and omissions, as is inherent to all human endeavour. Both of us are white, male and born on the island – and therefore conditioned by experiences and assumptions that a majority of the population does not share. But please believe that whatever we have missed, misunderstood or misinterpreted is because of our own inadequacies, not because we are seeking to steer you towards one or other outcome.

In all likelihood, some of the questions we are seeking to answer will in time seem to be the wrong ones. In 1987, an academic surveying the future of Northern Ireland pronounced the discovery of coal as a crucial breakthrough because it was an indigenous source of energy. Now coal is irrelevant to energy security as we realise the harm its burning does to the environment.

Even as we write, the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting and long-established relationships between Europe, America and the rest of the world are being thrown into doubt and confusion. The vote on a united Ireland, whenever it comes, will take place in an international environment that is currently unknowable and in all probability very different from one envisaged in 1998, when the Belfast Agreement set the stage for a future border poll. Even with what we now know, it is likely that if a referendum is held in the middle of this century the dominant social and political issue will be coping with the effects of dramatic climatic shifts. In a context where parts of the world we now view as idyllic will probably be uninhabitable, triggering mass population movements, our successors might see this question in a context that makes much of the present debate seem like a quaint dispute.

Hundreds of years of historical hope and pain will weigh on a border poll campaign, and manifest themselves in the joy and the anguish, the thrill and the fear that will follow its result. We owe it to each other, and to all those who have suffered because of the tensions and passions aroused by these issues, to consider them thoughtfully and respectfully. Not everyone who went before us had this chance.

1.The caseagainsta united Ireland

FINTAN O’TOOLE

Is partition unnatural?

There is nothing natural about nations. They are products as much of history as of geography. But Ireland’s physical shape as an island in the Atlantic seems to make its own case for political unity. Partition, in the nationalist imagination, is at heart a crime against nature. In 1982, Gerry Fitt, former leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), told the House of Commons that ‘Northern Ireland is an unnatural state’.1 In 2017, Sinn Féin MEP Matt Carthy spoke of ‘the undemocratic, unnatural and unjust nature of Partition’.2

Both were repeating a long-established claim. In March 1949, Ireland’s then minister for external affairs, Seán MacBride, wrote to his British counterpart, Ernest Bevin, and quoted an unlikely source, the Daily Mail: ‘The division of Ireland is unnatural. The split is a geographic and economic absurdity.’ MacBride pointed to what he thought of as an undeniable truth: ‘We have more clearly defined boundaries than most countries; the seas that surround our island provide those.’3 He in turn was echoing Arthur Griffith, who wrote in 1904 that ‘the frontier of Ireland has been fixed by nature’.4

The idea of the ‘unnatural division of this country’5 evokes the feeling that partition is not merely a political injustice but an offence against the God who established those clear and obvious boundaries. Father Michael O’Flanagan, vice-president of Sinn Féin, in a speech in Derry city in May 1921 insisted that ‘The boundaries of Ireland were marked by the finger of Almighty God when He surrounded it with the circling sea.’6

Partition could also be imagined as a kind of vivisection. When it was being planned, The Irish Times asserted that ‘You can no more dissect [Ireland] into two separate parts than you can divide the living body. Yet this is what ostensibly has been done. It is against reason, against history, against the very nature of things.’7

Yet, by this logic, Scottish and Welsh nationalism are entirely illegitimate: Britain, too, is ‘surrounded with the circling sea’ and intended by the Almighty to be a single polity. Irish nationalists have been reluctant to apply to their neighbouring island the geographical determinism they seek to impose on their own. Nor does the idea that an island is a natural political entity bear much scrutiny on a map of the world that includes New Guinea (divided between Papua and Indonesia), Borneo (Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei), Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti) and Timor (divided between Indonesia and East Timor, whose long, heroic and ultimately successful struggle for independence would also be ‘unnatural’ by Irish nationalist criteria). Some large islands (Iceland, for example) are governed as single independent states; some (like the Japanese or Indonesian islands) are constituent parts of single country spread across an archipelago; some are split between different states. Being surrounded by sea is not a predictor of political fate.

Ireland, moreover, has never been unified as a functioning and independent political entity. Gaelic Ireland had high kings, from the tenth century to the Norman invasion of 1169, generally – and almost comically – listed in the contemporary annals as ‘with opposition’. But no serious historian believes there was ever a single monarch whose rule was effective over the entire island. This contrasts sharply with, for example, Scotland, which operated as a separate kingdom for close to 800 years. The Lordship of Ireland and the Kingdom of Ireland, which did treat the island as a political entity, were creations of the English (later the British) monarchy.

Talk of the ‘reunification’ of Ireland rests on the technicality that an all-island Irish Free State did exist – for a single day. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 allowed the parliament of Northern Ireland to opt out of it, which it duly did on the day after the Irish Free State came into being on 6 December 1922. It was never going to do otherwise. An all-island Free State had no reality beyond the realms of wishful thinking.

Partition was, of course, messy, contradictory, incoherent and accompanied by violence. But there was nothing unusual in this. There were 24 independent states in Europe in 1900. There are now 45. Few of those new countries were lucky enough to emerge from orderly democratic processes. Most resulted from the implosion of empires (Ottoman, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Soviet), from the most murderous conflicts the world has seen (the two World Wars) and from horrific civil wars or regional conflicts (the Greco-Turkish war; the break-up of Yugoslavia). Most left ethnic and/or religious minorities stranded on the ‘wrong’ side of borders. There are, for example, two million Hungarians in Romania and another million in Serbia, Ukraine and Slovakia. Catholics stranded in the North of Ireland and Protestants in the South may have had good reason to feel abandoned, but they were certainly not alone in twentieth-century Europe.

It is undoubtedly true that the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921 was a paradoxical outcome of Ireland’s struggles for autonomy or independence: it created a devolved political entity for the very people who had resisted devolution most determinedly. As Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, James Craig, acknowledged: ‘The whole structure and ethos of Ulster unionism had been based upon a single object – determined opposition to Home Rule – and no constructive philosophy had been developed to govern a state they had neither expected nor wanted.’8 But it is also true that, however much partition was officially unwanted, it suited ruling elites on both sides of the border.

It did so because it meant that neither of the two polities was under any great pressure to make itself into a genuinely pluralist democracy. Partition gave Northern Ireland a Protestant majority of 2:1. The Catholic minority was concentrated west of Lough Neagh and the River Bann, in south Armagh and south Down, in the Glens of Antrim, and in specific working-class areas of Belfast, creating a significant degree of geographical separation. In the Free State, Protestants formed less than 8% of the population in 1926 and their numbers were in steady decline. Independent Ireland was free to form its political and social identity around a fusion of nationalism with Catholicism.

However much partition might be decried in the rhetoric of Southern politicians, it was clear that the majority of the population prioritised the specifically Catholic character of the state over any gestures towards unification. In 1986 the then taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, who had long characterised the Irish Constitution’s ban on divorce – its most flagrant encoding of a specifically Catholic doctrine – as an obstacle to reconciliation with Ulster Protestants, proposed a referendum to allow for the introduction of a very restrictive regime for the dissolution of marriage. His proposal was denounced by the Catholic hierarchy and by priests from the pulpit. Divorce was comprehensively rejected in the referendum, with two-thirds of voters rejecting the proposal. It was not until 1995 that the ban on divorce was removed from the Constitution, and even then it was by a tiny margin of fewer than 10,000 votes. In song, Southerners might occasionally mourn the loss of their fourth green field. In reality, they were happy enough with three.

Who are the people?

Underlying the desire for a united Ireland is the belief that there is such an entity as ‘the Irish people’. A single people should have a single state. But things are not so simple. The idea of ‘the people’ in Irish law is complex and sometimes contradictory. Colin Harvey notes that ‘It is striking how often “the people” is deployed as a concept within the language of the current framework’ of discussions about the constitutional future.9 But as Ivor Jennings put it, ‘Let the people decide’ is not a great shortcut to the resolution of conflicts ‘because the people cannot decide until someone decides who are the people’.10 Deciding who the people are is, in Ireland, much harder than it seems.

The preamble to the Irish Constitution, which serves as its fundamental enacting clause, echoes the more famous preamble to the American Constitution: ‘We the People of the United States …’. But it does so in ways that are rather more problematic. First, this evocation of popular sovereignty does not come first. It is preceded by a bald statement that the authority of the people is subordinate to that of ‘the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred’. A theological doctrine provides the ultimate frame of reference.

Second, the people who are giving themselves the Constitution are ‘We, the people of Éire …’. As Oran Doyle puts it, ‘the people entitled to vote in the [1937] plebiscite and to whom the Constitution would first apply were located on only part of the island of Ireland, representing a significant retrenchment on claims of an all-island Irish identity’.11

Third, and most importantly, ‘the people’ are implicitly understood as Catholic and nationalist. The preamble goes on to acknowledge ‘all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial’ – an obvious reference to the disabilities suffered by Catholics under the Penal Laws. And it conjures a people ‘Gratefully remembering their heroic and unremitting struggle to regain the rightful independence of our Nation’. Those who did not wish to see an independent Ireland are not included in ‘our’ nation.

This preamble was largely inspired by a draft created by the Jesuit Order’s Irish province. Mr Justice Gerard Hogan, in his definitive The Origins of the Irish Constitution 1928–1941, writes that ‘The Jesuit document proved to be enormously influential … The first four lines of the Preamble closely follow the Jesuit … model.’12 It is thus hardly surprising that the Constitution reflects a conception of ‘the people’ that emphasises its particular character as a religious community.

The changes to Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution that followed the signing of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 undoubtedly alter and broaden this idea of who the Irish people are. The new articles emphasise the ‘birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish Nation’. They declare the desire of the Irish nation ‘to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions’. And they assert the nation’s ‘special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage’.

The Constitution therefore seems to gesture towards three distinct ideas of who ‘the Irish people’ are. One, still there in its unreconstructed form in the preamble, implicitly defines them as the Catholic and nationalist inhabitants of the 26 counties. The second envisages them as the whole population of the island, no longer defined as Catholic and nationalist but rather as belonging to an unspecified number of different traditions. And the third nods towards the idea that the Irish people might not even be a concept confined to the island itself but might also encompass the descendants of Irish immigrants in other countries.

There’s nothing innately wrong with such a multilayered notion of ‘the people’, and the ambiguities are arguably true to the slippery complexities of Irish history. But in the context of thinking about a united Ireland, the necessity for these shifting definitions suggests that the argument that there must be one state because there is one people stands on decidedly unstable ground. And that’s before we get to that even trickier concept: the ‘people of Northern Ireland’.

This, too, has deep political and legal foundations. For Northern Ireland’s prime minister Basil Brooke, the legitimacy of partition rested upon ‘the declared will of the Northern Ireland people, expressed through their elected Parliament’.13 In 1973, the Sunningdale Agreement contained parallel declarations by the British and Irish governments that used the term ‘the people of Northern Ireland’ three times in one key clause alone: ‘The Irish Government fully accepted and solemnly declared that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland desired a change in that status. The British Government solemnly declared that it was, and would remain, their policy to support the wishes of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The present status of Northern Ireland is that it is part of the United Kingdom. If in the future the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish.’

It is notable that, in the same declaration, the Irish government explicitly put itself forward as speaking for ‘The people of the Republic, together with a minority in Northern Ireland’ – another very complicated idea in which the inhabitants of the Republic formed a ‘people’ that could be joined to the Catholic/nationalist minority north of the border but that was a separate concept to ‘the people of Northern Ireland’.

If anything, the Belfast Agreement made things even more uncertain. It refers in its opening declaration to ‘the people, North and South’, as though there is indeed a single entity with two parts. But it goes on to rest the big decisions on the future of the island on ‘the legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland’. And then in one single clause it seems to evoke three different concepts of the people: ‘while a substantial section of the people in Northern Ireland share the legitimate wish of a majority of the people of the island of Ireland for a united Ireland, the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, freely exercised and legitimate, is to maintain the Union’.14 So there are the people in Northern Ireland, the people of Northern Ireland, and the people of the island of Ireland.

This may all be somewhat mind-boggling, but it is not merely theoretical. In June 2016, the ‘people of Northern Ireland’ voted by 56% to 44% to remain in the European Union. This surely was an expression of political identity ‘freely exercised and legitimate’. Yet it was deemed to have no real standing. The UK’s Supreme Court ruled in a 2017 decision that the Belfast Agreement’s principle of consent did not extend beyond the question of Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom.15 As the majority ruling put it, ‘section 1 [of the Northern Ireland Act of 1998], which gave the people of Northern Ireland the right to determine whether to remain part of the UK or to become part of a united Ireland, does not regulate any other change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland’. Thus, the ‘people of Northern Ireland’ seem to be a sovereign people – but only in relation to the possibility of a united Ireland. In every other respect, they are not free to exercise their own choices about where they belong. They are a ‘people’ whose political existence is visible only in one very special kind of light.

All of this means that the whole idea of who makes up the people of Ireland, of the island and of Northern Ireland is shifty and blurred. The principle of popular sovereignty ought to give us a solid foundation for the innate rightness of a united Ireland. On the contrary, however, it merely reminds us that historical and political necessities and desires constitute ‘the people’ – and not the other way around.

Thus those who wish to see a united Ireland can rely neither on the idea that it is a natural condition nor on any simple belief that there is a single people that must automatically exist within a single state. They have to base their arguments on practicalities. Is a united Ireland politically feasible? And how would it improve the lives of those who would live in it? One participant in the ARINS focus group study in 2022 said of a united Ireland that they wanted to know ‘exactly what it would look like. Not like Brexit, but exactly how it would look before it was passed’, while another flatly suggested that ‘I would prefer no change to unknown change.’16 There are good reasons to think that ‘unknown change’ is what is currently on offer.

Will there be violence?

The most difficult issue to discuss in relation to the prospect of a united Ireland is violence. No one wants to suggest that armed groups – in this case loyalist paramilitaries – should be able to veto the democratic decisions taken by citizens. And yet the possibility of violent resistance weighs heavily on the minds of prospective Southern voters. Asked in the ARINS/The Irish Times survey of 2022 what they would need to know before voting in a border poll, those in the Republic identified as their single biggest concern ‘whether a united Ireland would be peaceful’. This anxiety was identified by 66% of respondents, making it even more prominent in their minds than the economic effects of unification (57%).

Moreover, the Southern public ‘is much more likely than its Northern counterpart to shy away from voting for unity when the prospect of Loyalist violence is raised: 42% are less likely and 18% more likely to vote for unity’.17 It is striking that this fear of a violent backlash is so much more pronounced in the South than in the North – perhaps because of a belief that much of it might be directed at the Dublin government, its public servants and its institutions.

The Independent Reporting Commission that monitors paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland notes in its 2023 report that ‘paramilitarism is different to what it was 25 years ago, but … it has continuing links to that previous reality also’. While much of it has descended into mere gangsterism, ‘there is a residual political dimension to the continuation of paramilitarism today’. The commission reports that ‘In respect of the ideological dimension of continuing paramilitarism, they have support in sections of the community as the “carriers of the torch” today and the defenders of a worldview shared by some in that community.’18 Within loyalist paramilitarism the torch that is being carried is the adamant refusal to submit to being absorbed into a united Ireland.

Paramilitary-related violence has declined considerably but it has not gone away. There were 1,238 sectarian incidents recorded by the police in Northern Ireland in 2022–3. There have been between one and three paramilitary-related deaths per year in each of the past ten years, apart from 2016–17, when there were five. In the decade from 2013 to 2023, loyalists were responsible for 74 bombing incidents and 106 shootings. In 2022–3, 23 of the 32 paramilitary-style assaults (72%) were attributed to loyalists.

The evidence suggests that most people from a Protestant/unionist background would accept a majority vote in favour of a united Ireland. In the ARINS/The Irish Times survey of 2023, 52% said they would not be happy with such a result ‘but could live with it’. However, 23% said they would find it ‘almost impossible to accept’.19 It would be wrong to assume that most of those people would resort to violent resistance, but we know only too well from Irish history that relatively small numbers of people, if sufficiently well organised and motivated, can create mayhem and cause immense harm. We also know that this violence can have an outsized influence on the political climate and that it can take on a dynamic of its own that is very hard to stop.

Northern Ireland has, in the loyalist paramilitaries, the core of an organisational structure for violent resistance to a united Ireland. It also has extremely high levels of gun ownership. In 2020, there were 55,441 firearm certificate holders in Northern Ireland.20 In 2012, The Detail reported that these licensed gun owners (then amounting to almost 60,000) held over 146,000 weapons (not including those held by serving police and prison officers).21 There are also, of course, an unknown number of illegally held guns.

Two obvious problems have to be confronted. The first is that, in the run-up to an ill-prepared border poll, there could be not just rioting and intercommunal violence in Northern Ireland but loyalist attacks south of the border. Given the level of anxiety already present among potential Southern voters, this could have serious consequences for both the conduct and the outcome of a referendum.

The other difficulty relates to what would happen after unification. Who could police areas of Northern Ireland where loyalist paramilitaries have their strongholds? The pronounced preference of Southern voters is for one set of institutions and services to operate in a united Ireland – so presumably the Garda Síochána would have to do so with, in an extreme scenario, the support of the Irish army. The Garda, unlike the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), is essentially an unarmed force. It seems highly unlikely that most people in the South are mentally prepared for the prospect of its members facing off against armed loyalist paramilitaries.

The possibility of violence is enhanced by the nature of the border poll as envisaged in the Belfast Agreement. It would be a simple majority vote, making it possible that unification could be agreed by a tiny margin – in principle one vote could swing it. It is easy to see how such a narrow victory could be construed as illegitimate with claims (valid or otherwise) of outside interference or voter fraud amplified by social media disinformation and AI (artificial intelligence)-generated images.

The threat of serious violence could be diminished if the shape of a unified Ireland were made clear in advance of a poll and, critically, if that shape were one in which those who wish to retain a British allegiance were reassured by generous concessions to their sense of identity. But there is no great reason to believe that people in the Republic are in general prepared to make those concessions.

What political institutions would govern a united Ireland?

A deliberative forum was organised in 2021, designed to tease out the views of a representative sample of Southerners about how Irish unity might happen and what it might look like. Strikingly, of the 46 people who participated, 28 ‘indicated before the deliberations that they were either not at all or not very well informed’ about the issues. ‘Generally, the participants were surprised to learn that there are different possible versions of a united Ireland.’22 This in itself is telling. There are reasons to believe that for most people in the South a united Ireland is, as Hamlet would put it, ‘a consummation/Devoutly to be wished’ rather than a practical proposition they have considered in any depth.