The results of the British general election in Northern Ireland confirmed what we already know. The DUP is in deep trouble: the loss of three of its heartland seats in Lagan Valley (the constituency of its former leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, now charged with historical sexual offences), North and South Antrim is a further body blow. It is good to see the back of Ian Paisley junior, whose career, in Belfast Telegraph columnist Sam McBride’s words, was characterised by “swagger, hubris and greed.” Extraordinarily, for a statelet that was set up over a century ago specifically to carve out an interminable unionist majority, Sinn Fein – formerly the party of the IRA – are now the North’s largest party in the House of Commons (where, of course, they don’t take their seats), in the Stormont Assembly and on local councils.
So I am going to return to last month’s big Ireland’s Future rally in Belfast, which I touched on briefly in last month’s blog. I have come across three recent articles (thanks to my friend Padraig Yeates for pointing them out) which criticise that movement for Irish unity from different angles. The first is from Sam McBride, for my money the best and most thoughtful journalist in Northern Ireland.1
McBride recounts being on his way to a Belfast leisure centre to play football recently and being confronted by three young boys, aged no more than 10, chanting ‘Up the Ra’ at him. It appeared that what they were objecting to was an old England cricket jersey he was wearing. In vain did he try to explain that he had bought it when Ed Joyce, one of the greatest ever Irish batsmen, had become the first Irishman in modern times to play for England, then the only route for an Irishman to play Test cricket. Presumably they thought he was English and shouted all the louder.
“These were youngsters no older than my own children, so I didn’t feel threatened, yet it was depressing to see children born so long after the end of the Troubles chanting support for a group that slaughtered the innocent.
“Some people think because Northern Ireland is now peaceful, this is harmless – the equivalent of football supporters screaming abuse at each other at a match and then sharing the train home. It’s not. Even in the sunshine of post-Troubles Northern Ireland, there is the omnipresent shadow of darkness. For now it is mercifully faint, but only the most historically ignorant would dismiss the potential for what starts as children taught to hate ending in savagery.
“Plenty of people in Northern Ireland scarcely even comprehend their own deep prejudices. Indeed, there is a conceit that those of us who have lived most of our lives since the Good Friday Agreement are almost immune to the barbarity of our ancestors. This arrogance is not new; history records myriad cycles of bloodshed between which there has often been the sense that this time things are different and what has gone before is now unthinkable. Each time, that hope has given way to butchery.” [This is not unique to Northern Ireland: look at what is happening in much of Europe now with the rise of the far right – who are often apologists for fascists and Nazis – in countries like France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Hungary. And let’s not forget the civil war in the former Yugoslavia].
McBride goes on: “Once the killing starts, there is what the late Belfast psychiatrist Professor Ed Cairns described as a ‘welling up of deep unconscious forces’ where fear and folk history fuel a seemingly unstoppable cycle of murder and retribution. As someone who plans to spend the rest of my life in Belfast, and who remembers the final years of the Troubles, I hope my children will grow old in a Northern Ireland where that deadly cycle has for ever been broken. But hoping isn’t enough”.
He then recounts a story about a yacht which sailed recently into Portballintrae on the north Antrim coast, “a sleepy holiday village brimming with the second homes of Belfast’s upper middle classes.” Within hours, the boat’s owner, Conor Costelloe, had lost the vessel, which was also his home, after it was burnt, seemingly because it was flying the Irish flag. He feared for his life and is now homeless after what the PSNI described as ‘a sectarian hate crime.”
Such deeply ingrained prejudice leading to constant low-level sectarian attacks is “just an accepted, if regrettable, fact of life” in Northern Ireland, says McBride. He then quotes the former UDA man David Adams who in a brutally honest recent article in the Irish Times reflected: “The vast majority of young people in Northern Ireland, on both sides, regardless of personal experience, upbringing, intellect and whether they were endowed with common sense, were able to retain a clear enough sense of decency to steer well clear of paramilitaries. I wasn’t.” Looking back on what he had done, he said: “I am thoroughly ashamed of it and regrets are never too far away… Do I apologise for my past? Yes, unreservedly.”2
Adams, who has expressed himself open to Irish unity, spoke at last month’s Ireland’s Future rally. He told the meeting that Ireland’s Future was dangerously downplaying the need for reconciliation in Northern Ireland and underestimating the potential for violence if Irish unity is bungled.
He asked: “Does anyone seriously believe two million unreconciled northerners can be injected into the political and social bloodstream of the progressive, liberal democracy to the south of us, and everything will be fine?” McBride reports that Adams urged republicans “not to see reconciliation as some sort of unionist Trojan horse to delay Irish unity, but as desperately necessary if those of us now alive are to play our part in breaking the hatreds that live on, even as the guns are silent.”
Former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told the same rally that republicans should make a “stronger, specific apology for what was done” by the IRA, something, he said, that could “help to change hearts and minds.” McBride comments: “The irony is if that happened, it would probably make Irish unity easier by helping to persuade some of the centrist voters who will decide a future Border poll. But more importantly it would also maybe mean that children might be less likely to chant about killers in the face of a stranger.”
The second article was by the Northern comedian, Jake O’Kane, in the Irish News.3 He felt obliged to “highlight the elephant in the Odyssey Arena – namely, the glaring lack of participation from unionist politicians.”
“Ireland’s Future appears to view the one million citizens who continue to identify not as Irish but as British as an inconvenience to be ignored. But make no mistake: if reunification is to be achieved, reaching out to that demographic is a challenge which must be surmounted. While nowhere near as glitzy, events such as those held during the West Belfast Fleadh, where unionist politicians of all hues are invited to speak, come closer to achieving that aim. Whilst doing a show during the fleadh years ago, I noticed that practically all the door staff had disappeared. On enquiring why, the head of security explained that [DUP MP] Gregory Campbell was in a debate on Irish reunification at the same time, and they’d believed it was wise to move staff to that event.”
O’Kane was impressed by Campbell’s courage and was not surprised that he had been given a respectful hearing by the audience on the night. He said the answer to our division would never arise from “political echo chambers” such as the Ireland’s Future event.- “it will come from those who attempt, difficult as it is, to understand and reach out to their enemy.”
The third article was by Patrick Murphy, a regular Irish News commentator and former director of Belfast Institute of Further and Higher Education.4 He is sceptical of “mass rallies for constitutional change” because “they are rather like a religious belief: never mind your troubles in this life, all will be well in the heaven of a united Ireland.”
He pointed out that 32% of West Belfast’s children live in poverty, and the Audit Office reports “little sustained progress” from the NI Executive in tackling this. “Child poverty here results largely from the Tories restricting welfare benefits to the first two children in most households. Stormont introduced that policy here and two Executive parties (Sinn Fein and Alliance) spoke at the Ireland’s Future conference – neither addressed the problem. Child poverty does not represent a failed Northern state. It represents a failed Northern government. Dublin’s failed government has left one in seven children in poverty in the South” [in 2022].
He went on: “Constitutional change does not imply social or economic advancement. The last monster rallies in Ireland were held by Daniel O’Connell for Catholic emancipation. In 1829 he achieved his aim, promising a new Ireland. 20 years later a million emancipated Catholics died of starvation and another million emigrated. Their ‘freedom’ counted for little during the Famine. The rich lived and the poor died.”
Echoing W.B. Yeats during the War of Independence, Murphy forecast: “There will be rich and poor in a constitutionally-led united Ireland.”
1 ‘Guns are silent now, but ingrained hatreds live on in Northern Ireland’, Sunday Independent, 23 June
2 ‘I am ashamed of my paramilitary past. I won’t be writing about it again’, Irish Times, 10 June
3 ‘It will take more than glitzy Ireland’s Future meetings to achieve reunification – unionists and reconciliation, for a start’, Irish News, 22 June
4 ‘Ireland’s future appears more important than Ireland’s present’, Irish News, 22 June
Andy Pollak retired as founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in July 2013 after 14 years. He is a former religious affairs correspondent, education correspondent, assistant news editor and Belfast reporter with the Irish Times.
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