THE RAMIFICATIONS OF Brexit for Northern Ireland have taken time to dawn. On 23 June, only 62 per cent decided to vote. Participation was higher in middle class South Belfast (69.5 per cent) and North Down (68 per cent), and the lowest in the UK in Republican strongholds like West Belfast (49 per cent) and Foyle (58 per cent). All seven leave-voting constituencies had higher than average turnout. Pro-remain professionals and Unionist Brexiteers were clearly more exercised than Republicans. Yet despite the indifference, four constituencies with Unionist Westminster MPS voted to remain as did every constituency bordering the Border. Just one, North Antrim, voted by more than 60 per cent to leave.
Many reasons were given for this apparent quietude. Seven weeks after NI Assembly elections, voting was another duty. The campaigns in Northern Ireland were low key, especially the remain campaign that suffered from poor co-ordination among its Unionist, Nationalist, Liberal and Republican supporters. Republicans did not engage in what was, essentially, a UK-wide event dominated by Conservative Party politicians. Alone among the NI parties, the DUP campaigned to leave the EU, focussing entirely on their own electoral core. Although it was later revealed that the DUP was the conduit for an undeclared injection of finance for the UK leave campaign, very little was spent in Northern Ireland. The strongest warnings about the implications of Brexit came from the Taoiseach and former British Prime Ministers with a deep personal stake in the peace process – Tony Blair and John Major.
Yet, with hindsight, any proposal to ‘bring back control’ over borders and recast relationships with all of Europe, and therefore Ireland, was bound to have enormous implications for the internal politics of Northern Ireland and for the unstable equilibrium of its fragile accommodation. The question of ‘UK – in or out?’ is not exactly new in Ireland. Indeed, it has dramatically divided Ireland into incompatible enemies since the 1880s, drawing on deep roots in both imperialism and religious hostility. The ad-hoc 1920 border on a 26 Counties-to-6 blueprint pleased Unionists more than Nationalists, but it left them facing implacable, organised and potentially violent opponents in a ‘Northern Ireland’ where legitimacy was contested. Moreover, the internal dynamics of Northern Ireland increasingly isolated Unionists from the rest of Britain as much as Ireland. Politics took on a pattern of Unionists excluding Nationalists from power, underpinned by draconian emergency law and a culture of eternal suspicion and vigilance.
After 1969, 50 years of ‘hostile tranquillity’ gave way to 30 years of violent mayhem. After forlorn attempts to stabilise the ship through internal power-sharing and British Direct Rule, the Anglo-Irish Agreement ushered in two decades of inter-governmental partnership pursuing the comprehensive, if undefined, goal of ‘reconciliation.’ The apex of this unusual co-operation was the signing and ratification by referendum of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, underpinned by US and European diplomatic and financial support. The Agreement allowed Irish nationalists to give conditional and historically unprecedented assent to British sovereignty in Northern Ireland.
Irish nationalism, including physical force republicanism, repudiated violence and acquiesced in UK sovereignty over a devolved Northern Ireland in return for a series of explicit guarantees. These were to prevent Unionist political and cultural monopoly, including recognition of the aspiration to Irish political unity and the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Irish citizenship for everyone in Northern Ireland, cast-iron Unionist-Nationalist power-sharing, institutionalised cross-border cooperation including a North-South Ministerial Council, cultural ‘parity of esteem’, Human Rights grounded in international law, and equality in appointments and the provision of goods and services. For nationalists, the Agreement was a comprehensive deal trading the military reality that Northern Ireland could not be forced into a united Ireland yet establishing that Irish identity and Irish citizens would not be treated as second class in Northern Ireland while the border remained.
The Good Friday Agreement explicitly anticipated reconciliation. But within 9 years, the governments were backpedalling on anything other than the vaguest aspiration, calculating that requiring commitment to a shared future would actually prevent devolution and power-sharing between the Democratic Unionists (DUP) and Sinn Fein. The St Andrews Agreement therefore pursued the lowest common denominator rather than any higher common factor. Where the GFA aspired, St Andrews apparently delivered. Critically, by creating a governing coalition between the DUP and Sinn Fein, it secured the internal stability and escape from entanglement which both Dublin and London craved. Pragmatic containment trumped aspirational reconciliation.
The results were mixed, and predictable. After 2007, devolved government in Northern Ireland survived three elections. Violence was no longer the everyday commonplace of previous decades. In practice, peace in Northern Ireland remained a series of politically-managed ambiguities, locally known as fudge. Wheels came off when sharp decisions required one side to concede to the other. Repeated micro-crises replaced the old macro-crisis, as devolved government floundered over policing (2010), flags (2012), the past (2013), parades (2014), paramilitarism (2015) and the right of the British government to impose welfare changes (2015). Survival required the re-engagement of the governments, and the design of complex, and sometimes expensive, ‘deals’ that softened the blow of concession. Above all, reconciliation remained symbolic and largely dependent on the actions of British monarchs, Irish and American Presidents and EU cash.
Among the most important changes, was the emergence of the ‘borderless border’, an uncontroversial and seamless continuity between North and South. Opinion polls reflected a more confident sense of Irishness among nationalists but a reduced urgency around the aspiration for Unity. (Morrow, Robinson, Dowds, 2013)
Unionists were prepared to work with Irish Ministers on practical issues, including using Dublin airport as an international gateway. Border areas neighbouring Newry and Derry/Londonderry became increasingly integrated local economies, and key sectors like agriculture, food and tourism developed a clear cross-border profile.
It is difficult to imagine a more fundamental challenge to the stability of these arrangements than a unilateral UK departure from the European Union. While asserting undiluted UK territorial sovereignty appears to be legally correct, it has huge consequences in a region that has been stabilised only by decades of nuance, subtlety and compromise. The establishment of a hard border where, since the 1990s, the President of Ireland has made multiple official and semi-official visits into the territory of another jurisdiction with the informal approval of the sovereign power is a dramatic political turnaround. The future of North-South bodies, the customs implications for agriculture, food and trade and the personal implications for cross-border commuters and communities are necessarily uncertain. And the longer-term implications for parity of esteem, human rights and reconciliation itself are now back on the table. More immediately, and in stark contrast to Scotland, polarisation over Brexit within the Northern Ireland Executive has effectively disabled the Executive as a vehicle for representing any consistent, coherent or common position during negotiations.
The Brexit negotiations are in effect also fundamental (re-)negotiations over the future of Northern Ireland. The form of Brexit, especially the rigidity of the border, has an existential relationship to the internal stability of Northern Ireland, and therefore to the future nature of both the UK and Ireland. The international partnership which brought about the Good Friday Agreement has been unilaterally set aside, and both the setting aside and the unilateralism matter in a society which is highly sensitive to anything which smacks of domination or external diktat. Inevitably, it will also mean that both Britain and Ireland must again become entangled in the affairs of Northern Ireland, and it is far from certain that the devolved institutions agreed in 1998 and 2007 can survive the pressures. Ultimately, the critical question may be: will Brexit in Northern Ireland be negotiated with a view to protecting reconciliation or will reconciliation in Northern Ireland be set aside to facilitate a Brexit which corresponds to the desires of other parts of the UK?
Morrow, D., Robinson, G. and Dowds, L. (2013), The long view of Community Relations in Northern Ireland: 1989-2012, Belfast: Northern Ireland Executive.