THE ARINS PROJECT
Early in January 2021, Brendan O’Leary marked the official launch of the ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South) project with a detailed and timely reflection on the prospect of a unity referendum. In an article for the Irish Times, O’Leary suggested that unionists were now in a political minority and fast becoming an electoral minority in the North, while the union now depended on:
the consent of cultural Catholics, whose opinions on that union are more volatile and averse than those held among those of Protestant heritage. …
Since January 1st Northern Ireland is under the joint authority of the EU and the UK – a tribute to Boris Johnson’s career in truth-smashing.
To address rational fears, Northern Ireland has been re-engineered in a remarkable improvisation. It is now a double ‘federacy’ or an annex to two different unions. The Belfast Agreement ‘in all its parts’ is now protected in two treaties: the one Ireland and the UK ratified in 1999, and the 2019 Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland agreed between the UK and the EU that has just taken effect. …
Northern Ireland remains within the EU’s single market for goods, and, for practical purposes, in its customs union, but without European political institutions. Unless Stormont decides otherwise in 2024, the government of Ireland will have more influence on economic regulations affecting Northern Ireland than the Westminster parliament. …
To resume full citizenship of the European confederation, many northerners have taken out Irish passports. Up to half the population have them, while the number taking out UK passports has slid. Later, they may support Irish unity to return to the European Union – not to Pearse’s, Cosgrave’s, or de Valera’s Ireland.
O’Leary went on to ask whether people in the North could enjoy the best of both worlds promised by the Withdrawal Agreement by having access to both the UK and EU trading blocs or whether they would polarise between two conflicting options:
‘Scrapping the protocol’ is the DUP’s ambition; the obvious alternative is Irish reunification within the EU.
Whether you like this scenario is not the point, but if you think it is possible, then recognise that Ireland, North and South, needs to prepare, if only to ensure that any future referendums on reunification do not resemble the ‘Brexit/Ukexit’ referendum of 2016. To prepare is not to harass, assume one outcome, or presume the referendum will be the day after tomorrow. Preparation can be open, peaceful and pluralist, ensuring multiple voices are heard, and available to constant correction.
Not to prepare is to take the ostrich as the paragon of political virtue.
In his view, the South was the ‘most obliged to prepare properly because, under the Belfast Agreement, the initiation of a Northern referendum on unification rests with the UK secretary of state; Dublin has no veto and could be taken by surprise.’ Arguing that voters must be given an ‘informed and properly clarified choice, not a choice between the status quo and rivalrous descriptions of paradise’ in a future referendum, he wrote that legislators in the Dáil would have to offer a precise model of unification or:
a detailed constitutional process that would follow affirmative votes for unification. …
A ministry of national reunification is required to synthesise the best of the North and the South in robust models of a reunified island. It must engage unionists, nationalists and others – the latter and ‘soft nationalists’ will be the pivotal voters in the North. It must organise citizens’ assemblies, and it will need to oversee a united Ireland transition fund, to be launched after the pandemic is controlled. (O’Leary, Irish Times, 11 January 2021)
O’Leary’s contribution was accompanied by analysis from Dr Peter Shirlow, also a founding member of the ARINS project, and a pro-union voice who claimed that there was no evidence that the necessary conditions for a border poll were close.
Instead, in his article for the Irish Times, Shirlow claimed that the most recent polling and other data suggested that the majority in the North wished to remain in the UK although ‘the desire for Irish unification has grown, but not significantly, since 1998’. He said that those promoting unity among the nationalist population:
typically present the 26 counties as Nirvana and the Wee 6 as a hapless place due to its links with perfidious Albion. Unionists respond that 15 per cent of southerners live in poverty, that rural Ireland has been abandoned, and like to remind us that two-thirds of the southern population do not have access to free healthcare. …
Within political unionism we find a limited space that promotes and persuades for the union. And yet, across the aisle, there is no serious blueprint setting out what a united Ireland would be.
Instead, he suggested, that:
the structures of the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Protocol and the new Shared Island Unit of the Department of the Taoiseach are the points through which to build and sustain an interdependence that will not be bogged down by wearied conjecture and sectarian head-counting.
The protocol entails a policy of enhanced all-island relationships that will build economic, cultural and political opportunity. The protocol and its promotion of greater North–South co-operation, combined with Northern Ireland being within the EU customs code and UK customs territory, can frame critical all-island connectivity.
Shirlow criticised the binary approach to the issue, which he claimed:
relies on and propagates the skewed idea that there are two economies on the island, as defined by the Border. In fact, there are several – among them Dublin, Belfast, the southwest, and the ‘left behind’.
There is an immediate case for building an Atlantic corridor linking Derry and Limerick. The furthering of linkages between North and South through culture, environment and tourism can also raise the levels of mutual dependence and assist in the avoidance of conflict.
For those who are pro-union, greater North–South connection can render the Border so invisible that the desire for unification will abate. For those who are pro-unity, greater interdependence can reestablish connections cast asunder by partition. Interdependence is the antidote to the politics of immiserating dissonance that have crippled Northern Ireland for so long.
Shirlow’s views reflected the small but growing appetite among middle-class unionists for a middle way of ‘interdependence’ between the united Ireland and the pro-union positions, while postponing for the foreseeable future the prospect of the referendum envisaged under the GFA.
Meanwhile, Gavin Robinson, a leading figure in the internally riven DUP, warned his unionist colleagues to prepare for a border poll. On 18 January, the Irish News reported that the east Belfast MP echoed the views of former leader Peter Robinson that unionists should not ignore the North’s constitutional future: ‘Peter is absolutely right, not only about how we should think about these things: how we should engage in wider discussions within unionism how we position ourselves, and how fundamentally we advance the cause of the union through thought and argument.’
Welcoming his remarks, Brian Feeney said in the same article that they were an acknowledgement that unionism needed to appeal beyond its traditional religious support which no longer guarantees a majority. In reference to the outcome of the UK election in December 2019, Feeney said:
These remarks are not just about preparing for a border poll – it’s also a recognition that thousands of middle-class unionists have deserted the DUP for Alliance, exemplified by the shock victory (for Alliance) in North Down and the 17 per cent drop in the DUP share of the vote in Lagan Valley.
For those within unionism who feared that any mention of a discussion on Irish unity would effectively mean a concession to its possibility, the intervention of the former UK chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, in the debate added insult to injury. Osborne wrote in the London Evening Standard, of which he is the editor, that the DUP were the authors of their own Brexit misfortune and that the North was already ‘heading for the exit door’ of Britain:
By unleashing English nationalism, Brexit has made the future of the UK the central political issue of the coming decade. Northern Ireland is already heading for the exit door. By remaining in the EU single market, it is for all economic intents and purposes now slowly becoming part of a united Ireland. Its prosperity now depends on its relationship with Dublin (and Brussels), not London. The politics will follow. …
Northern Irish unionists always feared the mainland was not sufficiently committed to their cause. Now their short-sighted support for Brexit (and unbelievably stupid decision to torpedo Theresa May’s deal that avoided separate Irish arrangements) has made those fears a reality. It pains me to report that most here and abroad will not care.
A member of the Conservative government led by David Cameron that called the Brexit referendum in 2016, Osborne said that the outcome had effectively placed a question over the survival of Britain itself. While most English people would not shed a tear for the North of Ireland, losing Scotland to independence would be a disaster and could, he added, finally put an end to Britain’s position as a leading world power. In advance of elections in Scotland in May 2021, it was widely acknowledged that Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP would emerge victorious and push for a second independence referendum. Osborne suggested that it would be a mistake for the British prime minister to allow this to happen.
An opinion poll by LucidTalk, published in the Sunday Times in late January 2021, showed that just over half of those surveyed in the North supported a referendum within five years. It found that 47 per cent of respondents in Northern Ireland wished to remain in the UK, with 42 per cent in favour of a united Ireland and 11 per cent undecided. Asked if they support a referendum on a united Ireland within the next five years:
Some 50.7 per cent said there should be a vote on whether Northern Ireland remained in the UK at some point before 2025, while 44.4 per cent said there should not, and 5 per cent did not know. When the ‘don’t knows’ are taken out, 53.3 per cent were in favour of holding a border poll.
Another LucidTalk poll for the BBC Spotlight programme on 20 April 2021 showed that 37 per cent of respondents supported a border poll within five years and another 29 per cent ‘at some point after five years’.
In the South, the response to the wave of speculation and analysis about eventual unity following the Brexit deal included an unrestrained attack on nationalist proponents of a referendum, and IF in particular, by Sunday Independent columnist, Eoghan Harris. On 3 January 2021, Harris described ‘Northern bourgeois nationalist pressure groups like Ireland’s Future’ as offering ‘a more sophisticated united Ireland agenda’ than SF. In response, the IF chairperson, Frances Black, wrote:
Our group promotes the need for referendums in both parts of the island under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement as the means by which to effect constitutional change. We are not a political party and are not affiliated to any political party.
Ireland’s Future notes that any move to new constitutional arrangements requires serious thought, consideration and planning. We believe that the requisite planning for these potential changes must be broad, inclusive, detailed and comprehensive.
Ireland’s Future has lobbied the Government on the issue of the establishment of an all-island citizens’ assembly as a forum to enable discussion on future constitutional change. We encourage discussion on all salient issues pertaining to Irish reunification including economic modelling, and human, cultural, and political rights/protections relevant to any prospective new constitutional arrangements on the island. (Sunday Independent, 10 January 2021)
In subsequent commentary, Harris went on to attack other supporters of the campaign, including Colin Harvey, in a continuing effort to tarnish its work as its influence grew.
Four days after Black’s reply, Belfast-based columnist Newton Emerson argued in the Irish Times that the IF campaign had initially prioritised a border poll before the restoration of the Stormont institutions in early 2020 ‘above compromise and delivery within Northern Ireland’ and claimed that support for its demands:
can hardly have increased since, as so much of it was premised on a no-deal Brexit and the absence of devolution …
Throughout Stormont’s collapse, Sinn Féin outsourced much of its messaging to the Ireland’s Future campaign, perhaps best known in the Republic for its ‘civic nationalist’ letters to taoisigh.
The party endorsed and heavily promoted Ireland’s Future, which at its height advocated giving up on power-sharing and Northern Ireland altogether, proclaiming unionist intransigence to be insurmountable. That message was heard repeatedly at a major conference the campaign organised in Belfast in January 2019, also attended by representatives of the SDLP and the Irish government.
In a letter of response in the same newspaper, Niall Murphy dismissed the allegation that IF was connected to Sinn Féin: ‘This statement is untrue, not backed up by any evidence and damaging to our organisation which has remained deliberately unaligned with political interests … Ireland’s Future is not connected with Sinn Féin or any other political party. Nor do we lobby on behalf of political parties.’