BUILDING THE ALL-ISLAND ECONOMY
The debate over energy has continued long since the nuclear option was rejected in Ireland in the early 1980s. Massive protests were staged across Ireland, Europe and the US, there were a series of fatal accidents and leaks, and the industry was unable to find a way to safely dispose of its radioactive waste. Forty years later, concerned and angry young people in Ireland and across the world are now protesting about the threat posed by climate change to the future of humanity and are demanding that governments meet the targets required to reduce global temperatures in the race to save the planet.
As wildfires raged across Greece, Siberia and the west coast of the US in mid-August 2021, and life-threatening heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts continued across the continents, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report warning that ‘human interference in the climate system is affecting both the frequency and severity of such events’. The report, issued just months ahead of COP26, a planned, global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021, stated that ‘All greenhouse gases matter if we are to limit human-induced climate warming … it is only by reducing emissions to net zero by mid-century and subsequent net negative emissions that warming will likely be kept below 2C.’
In its 2021 National Climate Action Plan, the Irish government acknowledged the existential crisis facing humanity and aimed for a climate neutral economy by 2050. For many concerned about the future of the planet, however, it was not visionary enough to deal with the challenges of the present, never mind the future. Promoting onshore and offshore wind farming, investing in more public bus and train travel and cycle lanes, pedestrianising city centres and banning short haul flights where possible, were proposed by climate change activists as further measures. Moving away from intensive beef and dairy farming, revitalising small farms and coastal communities, and encouraging biodiversity and recycling were also among the myriad of ideas environmental activists in Ireland put forward, much to the discomfort of the big agri-food lobbies and their government allies.
By 2020, wind energy provided over 30 per cent of the total energy supply for the island and 85 per cent of Ireland’s renewable electricity. Huge state-supported investment is required to utilise the potential of offshore wind power facilities and the connection of renewable energy production with other countries in the EU. The NI protocol provided for the uninterrupted functioning of the Single Electricity Market to ensure the continuation of energy supply across the island, including that provided by renewables. However, according to industry sources, a single island economy and administration will avert future jurisdictional challenges to the development of onshore and offshore wind farming.
Other measures to mitigate climate change and to enhance all-island co-operation include the commitment to improving rail links between North and South. Among the proposals included in the 2020 Programme for Government was a review of high-speed rail links between Belfast and Dublin and on to Cork and Limerick at a potential cost of €15 billion. The New Decade, New Approach agreement contained a similar commitment. In July 2021, engineering consultancy Arup was appointed to conduct the All-Island Strategic Rail Review on behalf of both transport ministers, Eamon Ryan in Dublin and Nichola Mallon in Belfast.
David McWilliams advocated for the development of an all-island infrastructure for rail, broadband and housing to prepare for unification. He is confident that lower interest rates, which are expected to continue across the EU for several years to come, will permit governments to borrow to invest in major reconstruction programmes, just as the Biden administration has commenced in the US. In an article for the Irish Times on 5 December 2020, McWilliams wrote:
Looking ahead 50 years, the reunification of the country makes the Dublin–Belfast corridor by far the most populous part of the country. More than half of the whole island will live in that parcel of coastal land, extending 30 km inland from the sea and stretching south to north from Bray to Ballymena. …
To combat the economic supremacy of this highly-urban, densely-populated eastern seaboard of the new-island economy, the rest of the country must be opened up all the way down the west, from Derry to Cork. This will take planning, significant infrastructure investment and a transport system that links all nodes of the country.
All-island infrastructure has not been considered for 100 years. Today, we must start building and not stop building until this island has an integrated public transport system that cuts rail time between Belfast and Cork (a distance of 420km) to less than one-and-a-half hours. …
A combination of global warming demanding more efficient modes of public transport and a new attractive system will coax people to change their habits. A new transport system will change our personal mental maps of the island.
McWilliams also promoted the idea of moving Dublin Port to a new site at Bremore or somewhere closer to Drogheda, in order to free up land for the development of high-density housing and a new city on the sea front. In the midst of a major housing crisis, deepened by a pandemic that further delayed the provision of new homes across the country, accessing state land for affordable and social housing is now a priority. In June 2021, the ESRI called on the government to immediately double its annual capital investment on housing to €4 billion in order to build 18,000 homes, still well below the required demand for more than 30,000 homes in a year. It also called on the government to then use the current low cost of borrowing to run an annual budget deficit of €4–7 billion or 1.5 per cent of GDP, to build up to 28,000 houses each year to resolve the housing crisis. Kieran McQuinn, the author of the ESRI report said that ‘while there are many pressing demands for additional state capital investment, without significant investment in residential construction, we risk experiencing another decade of inadequate housing supply and resulting upward pressure on residential prices and rents’.
In September, the government unveiled its ‘Housing for All’ plan involving the construction of over 300,000 social, affordable and private housing within 10 years. Critics of the plan claimed that there was no clear roadmap as to how the targets would be met and that there was a danger that, once again, public lands, which should be exclusively used to deliver affordable public housing, would be gifted to the private sector. Meanwhile, the rental crisis worsened and house prices escalated as the supply of new homes failed to meet the growing demand. In the North, house prices were a fraction of the cost south of the border, although a failure to build social and affordable homes for lower income groups in recent decades had contributed to a growing rental and housing crisis for young working people and families.
Earlier in 2021, McWilliams hosted the launch of a major study carried out by researchers from Ulster University and Dublin City University on the development of the Dublin–Belfast economic corridor in a project supported by eight local authorities from both sides of the border. The report found that the region had a population in excess of two million people and was younger and more diverse than any other part of the country, with 15 per cent born outside of Ireland. It also had the best educated workforce, with 34 per cent of the population holding third-level qualifications.
Speaking at the online launch of the report, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said that partition had divided the region, and with two million people living along the corridor, there was now an opportunity to work together rather than apart:
It’s not just about Dublin, Belfast; it’s everything in between. To a certain extent, because of the events of 100 years ago, these two major urban centres, this major economic corridor, was split and turned their backs on each other in a way. I would like that to turn around.
Finance minister at Stormont, Conor Murphy, then said that:
local authorities had been trying to improve the synergy between the two cities since partition and that the pooling of assets would be very beneficial.
There is a huge opportunity to market the areas as one, to recognise the potential of the growth of the population there and the diversity and the economic strength of both cities. We should be looking at a real strong connection between Derry, through Belfast to Dublin and Cork.
The development of the all-island economy and the eastern corridor were also promoted by the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (Ibec) in its detailed submission to the mid-term review of the government’s 10-year National Development Plan. It called for a tenfold increase in the €500 million that the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, had committed to the Shared Island fund over the remaining years of the plan.
The trade union movement also moved to acknowledge the growing debate on constitutional change arising from Brexit and the NI protocol. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU or Congress) – with 800,000 members across the island, including in unionist and loyalist communities of the North – maintained its cohesion through the worst years of the conflict and during the divisive referendum on Brexit. It argued that it was in the interests of workers across Ireland to remain in the EU and subsequently lobbied against a hard Brexit that could damage the interest of its members, particularly in the agri-food and other industries exporting to the UK. Its representatives (along with those from Ibec) attended the regular dialogues of the Shared Island Unit.
In a June 2021 video interview organised by IF and hosted by this writer, ICTU General Secretary Patricia King outlined the importance of building the all-island economy in the interests of all workers across the country. A motion reaffirming the support of Congress for the Good Friday Agreement, to develop policy on a unity referendum, and the need to strengthen the all-island economy was prepared for the biennial conference of the union in Belfast in October 2021.
Meanwhile, in the early summer of 2021, Trade Unionists for a United Ireland (TUNUI) – formed in 2019 by members of different unions on both sides of the border – published its Vision for a New and United Ireland. In his foreword, the chair, Gerry Murphy – a SF member who was also serving as president of the ICTU and writing in a personal capacity – said that ‘the interests of working people, their families and society are best served by the ending of partition and the creation of new all-Ireland economic and social models’ and that the TUNUI proposals, ‘such as an all-Ireland National Health Service, a Just Transition to tackle climate change and collective bargaining rights are in line with the proposals made by the ICTU in its “No Going Back” document released in May 2020’.
In ‘No Going Back’, the ICTU’s May 2020 policy paper, the organisation warned government and employers that the lessons of the Covid-19 crisis must be learned. In the future, it demanded, vulnerable workers on the front line in healthcare, transport, retail and meat processing must be protected and their collective bargaining and other rights enhanced. Poor, unsafe working conditions, low pay and the absence of sick leave provisions for workers in meat factories, which remained open through the lockdowns, led to a wave of infections among the, largely migrant, workforce. The paper set out a vision for workers’ rights, including the legal right to collective bargaining and an end to conditions of low pay and precarious work in which almost 25 per cent of workers across the island are trapped. Published in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and dysfunctional housing and childcare provision, No Going Back set out the ICTU’s plans for a universal public healthcare system free at the point of use, a massive public investment programme in public housing construction on public lands and a high-quality public service for early years care and education. It also sought increased education spending at all levels to tackle the lowest levels of per-pupil spending and the highest pupil–teacher ratio levels in primary schools across the EU, as well as the consistently high number of children from disadvantaged communities leaving secondary school early.
In early September 2021, the British government announced that it was going to further extend the grace period before the full implementation of the protocol for another three months and beyond its expiry in October, in a unilateral move that was, nevertheless, anticipated by the EU. Announcing the decision, David Frost said that it allowed for more time for further discussions with the EU to mitigate the damaging impact of the protocol on trade between the UK and NI. In response, the EU noted that the decision was in breach of the Withdrawal Agreement, but it did not propose any retaliatory sanction. It confirmed that there would be no renegotiation of the Brexit deal or the protocol, but postponed any showdown with the UK government and took the wind out of unionist plans to intensify its campaign against the Irish Sea border.
Secretary of State Brandon Lewis, however, managed to upset both unionists and nationalists, and UN human rights advocates with his proposals to proceed with legislation that would grant an amnesty for all conflict-related killings in the North carried out before 1998, and to halt coroner inquests and other investigations into them. Human rights activists in the North claimed that the scheme was intended to protect the security forces and their agents inside loyalist paramilitary organisations from exposure and to prevent a detailed examination of how the secret state prolonged the conflict. Up to 1,000 cases – brought by relatives of people killed and survivors of armed attacks in which British police, soldiers and agents were culpable – were in legal process; cases that were based on evidence collected by Relatives for Justice and other groups over decades. IRA and loyalist paramilitaries would also be covered by the amnesty.
Fabián Salvioli, UN special rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, and Morris Tidball-Binz, special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions also condemned the amnesty proposal. In an August 2021 Irish Times article they said that the planned amnesty, ‘forecloses the pursuit of justice and accountability for the serious human rights violations committed during the Troubles and thwarts victims’ rights to truth and to an effective remedy for the harm suffered, placing the United Kingdom in flagrant violation of its international obligations.’
Notwithstanding the protection it purported to offer IRA volunteers, senior Sinn Féin adviser Stephen McGlade said that republicans rejected the plan and insisted that the small number of former IRA members who might benefit from an amnesty, did not support it either. ‘The majority, if not all, of the republicans that I know from that generation have served time and lengthy prison sentences. I don’t think there are many republicans from that era who see any benefit from it,’ he said.
It was no coincidence, he added, that the proposed new laws came after the families of those killed in 1971 by the Parachute Regiment in Ballymurphy, Belfast, finally learned the truth of what had happened to their loved ones through a coroner’s inquest. In an interview with this author, McGlade argued:
What the British Tories are proposing will deny families access to the truth through inquests. They are basically seeking a blackout of the entire judicial process. When you think about the relationship between the state and citizens, what does this say? It’s a matter of truth and justice. The Ballymurphy families for instance secured a coroner’s inquest to get the truth. The British government now wants to shut down all judicial processes which would ordinarily be open to any citizen in a modern state because they don’t want the truth revealed about their role in the conflict.
He pointed to the lawyers, academics and human rights activists from the nationalist community who are leading the campaign for truth and justice, and are committed to exposing the role of the British state:
There is an educated professional class of nationalists whose parents endured the conflict and who are now practising lawyers and academics. They have been able to identify the routes and avenues to successfully access the truth and they’re committed to exposing the role of the British state in the communities from which their parents came by expertly advocating for clients in our courts of law. They represent ordinary civilians whose families have been grossly, brutally and unjustly trespassed upon by the state.
The British are taking these measures to shut down judicial processes and access to justice. This is all about exploiting their power and control. At the moment, the British state has jurisdictional control in the North and they are putting the stains of history to bed while they can and before a negotiation opens up on the constitutional future.
McGlade explained how, through a series of negotiations over the decades since the GFA, republicans, other parties and campaigning groups have forced concessions on a range of issues, including the demand for an Irish language act from the British government. These are central to the achievement of parity of esteem for the wider nationalist and non-unionist people in the North, he argued. The Dublin government, he said, including minister Simon Coveney and his officials, have also recognised that Irish citizens in the North are as passionate about their identity, heritage and culture as people in the rest of the country.
Achieving Acht na Gaeilge is a key issue for SF and the wider nationalist community because of the guarantees they received in the negotiations for the GFA. McGlade said:
The issue is hugely symbolic but it’s also a practical expression of the compromise within the agreement which on one hand was about parity of esteem for nationalists and the principal of consent to satisfy the unionists. For the last two decades, the principal of consent issue has been very much maintained but the issue of parity of esteem wasn’t. People who would consider themselves moderate nationalists felt very much that things weren’t moving at a quick enough pace in terms of parity of esteem. When Paul Givan, the DUP minister, scrapped the bursary for children to learn Irish in Donegal, that was the tipping point for even moderate nationalists.
It took a new secretary of state, Julian Smith, to force the DUP back into the power-sharing government after it lost the balance of power it enjoyed at Westminster and the support of the Brexiteers in the Tory party. Smith, one of the few Remain voters in the Boris Johnson administration, had, as McGlade put it, a ‘more educated understanding’ of the issues in the North than many of his predecessors or his successor and current secretary of state, Brandon Lewis.
Smith publicly met with Irish language campaigners and civic society groups and apparently did not disguise his impatience with the DUP, with whom he had dealt previously during its confidence and supply agreement under Theresa May. He frequently met with SF and other parties without any Northern Ireland Office (NIO) officials present. McGlade said:
Julian Smith came to the job with a more educated understanding and was willing to politically engage. He was prepared to meet with any amount of people including the Irish language activists. He had a different approach to his predecessor, Karen Bradley, and was not wholly dependent on the NIO officials and their agenda.
Previously, he had dealt with the DUP during the whole confidence and supply period, and the impression we got was that he had tolerated the arrogance of the DUP at Westminster and he wasn’t going to entertain the same behaviour or attitudes while he was in Belfast.
According to a number of people who have spoken to him, Smith has expressed privately his view that the days of British rule in the North are numbered. During his time as secretary of state, he spent a lot of time in Dublin, where his wife worked with state broadcaster RTÉ. In contrast, McGlade said, Brandon Lewis has a narrow English nationalist agenda and has been a dishonest broker since he took over as secretary of state:
Lewis has been dishonest with the public since he took on the role. He walked away from commitments made by his government on dealing with the legacy of the past through legislating for the key elements of the Stormont House Agreement and flouted his duty as regards ‘rigorous impartiality’ as a co-guarantor of the GFA.
He said publicly that the protocol did not represent a border in the Irish Sea and there would be no checks, when evidently there are. Like Boris Johnson, he will do and say anything to get through a week, and a week is a long time in politics. Like every British Secretary of State before him, he has political ambitions elsewhere and his main function is to soothe the Brexit protocol challenges.
Over the years of stop-start government in the North, SF and the other parties have achieved some significant changes to the structure and operation of the civil service, including the manner of appointments to senior positions. Through at least seven series of negotiations, over more than two decades, the pro-union influence has been weakened in the heart of government in the North. From the time that Stormont was prorogued in 1972, the permanent secretaries in the NIO controlled all aspect of government administration and chose who to run it. New regulations and appointment protocols have transformed that practice. Now, nationalists, or those from a Catholic demographic, have taken up some of the highest positions in the civil service, the judiciary and government administration. McGlade explained:
When the new state of Northern Ireland and partition were imposed in the early ’20s, the British officials didn’t leave Dublin Castle and go back to London. They went to Belfast and established the Northern state, the old Stormont regime and the civil service. The different pillars of the state included the ‘Protestant parliament for the Protestant people’, the judiciary, the civil service, the police and the Orange Order. Over the last number of decades, and with the repeal of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act as part of the Good Friday Agreement, there has been further erosion of the different pillars of the Orange state, including the police and the judiciary.
When the old Stormont collapsed in the ’70s and direct rule was introduced, the British set up a system of administration with permanent secretaries running government departments. That was the status quo for well over 30 years until devolution and power-sharing were established. The British secretary and their ministers of state came over once a week and rubber-stamped things, so those permanent secretaries were the power base running a dysfunctional state. They were also responsible for devising policies of oppression in every shape and form during the conflict.
Despite resistance by these powerful civil servants, much of the administration and running of public services was outsourced to ‘arms-length’ public bodies. In McGlade’s view, many of these senior civil service personnel are not fully signed up to the concept of self-determination envisaged in the GFA and are committed to the union rather than neutral on the constitutional status of NI.
McGlade cited the appointments of solicitor Barra McGrory as Director of Public Prosecutions, John Larkin as Attorney General, and Declan Morgan as Chief Justice and his successor Siobhan Keegan, as examples of people from a Catholic background reaching the top jobs in the administration of justice in the North. Just as the balance of power has changed in the executive and assembly where the unionists have lost their political majority, the senior civil service is also becoming more broadly reflective of the diverse communities in the North.
Under the New Decade, New Approach agreement, which restored the power-sharing executive, SF and the other four main parties made reform of the civil service a key commitment. The DUP did not resist this pressure as it was included as a recommendation in the report by Judge Patrick Coghlin into the Renewable Heating Incentive scandal that had caused serious political damage to the party and its leader, Arlene Foster. But as McGlade said:
The biggest resistance to reform invariably comes from within the civil service itself, rather than politicians. Conor Murphy, as minister for finance and in charge of personnel across the civil service is leading this major project of reform. It will be one of the key tasks for Jayne Brady, the newly appointed Head of the Civil Service.
After years of being accused by political opponents, North and South, of seeking to undermine the power-sharing institutions, SF, said McGlade, is more determined to ensure that they function efficiently and reflect the needs of all communities in the North:
I don’t see any contradiction between being opposed to the British state jurisdiction here, while wanting fully functional democratic, representative political institutions at regional and local government level. The people pay tax and deserve nothing less than locally accountable politicians to deliver on their behalf. The difference between Stormont today and previous iterations is that it is now representative of the entire community and its function is to provide political leadership and deliver public services on an equal basis. The old regime and the civil servants who ran it were developing policies which imposed unfair, unequal treatment on the nationalist population, denying services yet taking taxes from them. Not now, that’s done.
This does not conflict, he argued, with the SF strategy of promoting the debate around Irish unity and the working out of the commitment to a referendum contained in the GFA:
Brexit has been the catalyst for constitutional change. Until this point, SF has been a minority voice but now FG and all the mainstream parties on the island, bar the unionists, share a consensus that it is coming. The Claire Byrne Show on RTÉ television [in March 2021] was the public manifestation of that. Micheál Martin is behind public opinion, but he doesn’t care because his priority is to get through his term in office as Taoiseach. He’s not interested in a vision for the future or preparing for it.
SF has also been accused of not declaring its hand on what a united Ireland would look like in the event of a vote for unity. Again it comes back to the GFA, McGlade argued:
The Agreement is not going to disappear. The core elements of it, including equality and human rights protections for minority communities, are of critical importance. It is only a matter of time before the unionists realise that those protections will be to their advantage because they will be the minority community. The guarantees within the GFA are very important and must be sustained so everybody has equal treatment and protection within the island.
The core tenets and the strands are in place, including the equality and human rights protections and the principles of consent and parity of esteem. Now unionists have to deal with their loss of a majority, and we need to get a consensus on the future and that will have to be worked out. I’m certain a referendum will happen during this decade. Clearly, the objective of republicans is to secure a united Ireland, but we can’t afford an echo chamber with nationalists and republicans talking to themselves. We need to be listening to those who are opposed.
No unionist party is going to be advocating for Irish unity and I don’t think that people of a unionist political outlook are persuadable until a date is set and it’s in front of us all. That is 20 per cent of the population of the whole island. It is less than a third of the electorate in the North, and you now have people of a moderate disposition going towards Alliance. They see the DUP moving further to the right and the UUP have become less relevant.
When it comes to a vote on the protocol in 2024, Alliance will have a key influence. During the Brexit negotiations, the EU and British government agreed that the Assembly can decide by a straight, majority vote, if the protocol should continue. It was another blow to unionism, which wanted a cross-community vote which would require their support for the proposal.
The Tories deliberately negotiated that with the EU as a straight vote in the assembly, in favour or against the protocol continuing. The complaint of the unionists is that it should have been by parallel consent and cross-community vote, which excludes Alliance. The democratic consent vote in 2024, in my opinion, is going to end up being like a mini-border poll, a prelude to a referendum.
In campaigning for a unity vote, SF will highlight the need for an all-island national health service, the promise of full and immediate re-entry into the EU for people in the North and a progressive system of education that serves all communities, McGlade said:
The health service needs to be a number one priority. Covid-19 put the NHS under severe pressure and exposed the total underinvestment of the health service in the North by the Tories for the best part of a decade. At the same time, citizens can rely on it as a free, universal service. What we need to do is take the good bits of the NHS and combine them with Sláintecare. We need proper investment by the Irish government in a national health service, free at the point of delivery. The immediate entry of a unified Ireland to the EU, with all the rights and privileges that it entitles people to, is another selling point, not least for those of a unionist tradition or a British identity in the North.
He said that SF will should seek to develop a single state education system for all communities, one that provides choice to people who want their ethos, culture, history and language reflected in the school curricula:
The most divisive factor in the North remains segregation and sectarianism. One of the ways to tackle it and confront it, day to day, is through integrated and shared education models. For instance, in Omagh you have the example of six secondary level schools coming together from different backgrounds in shared education. At the same time, people should not be denied the choice to access another medium of education, whether it is private or Irish language provision. What we can’t have is a separate state system of education for different communities.
For businesspeople, the dramatic increase in trade in goods across the border since Brexit and the protocol has highlighted the potential advantages of the all-island economy. Some unionists with whom McGlade works at Stormont have described to him with excitement their experience of holidaying in the South over the past year:
In the North’s business community, more and more people are now investing in, and not just visiting, the South, including in hospitality and manufacturing. People can see the opportunities like never before. We’re going through a market adjustment on the island. More people from the unionist community travelled south because of Covid-19 and the restrictions on international travel and people from the South came to the North in big numbers. I am talking to people daily who are telling me about their experiences of visiting parts of the island they had never seen before. I’m a republican from Tyrone and I know my country, and here they are telling me I should visit all these wonderful places down south.
This is happening outside of the institutional prism and is welcome. It is happening through these social and the cultural exchanges. We have two societies on one island. It is the politics that divides us [but] what unites us is the arts, sports and culture. That is what bonds us – GAA, Irish Rugby, our love for music, and so on.
He said that, in his view, there is likely to be a transition period following a unity vote when many issues such as the national debt, pensions, public finances and social welfare will have to be negotiated between the two sovereign governments:
For people in the public service, in business and other sectors, another issue of concern is their pensions. That will be part of a negotiation process, like in South Africa after apartheid when they had an interim constitution and a transitional parliament for five years, during which they negotiated the national debt, pensions and public finances.
There has to be a transition period here as well. First of all, we must inform people before a referendum on ‘What you’re voting for,’ and … a period of transition where you fine-tune and integrate the public systems across the island. It is about integration, not the North being absorbed into the South. We are talking about a new state, and I think everybody who has a stake in that has to be involved in negotiating what that looks like.
I also think there is a huge danger, when you get into the transition period, that big corporates and the private sector will be trying to push their interests. It is another a lesson to be learnt from South Africa in terms of the loans they took from the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and all the difficulties they got themselves into with the oil barons and other corporate interests. They were trying to determine their economic policies and that is something that has to be done with eyes wide open. They were focused on the politics and the economic interests came in sideways. The ANC [African National Congress] made a flawed error by bringing in certain economists to work as part of the transitional government. They sold themselves short and were left with a massive sovereign debt for years. It was the poor and weakest who paid the price.
It is another reason, McGlade argued, that preparation for a united Ireland should begin in an organised, systemic way involving a Green and White Paper by the government in Dublin. The Green Paper would set out the constitutional, political, social and economic vision, which would be followed by a citizens’ assembly to discuss its contents. He envisaged a White Paper establishing the agreed specifics on policy, constitutional and legislative changes leading to a constitutional convention involving civic society and political parties across the island. The biggest civic organisation on the island is the trade union movement and as a member of a union, he can see the vital contribution it can make.
In McGlade’s view, FF and FG were taken by surprise by the rapidly changing political situation, particularly since Brexit, while SF has been preparing for it:
I think that the establishment and the main parties, FF and FG who helped to negotiate and support the GFA and the principle of consent, did not fathom how things would change so dramatically in 25 years. I don’t think they had thought that unionists down the line would be a minority community within a quarter of a century. They didn’t foresee that coming so quickly and they now realise that we are ahead of them in relation to the change that is coming down the tracks.
McGlade cited the Convention on the Constitution that was established by the Irish government and that met between 2012 and 2014. It included representatives of the parties in the North, although unionist representatives did not attend, and it led to the subsequent referendums that introduced marriage equality and abortion rights in the South:
The constitutional convention was all-Ireland. The nationalists and Alliance party took part and the unionist parties refused. SF has debated this and arrived at the conclusion an all-island citizens’ assembly should consult and respond to the government Green Paper setting out options and ideas. The government should then prepare a White Paper which would set out the proposals for a new Ireland, having had the input from all quarters concerned.
An electoral commission has to put out the facts and the information for citizens to know what they are voting about in the referendum. Preparation and planning could take at least three years before you have the referendum. You’re also talking about a new constitutional framework to govern the affairs of the state, and to also safeguard citizens’ rights in law.
Nobody will focus until the date for a referendum is set. For instance, the 30th anniversary of the GFA in 2028, which might be a date. We’ve learned from the shambles of the Tory Brexit process that preparation and planning in advance of the referendum is key. The period afterwards is also critical to negotiate issues like public finances, economic models, investment, services and to get the public administration established.
The EU will have a central role in any negotiation. They bring the pivotal experience from German reunification, integration and accession of member states. I think everybody needs to come to the table with their priorities. No party, including SF, is going to determine every issue. It is going to be a transition process and all these things have to be dealt with thematically, as part of the negotiations.
Both an open-mind and an open-hand by the main political and civic leaders and the people who share this island themselves is what will count. There can be no victories. Then the process of reconciliation and nation-building begins for us all.