THE POLITICS OF FEAR
Noli timere – don’t be afraid; the last words of Seamus Heaney in a text to his wife, Marie, before the poet’s death in 2013, could be prescribed for the people of Ireland as the debate on unity progresses. Fear of change, of possible loyalist violence, of continuing political instability, of more taxes and fewer public services, of a different flag and anthem have all been put forward as reasons for the people of the South to retain the status quo.
For Protestants and unionists in the North, fear of losing their British identity, political influence and their loyalist culture, the free National Health Service, the annual subvention from the UK, the monarchy and the BBC have been cited as reasons to hold on to the union.
In his report for the Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement in 2017, Senator Mark Daly said that rural unionists expressed the fear of losing their land along with their identity in a future united Ireland. Former members of the RUC, the British Army and the Prison Service feared that a triumphalist nationalist community would punish them in retribution for past deeds. Loyalists said they would not be able to parade, fly the Union flag or make bonfires on the Twelth of July (Daly, Unionist Concerns and Fears of a United Ireland, 2017).
Many of these fears were addressed by the GFA, which promised that all citizens would be entitled to the full protection of their rights, identity and citizenship if and when people voted to change the constitutional arrangement and decided by a majority in the North and South, concurrently, for unity.
In early December 2021 the power-sharing executive’s Commission on Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition (FICT) published a detailed report that sought to address the concerns of people across the North on a range of sensitive matters.
Chaired by Professor Dominic Bryan, the 15 commission members, 14 of whom were men, were unable to forge a consensus, despite five years of work and consultation and a cost of almost £800,000 (€938,000) since it had been established in 2014. The report called for a ban on the display of paramilitary flags and murals and said bonfires should only be permitted where they are compliant with the law.
However, no action plan to implement the proposals was agreed and the Alliance leader and justice minister, Naomi Long, said that the report merely kicked the can of dealing with contentious issues down the road. The DUP blamed Sinn Féin for weaponising culture and identity and criticised the party for refusing to commemorate the centenary of the Northern Ireland state, among other insults.
‘Sinn Féin in 2021 denied unionist MLAs the opportunity to mark Northern Ireland’s centenary by laying a simple stone or planting a rose bush in Stormont,’ DUP MLA Christopher Stalford was quoted in the Belfast Telegraph as saying. ‘Sinn Féin snub the royal family. Unable to even mark the Duke of Edinburgh’s passing in the same way as other countries. Such cultural and identity weaponisation will make solutions very difficult to come by as some want cultural domination rather than respect.’
Sinn Féin MLA Gerry Kelly replied that the DUP ‘doesn’t do equality’ and was ‘unwilling to confront sectarianism’ associated with flying flags at hospitals, schools, places of worship, interfaces and mixed housing developments.
‘It has chosen to support those engaged in intimidation and antisocial behaviour at bonfires which have no regard for the protection of people, property or the environment,’ Kelly said. ‘Progress in tackling sectarianism in this society will be made in spite of the DUP’s efforts to deny rights and equality’.
The DUP was also accused of blocking the introduction of a Bill of Rights, and of delaying urgently required protections against climate change.
Under the New Decade, New Approach (NDNA) agreement that restored the executive in early 2020, an ad hoc committee was formed in the Assembly with the task of examining the implications of a Bill of Rights, proposed under the GFA. When the committee sought to appoint human rights advocate Professor Colin Harvey to an advisory group, the appointment was blocked by the DUP, leading to the suspension of the work of the committee at Stormont.
According to Patrick Corrigan, the director of Amnesty International in Belfast, the failure to appoint the panel was a breach of the NDNA agreement. ‘It is even more concerning if the failure to agree this five-member panel is because of a refusal to appoint someone of the standing of Professor Colin Harvey, a leading authority on constitutional and human rights law on these islands and one of the most distinguished researchers and writers on the Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland,’ he said in the Irish News in November 2021.
Harvey was quoted in the Belfast Telegraph as saying that he believed that his work with Ireland’s Future led to the refusal by DUP to agree his appointment. ‘I am saddened to hear these reports about the expert panel and it is disappointing to see what appears to be a further political blockage to the Bill of Rights process,’ he said.
The episode confirmed for many the deep hostility within the DUP to the human rights and climate change agenda pursued by Harvey and other activists before and since the GFA. For Harvey, the unity project provides a unique opportunity to embed human rights protections in the constitution and polity of a ‘new Ireland’.
‘The Good Friday Agreement prompted significant human rights and equality reforms, North and South, but it is well known that this agenda has not gone as far as anticipated. The expected Bill of Rights was never enacted and there is no Charter of Rights for the island of Ireland. Commitments in the Agreement on rights will flow into planning for reunification. The chance to advance more extensive protections for everyone on the island should not be missed,’ Harvey said in an interview with this author.
A new and united Ireland must include enhanced guarantees for social and economic rights, in areas such as housing and health-care. An appropriate rights-based mechanism must be found to respect existing Agreement guarantees on parity of esteem in these new circumstances, including more extensive recognition of minority rights. Better domestic equality protections – inclusively defined in terms of groups and scope – will be essential. If the preparations incorporate ideas for a new constitution, this conversation is likely to broaden considerably.
The ‘innovative thinking on what a modern Bill of Rights might contain, and the extent of the practical engagement with comparative and international experience’ can assist any forum established before or after the unity referendums, Harvey said.
On climate change, DUP Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots placed a bill before the Assembly which does not include the globally accepted target, largely agreed at COP 26 (held in Glasgow in November), of decarbonisation by 2050.
John Sweeney, Emeritus Professor of Geography at Maynooth University, said that the Poots bill contrasts with another put forward by Green Party MLA Claire Bailey, which endorses the 2050 decarbonisation target and is accepted by all other parties except the DUP, which has a fair number of climate deniers in its ranks. ‘Poots has a record of fundamentalism and creationism. He hasn’t touted that publicly as a reason for not having an adequate response to climate change, but he is using the same arguments as the Irish Farmers’ Association, for example, are using in the South to limit the effectiveness of any bill,’ Sweeney said in an interview with this author. In his view, only a co-ordinated all-island approach can meet the existential challenge from global warming.
‘The only way I can see that there would be homogeneity in an all-Ireland situation would be if the North was in the EU and therefore subject to EU legislation. Otherwise, we’re going to have this ongoing discrepancy between the legal systems in both jurisdictions,’ said Sweeney, who attended the two-week COP 26 gathering.
It certainly would be easier to have one jurisdiction and one set of international rules to abide by. That really is what was coming out of COP as well, commitments to reduce [carbon emissions] by 50 per cent by 2030 internationally. We’ve got that in the Republic but we haven’t got it in the North officially yet.
There were some positive bits that came out of COP 26 in terms of finance, in terms of Ireland’s role in particular this time around, which was much more progressive than previously.
Sweeney also cited as significant the international agreements on deforestation and reducing methane gas emissions. However, he was sceptical about whether some key countries will implement the targets on deforestation.
Ireland signing up to the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance was something that wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago, he suggested, although the Irish government has been less than convincing on its commitment to drastically reduce methane gas emissions. In the long term, a united Ireland would be ideally placed to maximise the benefits from wind power, including offshore electricity generation.
The offshore wind resources in both jurisdictions are phenomenal. I don’t see any problem reaching 70 or 80 per cent of our electricity demand from wind. There will be an issue with the integrity of the marine environment being protected, but I don’t see it as being a major one. Ireland will be potentially an exporter of energy for wind in the future. Therefore, we will be able to get the security of energy supply from interconnections that will be important for the times when we don’t have wind or solar power.
Many young people from the North who travel abroad to university or for work do not return due to the sectarian divisions and political instability there and, in recent years, due to the unwillingness of some parties to deliver rights that are accepted as normal in most other modern democracies. This trend was confirmed in a recent survey of 300 young people who left the North to study or work abroad. Only 12 per cent planned to return to the North after graduation, while older professionals made a similar response. The survey was carried out by Belfast think tank Pivotal in 2019.
Emma Campbell is among those who returned to the North. She spent 13 years studying and working in Wales and England. A member of the Array collective of artists in Belfast, Campbell said that the struggle for human rights, including abortion, LGBT and language rights, and climate action are the biggest challenges facing young people in the North. Array, which consists of 11 artists, won the prestigious Turner Prize in the UK in December 2021 for an installation they built involving a shebeen, or illegal pub, containing artwork depicting and imagining a wake for the partition of Ireland. When I spoke with Campbell, she said:
The shebeen is just the holder for the artwork itself which is a film that we made of the Druithaib’s Ball (Druids’ Ball). We had performers and activists and all sorts of people and we celebrated a wake for the centenary of the partition for Ireland. That’s the main feature for the work we submitted for the Turner Prize, which is obviously really significant if you’re thinking about a united Ireland.
I think it was really important to us that we consciously didn’t include any flags in our work. We included rainbow flags or created other flags and banners but we purposely didn’t include any national flags in the work. It was the year of commemoration and celebration of partition and we felt like we wanted to take this really particular and controversial and potentially explosive moment in time and talk about it differently and from the perspective of queer people, of gaelgeoir, of artists, of feminists, and make sure that those voices and the experience of life in Northern Ireland for us was also included.
The collective, with a majority of women members, works in a shared studio space in Belfast and came together from their involvement in a range of social and political campaigns over recent years.
After returning to Belfast, Campbell became involved in the Abortion Rights Campaign, advocating for women’s reproductive rights through creative and direct action, North and South. From a cultural Protestant background in east Belfast, Campbell attended art college at Ulster University before completing her studies in Wales.
The art college in Belfast at that time was way more of a hotbed of student political activity than it is now because it had a really strong students’ union and it had a big open café where everybody used to go and meet. I was the welfare officer for a year, mostly giving out free condoms, I’ll be honest with you. I went to Wales for three years and then went to London where I was mostly working in the photography industry in various roles. It was the time of the big anti-Iraq war marches and I was involved in a feminist group in south-east London.
Array includes artists from across the island, as well as one from Italy and another from Manchester, who share a progressive and radical left political outlook. Campbell continues:
I was fairly lucky in that my parents weren’t hard-line unionists. I have mixed grandparents and one is religious, so I suppose that’s quite unusual. I also went to a fairly mild church, a Methodist church. I wouldn’t say it was a typical Protestant upbringing. My partner is from Waterford and when she asked me ‘what about this Orange Order thing?’ I said you are asking the wrong person.
During Campbell’s primary school years, the Troubles meant bomb scares and bag searches and occasionally the sound of explosions, but she knows it was different for those living in Catholic areas.
I’m aware the constant scrutiny and the army visibility everywhere was probably less frightening for me than my Catholic neighbours. But we had to go through army turnstiles at the gates. I was working in Castlecourt in Belfast on the day of the Omagh bombing and we had to search the shop for [cassette] tape bombs. I didn’t even know what I was looking for.
A teenager when the GFA was signed, Campbell only got to befriend young Catholics when she went to college. Segregation in education is still a key challenge. ‘It’s still really difficult to get your child into an integrated school. My child has a parent from two different backgrounds essentially and we still couldn’t get him into an integrated school because there aren’t enough places,’ she said.
We have a problem in the North and I think it’s this democratic deficit where quite often people will vote for parties based on national identity rather than their social policy. It delivers this false mandate so people will be voting for the DUP because they want to be British even though they might support equal marriage or abortion rights. There’s plenty of evidence to show that even among the hardline loyalist community there’s still a majority of people who support gay rights and abortion rights.
When Campbell and her friends discuss a united Ireland, there are concerns over the loss of the National Health Service, as well as house prices and the cost of living in the South. ‘I think the biggest fear around a united Ireland isn’t a loss of identity but a loss of a National Health Service. Among the left, there’s a fear about the liberal taxation system in the South, the astronomical housing and fuel prices and that kind of thing. We are in a kind of affordable bubble here in the North and there’s a bit of a fear of that being risked,’ she said.
People are happy to discuss a united Ireland but have deep reservations about who will govern it, particularly given the mess made by the existing parties.
We don’t want that, Fine Gael and the DUP running the place. That would be the worst-case scenario. Everybody is incredibly concerned about Brexit especially as the majority of people in the North voted to remain. I think people would be interested in a united Ireland. People are also impatient that the government here for three years, they just didn’t sit at all, which is absolutely anti-democratic. Even though the Good Friday Agreement was supposed to enshrine a bill of rights, we still haven’t got that over two decades later. There’s a lot of frustration that’s feeding into this kind of civil unrest. The frustration is twisted and abused by sectarian messages. Trying to campaign for a progressive Ireland would be something that would appeal to my generation and the generation after me because what we see now isn’t working, North or South. A lot of the stuff that Array tend to protest about is because of this frustration. It is coming from a genuine concern for people just having liveable lives.
I also think there’s a difficulty for the whole island of Ireland. It’s still a really immature democracy and there’s an issue with the kind of people who end up in government. In the North, the majority of people who end up in the big parties are there simply because of a strong belief in a particular identity. A lot of the people who end up in the big parties in the South are people who can afford to be or people from wealthier backgrounds, so it’s not properly representative.
Many younger and progressive voters in the North have shifted to Alliance and the Green Party in recent elections, although these parties may not be left-wing enough for Campbell’s circle of friends and campaigners. She is involved in a ‘feminist constitution’ project which has examined how the rights of women who have suffered abuses while in care or in institutions like the Magdalene Laundries can obtain redress. Campbell has also worked on a project which examined how women were disproportionately affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are huge issues like the treatment of women in institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries, North and the South, things that are currently quite toxic in the whole island. Let’s not get too bogged down in emblems and think a bit harder about housing rights, and how people are expected to survive, what a fair tax system looks like, what a fair education system looks like and what about transport and so forth that serve more than just the big urban centres.
All of these things hugely impact women more than men. There’s a women’s policy group which I’m also involved with and has written a feminist Covid recovery report. It details quite plainly how all of the issues that were already impacting women more have only been exacerbated by Covid. How do we imagine an Ireland that has universal free childcare, never mind universal free healthcare? That’s a problem for the whole island. How it impacts women in terms of employability, in terms of affordability of housing. I think the work that needs to be done from the left is to try and imagine what that fairer Ireland could look like.
Campbell and other artists collaborate with organisations across the island, including those active on migrant rights, with housing groups and trade unions as well as, in her case, Alliance4Choice and the Women’s Policy Group in Belfast. They would welcome the type of universal basic income that has been introduced for artists in the South.
It’s not necessarily a perfect scheme but the universal basic income for artists, if it works [in the South] then it would be good for that to be expanded. That could be a central facet of a new Ireland. Artists are there to kind of reflect and to allow the nuances in things and maybe just get the chance to be aired in political discussions. I think it’s also our duty to reflect the voice of the people that aren’t normally heard in those arenas. The work that Array have done for the Turner Prize has been described as a kind of utopia, so we can imagine these utopias and if we can imagine them then how can we make them part of the future of Ireland?