Foster’s threat to unpick Belfast Agreement makes her a recruiting sergeant for a united Ireland
Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, our lives were characterised by wastefulness. The radio was always on in our house and it seemed like every news bulletin brought fresh word of carnage. A shooting at an isolated farmhouse, or the heart ripped out of a familiar-sounding town became the hallmark of daily dispatches. It was all very depressing.
Margaret Thatcher’s intransigence over the hunger strikes poisoned the atmosphere, and the toxic mix of the ongoing campaign of violence of the IRA and stubborn unionist resistance to anything looking like dialogue made the conflict seem intractable.
Behind the scenes, men like John Hume and Fr Alec Reid tried to persuade all involved that a brighter future would only come about by peaceful means and an agreement between nationalists and unionists to share Northern Ireland.
Looking back, parents and schoolteachers worked with an almost pathological passion to keep young men away from the lure of paramilitaries. By the time of the 1994 IRA ceasefire, support for violence was virtually non-existent in the Catholic community.
The first time I was eligible to vote was to endorse the Good Friday Agreement. For every person in Northern Ireland who voted against the agreement, three people voted for it. In the south, it was more like nine-toone.
Finally, it seemed that hope and history had, indeed, rhymed and a brighter future beckoned. A new generation of self-confident and well-eduin cated Catholics were entering the professions and challenging the unionist hegemony. John Hume’s great achievement was to convince Catholics that Northern Ireland was, indeed, reformable and that unionism could be convinced to share power. The success of the peace process seemed to prove that, and everyone agreed to park the ‘national question’.
Sure, there was still a romantic attachment to the idea of a unified Ireland, but with a fair crack of the whip and equal treatment in Northern Ireland, most nationalists — even if they didn’t admit it — were content with the status quo.
Those who believed themselves to be Irish finally felt there was parity of esteem, that their identity was respected by the institutions of the State and their equality enshrined in an international treaty.
Brexit has blown a hole that consensus. And while predictions of an immediate post-Brexit return to violence are greatly exaggerated, Britain taking back control — as the campaign slogan goes — has done more to dismantle the United Kingdom than decades of IRA violence.
Northern nationalists, who were content to park the issue, are now aghast at the prospect of being cut off economically, socially and politically from the rest of the island, and the spectre of a hard border.
Add to that the ‘No Surrender’ rhetoric of DUP leader Arlene Foster, and many nationalists are left wondering whether that party has really left behind the brand of supremacist politics her predecessors, Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson, appeared to have eschewed.
Mrs Foster’s stubborn resistance to an Irish Language Act led people to wonder whether her commitment to parity of esteem was all she claimed. At the heart of the tension is a deepseared suspicion nationalists feel that they’re not respected — not really.
Theresa May is playing a dangerous game with the DUP. Her reliance on that party to stay in power is imperilling the peace process and the consensus that has made Northern Ireland work for the last 20 years.
The fact Mrs Foster feels sufficiently emboldened to publicly try to unpick the Good Friday Agreement should make anyone who feels strongly about the peace we now enjoy anxious. Whether Mrs Foster realises it or not, she is currently the most effective recruiting sergeant for a united Ireland. The longer she digs in her heels, the more she makes that an irresistible prospect for northern nationalists.