MOVING THE GOALPOSTS IN THE NORTH IS MORAL COWARDICE
Changing the rules so that a simple majority is no longer enough to decide North’s status is a dangerous game
This is the 23rd Easter Sunday since the Good Friday Agreement was concluded. It’s far from perfect. The power-sharing structure ushered in back then has cemented sectarianism to such an extent that a place which used to vote solidly for the SDLP and Ulster Unionists during the worst days of the Troubles is now controlled by Sinn Féin and the DUP — which few could seriously claim as progress.
For all that, the GFA has largely done what was asked of it, which is to hold the peace. Now, though, it appears that some, alarmed by the prospect of a potentially destabilising Border poll in the next few years, want to change the rules, arguing instead that a simple majority should no longer be sufficient for a change to the North’s constitutional status.
Such a retreat was signalled by former SDLP deputy leader, the late Seamus Mallon, in his 2019 memoir.
In it, he argued that “the GFA metric of 50 per cent plus one for unity will not give us the kind of agreed Ireland we seek”. Fearing the violence that could erupt, North and South, in the event of a narrow majority for Irish unity, Mallon came to the conclusion that the “parallel consent” principle which applies in the Assembly — which requires a majority of both unionists and nationalists, or a “weighted majority” including at least 40pc of both — should be applied to the constitutional question itself.
Otherwise, he warned, Northern Ireland risked replicating the conditions at the start of its existence, when nationalists were resentfully forced to remain in the UK against their will.
Mallon was right. But only half right. Such a scenario might indeed turn unionists into an angry minority on the island; but changing the rules to appease them would also incentivise the worst elements in loyalism to threaten trouble. As for nationalists, changing the rules to stop them from achieving a united Ireland, even after they’d won a Border poll, would simply cement the old poisonous idea that peaceful change is impossible.
It’s not surprising that Mallon’s plan has been embraced by many unionists who, whilst pooh-poohing the idea that a Border poll could deliver a majority for Irish unity any time soon, clearly aren’t minded to take a risk.
They like the additional safeguard that “parallel consent” would offer, for a little while longer at least. In practice, though, it would be a false consolation. Once nationalists gained a majority, the end of Northern Ireland would simply be a matter of time.
This could well be another example where technocrats, confident of their strategic brilliance, decide that they know best, only to be surprised by consequences that less accomplished minds saw coming a mile off.
“Parallel consent” was also agreed by all the wisest heads during peace talks to be the best way to bring the two sides together in power sharing. In fact, it has had the opposite effect, increasing intransigence and giving each side an incentive to take turns at collapsing the Executive. Why would parallel consent be any more successful on the constitutional level?
Putting up absurd new hurdles in a referendum would also make a mockery of democracy. What relief there was in 1998 came from the fact that violent republicanism finally seemed to accept that “50 per cent plus one” was enough to keep Northern Ireland in the UK. The pay-off was that, once “a majority” in the North did want to leave the UK, the GFA accepted that the governments had a “binding obligation” to enact that too.
This has always been the very basis of the constitutional nationalist argument — what Mallon in his book calls “the long and noble tradition of using peaceful, democratic means to bring about progressive change in Ireland, from O’Connell through Parnell to the GFA”. Tinkering with that now would be both cynical and dangerous.
Even those now arguing for such a change probably know that to be true.
What stops them from acknowledging it is fear. Fear of violence. Fear
of contamination from a virus of sectarian militancy spreading south in future. Those fears are not unreasonable, given Irish history. Faced with that risk, people in the 26 counties would be entitled to decide that a unitary state was not for them, even if the North had earlier voted in favour.
What no one has a right to do is move the goalposts this late in the game, in the hope of sparing them from having to make that choice.
That would simply pass the buck to a future generation anyway, which is a kind of moral cowardice in itself, leaving the hardest decisions to your grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the hope that “something will turn up” in the meantime. Of course, the best solution, both in the short term, and longer hope of peaceful unity, is, as Irish High Court judge Richard Humphreys acknowledged in his own book, published the same year as Mallon’s, to make Northern Ireland work, “as a self-contained entity that respects both traditions”.
SF certainly doesn’t want such a prolonged period of dull normality. Extremists need rolling agitation to increase demand for a Border poll. Lose it, and they would just start the
process over again, exploiting every political crisis towards the one end goal. Former Progressive Democrats leader Michael McDowell offered one possible solution a few years ago. He started from an admission that a unitary Irish state was the “least attractive option”, not just for unionists, but voters in the Republic too, because it would mean ditching many institutions and ways of life they hold dear.
His proposal of “parallel states”, existing side by side on a temporary or semi-permanent basis, looks far more workable and democratic than “parallel consent”. It’s also not a million miles from the long underrated Republican SF policy of “Éire Nua”.
The one proviso is that they’d have to be parallel states outside the UK, because that’s the only way to honour the “binding obligation” in the Agreement that has, however uneasily, secured the peace for the past 23 years.
Perhaps what ultimately frightens those in the Republic who are hitching a ride on the late Seamus Mallon’s coat tails in the hope of preventing a Border poll in the short or medium term, is the very idea of change. Abhorrently, many commentators have even taken to arguing against Irish
unity on the risible grounds that people “up there” are not as authentically Irish as the people “down here”.
“I will never consider them as Irish as I am,” one columnist wrote recently. On social media, nastier things still are spewed by anonymous trolls.
There’s nothing wrong with saying that people North and south are different in many ways. So are people west and east. But to say that those in the North are not “as Irish” is to act as if you are the undisputed gatekeepers of Irishness. It almost flirts with an idea of racial or national purity.
Irishness is not a sliding scale like height or weight. You can’t be “more” or “less” of it. You either are or you aren’t. It’s certainly impossible to imagine that anyone would declare publicly and without shame that immigrant communities in Ireland are not really Irish or “as Irish”. They’d be denounced as a bigot, and rightly so.
It’s perfectly possible to make reasoned arguments against a united Ireland without painting everyone in the North as some kind of lesser species who mustn’t be allowed to sit on the best furniture lest they leave a stain or a smell. People who know better should leave that toxicity to Twitter.