Hume was right: reconciliation must precede reunification
IT’S the very fact of an actual or impending Catholic majority in Northern Ireland that makes Sinn Féin’s premature demand for a unity poll so perilous. Tipping points, with their inbuilt instabilities, have always acted as open invitations for trouble and strife, for adventurists and demagogues with anger, fear, control and murder in mind.
Northern Ireland is unlikely to be any different.
Three years ago the BBC predicted that Catholics would outnumber Protestants in the North by 2021. Now that we’ve arrived at that point, with a new census already under way, Mary Lou McDonald and her friends at home and abroad – particularly those dangerous dreamers in the United States who placed newspaper ads demanding a border poll – are losing patience.
They should be listening to people like former rugby international Andrew Trimble, politicians in the Republic like Micheál Martin, Leo Varadkar and former taoiseach
John Bruton and they should be paying particular attention to the extraordinarily deep community divisions that still persist in the North.
How can anyone expect to unite this island’s 6.8 million people when 1.9 million in the North simply can’t bear the thought of mixing together as a functioning community?
It’s a daunting reality that 23 years after the Good Friday Agreement about 90% of children – NINE out of every 10 – have virtually nothing to do with each other in their formative years, because Catholics and Protestants attend segregated schools. But that’s what can be regarded as the more pleasant aspect of the stark sectarian divide there. The so-called ‘peace walls’ remain – practical, brickand-mortar reminders of murderous tribalism that has claimed so many lives down the years. This is despite the Northern Executive setting 2023 as a date for their removal. Last year well over 100 peace walls, mainly in Belfast, still kept communities apart because ordinary people fear for their lives if they were taken down.
John Bruton, quite properly, adopts the John Hume three-strand analysis to bring about agreement on this island. Reconciliation must be North-South, East-West and between the people of Northern Ireland – the latter being the first amongst equals. Clearly, the rampant sectarianism and mutual mistrust in the North is as potent today as ever it was – hardly surprising after 30 years of mass murder orchestrated by slaughter-masters on both sides and egged on by the British when it suited them.
THE years since peace came slowly dropping in the North have lulled too many into believing the conflict is ended, despite all the facts on the ground indicating the very opposite. John Hume’s injunction that unity can only come about after centuries-old sectarian hatreds are managed to extinction is as compelling today as it always has been. We should all remember that it was his required ingredients for peace that
led to the Good Friday Agreement in the first place.
Sinn Féin is playing fast and loose with that Agreement by pointing only to the clause allowing a border poll while recklessly ignoring the demands for true reconciliation as a necessary precursor to fundamental constitutional change, like unity. The notion of persuasion, of bringing people to an agreement where all sides are winners, seems utterly alien to them.
We’re entitled to ask what’s their rush, particularly at a time when Brexit has poisoned relationships, undermining the three pillars that support the only pathway to peace.
And then there’s Andrew Trimble, one of a growing number of moderate inbetweeners in the North who identify as both Irish and British and don’t want to be forced to decide on a simple, binary choice as presented in a border poll.
He’s living proof that reconciliation is possible, that people in the North can be united in the only way that means anything – given time.
The divided people of the North must first be persuaded to like one another and to settle into that friendship before they are pushed into an even-more-complicated relationship with southerners. A forced marriage always lacks essential consent. And the absence of consent always leads to injustice and tears.