UK plans rocked by Sinn Fein
Price of coalition will be to formalise unification agenda
The prospect of the nationalist Sinn Fein entering government in Ireland now looks to be very real after last weekend’s election, a move that will make many that recall the Troubles instinctively deeply uncomfortable. But in a world of fragmenting politics that had already ended the duopoly of Ireland’s mainstream governing parties — Fine Gael and Fianna Fail — it was perhaps only a matter of time before Sinn Fein found a route to power.
Still, it seems that no one — least of all Sinn Fein itself — foresaw this happening so quickly, given that the party polled around 11 per cent in recent European and presidential elections. But by winning the secondlargest number of seats in the Dail, there is now a realistic prospect that a British foreign minister will find themselves sitting across the table from a Sinn Fein tanaiste, or deputy prime minister, whose party is avowedly in favour of reuniting Ireland.
This at a time when Britain’s Prime Minister talks of “cementing the Union” with a £15 billion ($30b) “Boris bridge” between Ireland and Scotland and Northern Ireland’s Unionists complain that Johnson’s Brexit deal is inexorably sucking the province into Dublin’s economic orbit.
If Brexit was not already testing the viability of the deliberate constitutional limbo that underpinned the Good Friday Agreement, then the prospect of Sinn Fein in government in the South surely does so. This does not mean that a “border poll” is anywhere close to being an immediate prospect, since a vote on Irish unity can only be triggered by the British secretary of state “if at any time it appears likely to him” that a majority in Northern Ireland would vote for unification.
The best available data only shows around a quarter of Northern Ireland’s population are explicitly pro-unification. Forthcoming election data is expected to show a narrow majority among Catholics for Irish unity, but taking into account the entire population of Northern Ireland, the Secretary of State has no immediate grounds to call a poll.
That is not to diminish the seismic nature of the election result, and the potential it provides both to change the dynamic between London and Dublin and within the Republic of Ireland itself.
Although Sinn Fein’s president, Mary Lou McDonald, clearly won voters over on an anti-austerity ticket, the price of any coalition will be to formalise the unification agenda through a White Paper that will give official form and content to the idea.
If that is the case, then what is now a talking point down the pub or at the bus stop can be given an official, bureaucratic structure and legitimacy that, incrementally, can lay the foundations for the longer term ambitions for unification.
We live in constitutionally febrile times. No one can be sure precisely how the Irish “frontstop”, with its capacity to hit both business and consumers in the North, will affect the discussion on unification — nor indeed the impact of a Scottish vote for secession. The prospect of Sinn Fein entering government in Dublin is another destabilising ingredient in that volatile constitutional mix.