Irish Unification, 2024

By Jack Sheehan

Ireland’s next general election is happening on Friday. Could the results pave the way for reunification? It isn’t likely. Jack Sheehan explains why in our new issue.

ON FEBRUARY 3 OF THIS YEAR, Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill became first minister of Northern Ireland. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The six-county statelet of two-million, created in the 1921 partition of Ireland, was specifically designed—to paraphrase one of its founders—as a Protestant state for a Protestant people, an instrument of permanent rule by a unionist political elite loyal to the British crown. More loyal, indeed, than most people on the mainland itself. For half a century, this elite ruled an effectively one-party state, disenfranchising many Catholics and gerrymandering electoral districts, until the North shook with thirty years of paramilitary and state violence from the late 1960s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The price of peace was incorporating radical nationalists into the political system, and they proved every bit as good at electoral politics as the insurrectionary kind. Within two decades, Sinn Féin has utterly dominated the nationalist side of the aisle in the North, reducing the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party to a rump and becoming, for the first time, the largest party in Stormont, Northern Ireland’s devolved parliament.

Barely two months after O’Neill’s ascent, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the dominant political force in Northern unionism, was thrown into disarray by the revelation that their leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, had been credibly accused of multiple cases of rape and other sexual abuses over more than two decades. A man whose career began as the election agent of Enoch Powell—the anti-immigrant British MP of the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech—was ending in grotesque disgrace. The Orange State is now led, symbolically at least, by someone wearing green, while the DUP lurches from scandal to scandal, crippled by their support for Brexit, unable and unwilling to moderate for fear of losing the unionist mandate of heaven to the even more reactionary Traditional Unionist Voice party, who reject power sharing with nationalist parties outright. (In a moment of great symbolic weight, TUV leader Jim Allister recently won the seat that DUP founder Ian Paisley—and later, his son—had held for over half a century.)

“Even if a vote were won, how would the unionist minority, long sworn enemies of Irish nationalism, be integrated into a new Ireland?”

At first glance, it might seem as if the long wait is almost over, and we are only a few years from the final triumph of Irish republicanism. Indeed, it has become common to hear talk from across the political spectrum, both inside and outside Ireland, of the inevitability of Irish reunification. A popular meme clips a moment from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Data refers to “the Irish Unification of 2024.” We are in a historic moment—though whenever I hear that phrase, I am tempted to reply that all the other moments are historic too. In the North, Sinn Féin has ascended to the highest heights possible within the confines of the post-Troubles settlement, but those confines are fairly, well, confining. The devolved government in Stormont is structured in such a way that it legally enforces a coalition between the largest unionist and largest nationalist grouping in parliament, with other parties having the option to join that grand coalition, should they wish. Both those main parties have essentially equal power, and there is no real difference between the positions of first minister and deputy first minister, which are divided between them. Numerous mechanisms exist to make sure that neither side is able to impose their will on the other. In budgetary terms, the government is beholden to the whims of Westminster. The net result of all of this is that Stormont exists as a permanent caretaker government. Politicians from a supposedly radical party must govern like civil servants. As such, Sinn Féin’s ability to implement any kind of serious agenda, let alone begin the formal process of reunification, is strictly limited.

And this is only one of numerous hurdles—political, legal, electoral, and social—that must be crossed before this centuries-old dream can become a reality. First, a mandate must be achieved, both north and south of the border; Sinn Féin is the most likely vehicle to build this consensus, but their meteoric rise has recently stalled out amid serious strategic errors and a changing social climate. Next, the British government must assent to a unification vote, something in which neither the Tories nor Labour have lately shown much interest. Third, the vote must be won in both the Republic—straightforward enough—and the North, where current polls suggest this would be an uphill struggle. And even if a vote were won, how would the unionist minority, long sworn enemies of Irish nationalism, be integrated into a new Ireland?

Looming over all of these technical and political obstacles is a larger question of what exactly unification would mean in practice. Would it be a shotgun wedding where one side sets the terms, as in the case of German reunification, or the creation of a whole new polity? And who, crucially, would decide?

Continue reading “Irish Unification, 2024,” an essay by Jack Sheehan, on our site.

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