For Irish nationalists the tricolour is a symbol of national pride – but it could also be argued that it symbolises the tragic failure of the flag’s aspiration to form an Irish identity based on reconciling the green and orange traditions on the island of Ireland.
In recent years, increased support for Sinn Fein and the fallout from Brexit has seen the issue of a unitary Irish state being debated more frequently with the activist group Ireland’s Future organising large scale events to promote and discuss issues related to Irish unity. One of the legitimate criticisms levelled at these Ireland’s Future events and other similar initiatives is that they involve prominent nationalists from both jurisdictions talking to themselves about an agreed constitutional outcome. In almost all of these united Ireland debates, there’s little emphasis on how to convince over half the population of Northern Ireland who consistently state they wish to remain a part of the UK or indeed the large number of undecided voters on why they would be better off within a unitary Irish state. Not to mention the awkward fact that according to a recent Irish Times poll, along with various other polls in recent years, the pro-union demographic includes roughly twenty percent of Northern Irish Catholics who while they aren’t culturally orange view remaining part of the UK as personally beneficial to them. This is hardly surprising when you consider that there is a large Catholic middle class in Northern Ireland with a very many of them in well paid UK public sector jobs.
For many of this cohort, a vote for unity is a vote for an uncertain period of unemployment in a newly formed state trying to find its legs. I would imagine these pro-union Catholics feel similar to the Edinburgh taxi driver who told me during the Scottish independence referendum that in his heart he was an ardent Scottish patriot but that his pocket was staunchly pro-UK.
Whatever about pro union Catholics being asked to forego the economic benefits of remaining in the UK in favour of a united Ireland, convincing culturally unionist protestants will be an even greater task. It’s going to take a lot more than the odd Irish politician occasionally floating the idea of rejoining the commonwealth to entice unionists into a united Ireland and if we have learned anything from what triggered the Northern Irish troubles, it’s that you can’t have a very large disgruntled minority who feel alienated from the state in which they live and hope to maintain social cohesion. The late Ulster Unionist party leader David Trimble acknowledged that the early decades of the Northern Irish state were, as he put it, ‘a cold house for Catholics.’ For a truly united Ireland to have any chance of flourishing it would have to ensure that Ulster protestants didn’t feel it was their turn for a spell in the aforementioned ‘cold house.’ This is the challenge that almost no one in the united Ireland camp appears to ever seriously address.
Sadly, I see no sign of most nationalists, especially those in the Republic, currently willing to give ‘parity of esteem’ to the unionist tradition on an all-island basis. It’s ironic that most southern nationalists expected northern nationalists to compromise with unionism to reach an agreement within Northern Ireland while many of them would never consider making even the most cosmetic of constitutional changes to accommodate unionists within a united Ireland. Whenever any moderate southern nationalist politician contemplates rejoining the Commonwealth or adopting a more inclusive national anthem he or she is widely derided as a ‘West Brit’ and various opinion polls show a slight majority of southern voters are as intransigent as the most hardline of unionists when it comes to any form of constitutional compromise.
Before this island could ever be in a place to sit down and negotiate the contours and constitutional furnishings of a unitary state, feelings of kinship and mutual belonging would have to be fostered on an all-island basis. What good is a unitary jurisdiction if the people are bitterly divided? Nationalists will have to employ some lateral thinking strategies to get unionists to even consider the prospect of a united Ireland. One such strategy would be to emphasise that there is a British strand in Irish identity and an Irish strand in British identity and that the nations of these islands are not foreign to one another. For instance, there are millions of us across this archipelago who have ties of family and ancestry across both islands and who view both Ireland and Britain as home. There’s also the fact that much of Scotland’s Gaelic culture has its historic roots in Ulster. The Irish spoken in Ulster is more closely related to the Scots Gaelic still spoken in parts of northwestern Britain than it is to the Irish spoken in the rest of Ireland.
Even the emergence of Irish republicanism in the late 18th century had a distinctively British flavour as the United Irishmen were largely led by Presbyterian Ulster-Scots and Anglo-Irish Dubliners who were descendants of the Cromwellian plantation and therefore brought their suspicion of monarchy with them to Ireland.
Acknowledging these areas of overlapping culture and shared ancestry doesn’t mean that we have to deny historical injustices or the atrocities we inflicted on one another, but in the words of the late Queen Elizabeth II speaking in 2011 in Dublin:
“With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.”
And most importantly she urged us to:
“Bow to the past but not be bound by it.”
In a recent trip to Dublin to support the all-Ireland rugby team Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister Emma Little Pengelly remarked:
“Took the opportunity in Dublin to talk about our incredibly rich heritage – proud Anglo-Irish and Ulster-Scots – and our role in the very fabric of our Isle, we are the people of JB Yeats, Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Iris Murdoch, Lavery, of Jameson’s and Guinness and much more! I am determined to create better understanding of the incredible role of the British, Anglo-Irish and Ulster Scots in this place we call home.”
You’d probably have to go back to the days of pre-partition Ireland to find a prominent unionist politician speaking about belonging to the whole island of Ireland. Such conciliatory language would have been unimaginable during the darkest days of the troubles. A prudent nationalist response would be to reciprocate such inclusive sentiment by emphasising the common ties between all the peoples of both Ireland and Britain and that if a united Ireland were ever to emerge it would be inclusive of the island’s British heritage and traditions.
If nationalists ever want to see a functioning cohesive unitary state at peace with itself, then unionists will have to feel that their Britishness can be at home in Ireland. After all, that’s what the tricolour purports to represent. In reality, any long term constitutional compromise on an all island basis would have to involve a lot more than unionists being granted a few cultural trinkets. All that said, with time even the most hardened of mindsets can be softened. Afterall, whoever thought we’d see the day that the once bitter foes Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness would have jointly governed Northern Ireland while affectionately being referred to as the ‘chuckle brothers.’ Any united Ireland worth living in would have to be founded on the same principles of parity of esteem, mutual respect and willingness to compromise that made peace in Northern Ireland possible.