It’s safe to say that one of the very few national institutions that would not undergo any significant change in a hypothetical United Ireland is the Irish Rugby Team. That is because Rugby (for all that yours truly isn’t really a fan) is one of the few institutions in Ireland to have successfully fostered an all-Ireland mentality that doesn’t feel alienating to one side or the other. There are not very many – if any – other examples of a team that can get staunch Presbyterians from Ulster cheering lustily alongside fellas from Limerick in a common patriotic cause, but Rugby has managed it, to its credit.
For most Irish people, the sight of thousands of Irish fans singing the Cranberries hit “Zombie” in Paris after a hard-fought win over the number one team in the world at a Rugby World Cup might have been considered intoxicating. But here we arrive at the paradox: Because a truly united island enjoying a sporting triumph appears to have upset some of the most hard-core nationalists amongst us, who profess themselves determined to achieve national unity. Here’s self-styled comedian Tadhg Hickey:
Zombie is the perfect partitionist anthem. It encapsulates the complete lack of understanding or even basic compassion in the south for the lived experience of Northern nationalists.
"But you see, it's not me
It's not my family"— Tadhg (@TadhgHickey) September 23, 2023
What that tweet comes down to, essentially, is the complaint that a united island was not sufficiently Fenian and did not sufficiently deliver on the need for nationalist grievance to be constantly recognised. Indeed, note the language: A united Irish team celebrating a united Irish victory is denounced as “partitionist”.
Here we arrive at the basic difficulty: Because by this standard, any achievable united Ireland in the political sense of removing the border and having a 32-county state will be more partitionist, not less so.
The rugby lads have, in some ways, provided the blueprint: The national flag and anthem of the Republic do not feature, except in games played in the Republic. The icon is the shamrock, which is claimed by both sides. The anthem has been replaced by some inoffensive bilge about four proud provinces standing shoulder to shoulder. Northern Protestants and Unionists play a full part in it. The Rugby team eschews and avoids any explicitly nationalist sentiment.
This, I’m afraid, is what most organisations, and the country, would look like in a United Ireland. And yet for some reason, the most devoted nationalists are very upset by it. They despair of the lack of an anthem, or of the “partitionist” songs. Why?
Part of it, I think, is that for many unity is not so much the objective as victory is the objective. A United Ireland is not so much about walking hand in hand with Unionists into a shared future as it is about raising the tricolour over Stormont and putting Irish language road signs on the Shankill Road, and singing Republican ballads in celebration. And if the Brits don’t like it, they can go home. Actual Unity, by contrast, would mean blending the Unionist and Nationalist identity into one, which defacto means the loss of some nationalist identity.
Last week, at the Ireland Uncensored event in Dublin I talked a little bit about the NGO paradox: The fact that an NGO can never risk its own future by actually succeeding in its stated aim. If you are earning 100,000 per year to lead an organisation to combat homelessness, then the safest thing to do is to make sure that you never succeed. Homelessness pays your wages, at the end of the day. If it goes away, what happens then?
For some nationalists, there’s the same problem: If your whole identity is wrapped up in abolishing the partitionist border on the island and building a new united Ireland, what happens when you succeed? If the fight becomes your identity, then the fight ending is actually a threat to your identity. Every political movement, to one extent or another, suffers this problem. One of the reasons, I’d argue, that we’re having such a silly bunfight in Ireland at the moment over “trans rights” is that a lot of organisations that received a lot of state money to fight for gay and lesbian equality simply needed a new fight. Similarly, a lot of victorious abortion campaigners rapidly shifted emphasis to things like exclusion zones, because equally, they needed and always need a new fight.
For many nationalists – not all, by any measure, but many – the fight with Unionism seems to animate them more than the ultimate end goal of unity does, which means that the very idea of the compromises that are probably necessary to achieve any kind of peaceful and harmonious unity aren’t compromises they are prepared to make.
And that’s the paradox: Because when they scorn the Rugby team, or scorn the replacement of the anthem, or scorn songs like Zombie, they’re openly scorning the very kind of unity that they’d declare with a straight face to be their life-long dream.