While Northern Republicanism remains preoccupied with the "semiotics" of defiance and historical score-settling, the dream of a 32-county state is stalling and the divergences between North and South are widening. If the Good Friday Agreement was meant to be a bridge, why has it been turned into a trench? Mick argues it’s time to trade 19th-century tactics for 21st-century statecraft.
A nationalist friend of mine recently said there’s never good answers to any given issue just good questions. The nationalist cause for political unity has stalled because it has bewildered itself into believing it has to come up with a pristine answer now.
This may explain why Ireland’s Future has stalled in its campaign for unity. There’s absolutely no doubt that many, many people in Northern Ireland feel passionate about the cause, but nor is there any that it’s all gone cold over the last two years.
What the ideological brand of republicanism in the north missed out on was any coherent understanding of the whys and the hows of southern republicanism’s journey from independence and capture by clericalism to a modern secular Republic.
This new secularist character often makes the population there less interested in the North’s “tribal” baggage. A southern voter may look at Northern republicanism and see a mirror image of the very dogmatism they just spent the last 40 years escaping.
Having spent so much of the last 100 years since partition in some sort of rebellion or another against the northern state they have also missed the divergences that must be bridged before creating the momentum to get enough support to trigger a poll.
A report in yesterday’s Irish Times shows just how profound some of disconnects are. Today, a younger renter in the Republic is nearly three times more likely to fear eviction (61%) than their counterpart in the North (23%). It’s not just about HSE v NHS.
Another argument is the idea of a brain drain that sees Protestant youngsters go to campuses in Britain. Yet many Catholics also end up in universities in Britain because it’s a single system which offers them far more choices at higher rated campuses.
There are structural reasons why just 2.7% of northern students go south (as opposed to 23.7% who go to Britain) these days.
- Most high-demand courses in the Republic require points that essentially necessitate four A-levels at A* or A grade, where most northern students only take three;
- Many Irish universities require a qualification in a third language for matriculation (whilst take up modern languages in both GCSE and A levels is dropping in the north);
- The cost of living crisis in many parts of the south is acute and event makes student placements from lower housing cost areas in the Northern Ireland and the UK prohibitive even for higher middle income students.
The Shared Island Initiative is trying to identify and address some of these issues in practical terms, but the enormity of the disparity means that these solutions may be small scale and take a long time to have a substantial effect on current numbers.
These structural blockers actually become cultural over the long haul to the extent that the idea anyone, no matter how visionary, is in any position to describe what a politically united Ireland would look is risible. It is in fact a very long haul job.
The neglect of infrastructure both internally within Northern Ireland and on the North South axis (see the A5 debacle?) and the sectarian theatre we pass off as serious discourse in the north are two sides of the same coin: a failure of serious statecraft.
The election results since the Belfast Agreement show that much of the unity rhetoric that has emerged since has been based on a politically weak premise that it’s not that we must succeed but we win simply because our unionist friends continue to fail.
Many take solace in unionism’s division and overall decline. But Nationalism has benefited neither from a sharp decline in Protestant identity or a marginal growth in Catholic identity. The advantage is currently accruing to those classified as Others.
Irish republicanism is not a weapon to be swung at neighbours; but rather a constitutional principle of inclusion. The wider movement’s core mandate is unity of the people first. Yet, too many today mistake petty provocation for political progress.
Poking unionists in the eye or gloating over the violent history of the Provisional movement isn’t “winning”—it is self-sabotage.
Such “semiotics” are empty victories that only alienate the very people required for a peaceful transition. If the goal is a United Ireland, every act of sectarian tribalism serves only as another flammable log on the funeral pyre of that ambition.
Even if the average citizen feels indifferent toward constitutional change, this approach is injurious to the ambition. You can’t build a “New Ireland” on a foundation of “us versus them”. It is hard work to hold a space for those with different identities.
If northern republicans cannot move beyond historical grievances to embrace a genuine unity of an island people, then the dream of a sovereign, thirty-two-county state will remain exactly that: a dream, burned to ashes by its own supporters.
The Belfast Agreement was designed as a bridge—a mechanism for the slow, painstaking work of reconciling two traditions and building a “New Ireland” through the unity of the people. Instead, northern nationalism has treated it as a trench.
Retreating into the safety of sectarian silos, using the GFA’s structures not to reach across the divide, but to fortify their own tribal territory has been a profound strategic failure, alienating the very people they need to win a border poll: the “Others.”
This growing, non-aligned middle ground is exhausted by the trench warfare of the past. They aren’t interested in the dopamine hit of a taunt or a gloating commemoration; they care about the material disconnects in house building and transport.
In prioritising the “us versus them” narrative, nationalism has burned the bridge it was supposed to cross. You can’t demand a new future while refusing to climb out of the defensive ditches of the past. The “Others”aren’t looking for a side; just a way out.
The truth is that northern nationalism is trying to win a 21st-century referendum with a 20th-century mindset and 19th-century tactics. This relic of land wars and simplistic binaries has too little purchase in the sort of modern society unity might offer.
Selling a “vision” while ignoring reality – a 61% fear of eviction in the South and a Northern student body that looks to Manchester before it looks to Cork – doesn’t work. Taunting neighbours will keep the base happy, but it’s a disaster for unity.
Surprisingly enough the only real momentum for a shared future on the island has been generated in Dublin. The coalition, through its Shared Island Initiative, is actively working toward the constitutional mandate of Article 3: the unity of the people.
This is a hard-headed, material strategy, doing the dull, unglamorous, long-haul work of stitching the island back together.
From funding the A5 and an hourly Dublin-Belfast rail service to investing €44.5m in Derry’s university expansion, they are treating partition as a structural problem to be solved rather than a political drum to be banged in the ear of historic enemies.
By working on tertiary pathways and cross-border research, the coalition is attacking the blockers that keep northerners at a distance and trying to make the island a viable, integrated home for everyone who lives there. And without preconditions.
