An establishment perspective on a United Ireland

Brendan O’Leary is an academic and a serious, well-known commentator on the prospects for a United Ireland. I hope to take the time in a subsequent post to assess his career as an advisor to officials in post-conflict societies, but for the moment I’ll be limiting myself to a few thoughts provoked by his book Making Sense of a United Ireland and his work in the Royal Irish Academy, which publishes the results of statistically representative opinions and attitudes within Irish society regarding the form an hypothesised future state might take.

My perspectives on this are complicated. Ending partition would be the righting of an historical injustice, but one of its less important facets. I am ashamed of how badly citizens of the twenty-six counties have performed in making a state for which people have given and taken life. There has been significant economic and social advancement from the state’s foundation, a creditable record of cultural achievement, neutrality and international co-operation, but this is a record which is being undone by extremes of wealth inequality, a NATO or Atlanticist alignment; further evidence if any were needed of a regnant visionlessness given such affiliations are in their autumn years. A depressing index of the direction of travel can be seen in the results of a 2023 ARINS poll, which notes that lower-earners in the twenty-six counties increasingly align with loyalists in their racist views, a constituency which until a few years, I would have thought was confined to the cultures of imperial or ex-imperial nation states.

My personal preference would be for a socialist republic. By ‘socialist’ I mean an economy subject to democratic control, towards the moderation or abolition of class differences and the universal provision of socialised goods such as education, housing and childcare. It would be militarily neutral and advocate for peace and the rights of oppressed peoples in international bodies. By republic I mean something more symbolic. A secular state, a constitutional commitment to anti-sectarianism and asylum for those fleeing persecution or hardship. I regard this as having more pertinence for a growing (but still relatively small) immigrant population rather than just Protestant or unionist - a finding I found amusing in that poll I mentioned above arose from EU or non-EU participants who asked why there shouldn’t be reserved ministerial or veto powers for them - because I see the state having a leadership role to play in undermining rather than encourage the efforts of unionists who would seek to undermine or sabotage the functioning of the state.

Rita Duffy

Though this is the sole vision for a United Ireland I would be excited by its prospects are remote. The closest thing to this model is something like Cuba during the Cold War, which existed under a highly specific set of circumstances, attested to by the lack of other exemplars. There is also the chance that Castro was history in fatigues and doesn’t come along only once in a century, but I digress; in the advanced industrial capitalist societies of the type that exist on both states on the island, there are no present models for a successful movement for universal rights. No currently existing organisation has a convincing map for doing it in the absence of a landless peasantry, let alone with the combined presence of a petty-bourgeois property owning class and a not entirely separate population of wage earners too internally differentiated to enforce their interests, whether they have any in common or not.

Until recently the momentum seemed to be behind a post-historical demographic drift, which would follow the trajectory of Sinn Féin’s moderation into a responsible party of government and capitalise on the twenty-six county state’s status as a low-regulation / high consumption economy, highly integrated with European and USian markets. We saw this in SF’s unexpectedly high showing in the 2020 General Election, seemingly driven by a generalised frustration with FFG’s failures on resolving the many systemic issues besetting the state, foremost among which is the shortage of available housing. COVID was the first of the number of crises which have set this agenda back by knocking SF into its current pattern of confusion and vacillation, as anti-social elements were catalysed against lockdown and immigrants, encouraged both directly and indirectly by USian tech oligarchs and a partitionist D4-centric media innately hostile to those who seek to transform the nature of the state or state institutions, however modestly. The result is plain to see: climate denialists in office and SF’s disgraceful and self-defeating capitulation to anti-trans and anti-immigrant positions.

Donovan Wylie

I hold two contradictory ideas in my head at the same time here. If SF do decide to get their act together I am confident a broad coalition supportive of a decommodifying and anti-anti-immigration politics is there for them to win - a constituency to which the Catholic nationalist working class in the north would be fundamental. But this is not solely a dynamic of betrayal at the top, but a symptom of contemporary political parties’ relative thinness. Professionalisation and PR-driven politics rooted in participation in state institutions foment an establishment Weltanschauung in the leadership. I agree SF are betraying what I and I imagine a good proportion of their membership would regard as what is valuable in their organisations’ history, but I don’t think they’re capable of the required mobilisation from above, I think there needs to be that projection from below, which tend to only emerge in an extraordinary situation.

My prediction is that inter-capitalist competition and instability arising out of the decline of the US, disorganisation at a European level, the rise of China will shape even the most economistic demands; cost of living crises further stoked by anti-immigrant politics, rising food prices. Decarbonisation opening issues of sourcing from a China which plans to move on Taiwan. This will create opportunities, but as anyone who lives in the six will tell you it can also generate fatalism; debates about Jesus Christ taking the place of concrete actions to fill potholes for example.

That unforeseen circumstances arising out of turbulence and crisis is what shapes geo-political boundaries can be seen firstly in how dated Brexit has become as O’Leary’s most significant macro referent and secondly in the choice of case studies or examples. Germany, Korea, Cyprus, the unity of Syria and Egypt, lack applicability to the present context. However O’Leary can’t be faulted for not seeing the future, or rooting policy discussion in potential ruptures. His work has continued within ARINS and the central lesson he seeks to extract from his account is the importance of preparation, detail and consultation. Well-taken points. But I’m struggling to find the space is for policy and contemporary governance sa lá atá inniu ann. I think we have Facebook brain from below and ‘anything we can do, we can do’ at the top. The problem isn’t state architecture, policy design or messaging but breaking the monopoly a managerial centrism has on this issue.