The dream of a united Ireland is on the path to reality
and, Boris Johnson can take some credit for it.
The dream of many that one day Ireland will be one has come closer to reality courtesy of a seemingly bumbling Old Etonian. Who would have thought this would be so?
Growing up in inland Australia, I was fed a diet of Irish history. I grew up hearing about the flight of the Wild Geese, the 1798 Uprising (who fears to speak of ’98), Robert Emmett’s speech from the dock, the Fenian uprising, the 1916 Easter uprising and other disjointed fragments of Irish history. So, with this sort of embryonic feeding, how could I not have an interest in and yes, a pride in my Irish heritage?
In December 2018, I wrote as small piece called: You reap what you sow — the Irish Border and Brexit[1]. At the time, Theresa May was struggling with the poison chalice that was the negotiating of an exit from the European Union. She wasn’t successful and the task eventually fell to a political opportunist called Boris Johnson. He appears to have achieved it although in the end it may be No Deal. How did he succeed where Theresa May failed? The answer is a massive majority in the British Parliament and his own pragmatism. Johnson was able to ignore the machinations of the Democratic Unionist Party and get Parliamentary approval for a simple solution to the tricky question of the Irish border. The Brexit deal with the EU now assumes the Irish Sea is the border rather than the long and winding land border between Northern Ireland and Éire.
This simple solution has removed a grave threat to the fragile peace in Northern Ireland. Before this, there was the real possibility that the musket and the pike would be brought out and polished for renewed battle. Boris Johnson for all of his inadequacies has done what no one else could manage over 600 years. Perhaps the Irish Government should erect a statue to him to replace the one of Nelson on O’Connell Street that was blown up by the IRA in 1966.
The agreement between the UK and the EU stipulates that all goods coming into Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK will be assumed as destined for the EU and will be checked at the port of entry be that Belfast or Derry. This is exactly as it would be if the same goods came in via Dublin or Cork. By having the checks at the ports, the customs boundary is the Irish Sea. The only difference is that if ultimate destination of the goods is Northern Ireland any tariff paid will be refunded, whereas if the goods were headed for Éire the tariff would stand.
This removes the threat of the re-activation of a border control between Northern Ireland and the Republic and ipso facto, the integrity of the Good Friday Agreement is protected. This border, since 1921 a painful reminder of British imperialism, disappeared with the Good Friday Agreement and will stay disappeared. Ireland continues on a path towards full reunification.
The irony of this is that Brexit, an outcome of long suppressed English nationalism, has also resulted in reaffirming the path towards a united Ireland.
Ireland has seen extraordinary changes over the last few decades. I visited Ireland for the first time in 1974 in the middle of “the Troubles”. I entered Northern Ireland from the Republic at the nearest crossing to Omagh. Now, 46 years on I retain a vision of that border crossing. The bus crested a hill and descended towards a small creek and the border. Just beyond was a military checkpoint complete with fortified pillbox and carefully positioned armoured cars and wary heavily armed British soldiers. It evoked a feeling of caution that I was to again experience a little over a year later in walking across the India-Pakistan border. There, it was expected but not on my beloved Emerald Isle. I thought at the time that all that history I had read was indeed real. These feelings were reinforced on arrival in Omagh, where the high street had been bombed the day before. Today, all this is in the past and the pillbox and the soldiers are long gone.
Ireland is no longer among the poorest nations of Europe and with the UK gone, its role as the only remaining English speaking country in the EU, enhances its position well beyond its economic importance.
We mustn’t forget the biggest change — the relationship with the Catholic Church. Since the 1980s, attendance at Sunday Mass has fallen from around 80% to around 30%. The fall in active devotion is even more dramatic amongst the young. What is surprising about this is not the trend but that it took so long to occur. In Australia, this decline in devotion happened much earlier. One thoughtful essay[2] on the subject struck a strong chord with me:
For many older Irish Catholics, regular Mass attendance has little to do with religious faith and more to do with routine, a routine which a few generations ago attracted virtually the entire Irish population to church each Sunday morning.
For a decent-sized minority, Mass has long been as much a social outing as it is anything else, where people (especially those living in the countryside) come together to discuss the local goings on before the service begins, and as soon as it ends.
The sense of being part of a shared community of faith is not felt as strongly during Mass in an Irish church as it is in England for example, where Catholicism is less common but in a much healthier state.
So it was with my father. He always took a seat at the back of the church specifically to see who came and with whom he might discuss, after Mass, the probable price of fat lambs in the coming market sales.
The decline in dominance of the Catholic Church, when it happened, happened explosively. There was no long slow decline for the Irish. With successful referendums on abortion and same-sex marriage behind them, it might be that the Irish are well on the way to creating a secular state perhaps along the lines of France, long a reference point for any Irish republican.
This is a good sign for bringing the North even closer to the rest of Ireland but it is easy to be over-optimistic about the rate of such a change. There are centuries of prejudice and bigotry to strip away. This prejudice and bigotry has, unfortunately, been enshrined in constitutions and other legal structures of the various jurisdictions. Slow and steady might well be both a more realistic and a more effective path.
In my second trip through Ireland more than forty years after the first, the other change that struck me was the rise in prosperity, particularly in the countryside. Every farmhouse looked brand new with new and freshly painted crépi and, I am sure, complete with up-to-the minute granite topped kitchen furnishings. TV shows like Dublin Murders bring me back to the reality that poverty is not yet, nor ever will be, passé in Ireland. Nor is it anywhere else. Nevertheless, the fact that Ireland can have a property boom and bust tells us that social life in Ireland has changed forever. Today, Ireland doesn’t seem that much different to Australia except for distances and the intensity of green. I found from casual observation, conversation and “listening in” that the lives people in Dublin are very similar to what they are in my Melbourne. The way the Irish live their lives has become “standard Western”.
Even the new diaspora is different because they stay in contact with home on a daily if not hourly basis. For my great-grandparents the journey they took in 1863 was into the darkness and contact with “home” died within a generation. Paradoxically there is no one more passionate of things Irish than those of the old diaspora. Whilst the minutia of the day to day Irish living was lost forever, they retained and passed on their love of their birthplace. A love that was heavily laced in nostalgia and without evolutionary mechanisms. We became as the saying goes: “more Irish than the Irish”. It was a pride in things Irish but calcified somewhere in the late 19th Century. In contrast, today’s immigrant Irish retain stronger connection to what is happening at home and this delivers a somewhat more realistic affection for the old country.
There is also the matter of the universal world culture. Now there is no strong and immutable cultural affiliation or reference point anymore as we all listen to the same world music, movies, TV drama, comedy and reality shows and we all spend far too much time watching the same viral Utube videos. We are becoming increasingly homogenised.
If my argument is true (and I acknowledge it has an element of overstatement), there is a great chance that the path sustained by Boris Johnson’s decision will reach the endpoint sooner rather than later. Both increasing prosperity and the declining influence of the Catholic Church are creating a situation that makes it very difficult to rationalise the differentiation of people according to religious identity. Furthermore, the motivation for union is now much stronger than it is for retaining a border that winds some 500 kilometres across gently undulating terrain without any defining geological or cultural divide. Gaelic football, hurling, drinking and telling wild stories are as popular north of the border as they are to the south.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the media classified The Troubles as “sectarian strife”. This, arguably, wasn’t true back then but is certainly not true today.
On my visit to Omagh back in the summer of 1974, I stayed on a dairy farm and was struck by a generational divide you wouldn’t expect. When the parents talked of the Protestant community they talked of people they dealt with daily and it was a compassionate and understanding dialogue. The “other side” were not some abstraction but rather they were real people with names and something to say and to listen to. It was not quite so for their children who were only home for the weekend — some from England and some from Dublin. They saw Northern Ireland’s Protestants in much more abstract terms and were more critical and more rigid, even ideological about the problems.
On the Sunday of my stay we went to Mass. To my great surprise, the congregation divided by gender. The women went to one side of the aisle and the men to the other. Such was the mindset of this community that a practice long gone anywhere else would still exist. Yes, as I said, so much has changed in Ireland. I doubt that they divide by gender anymore at that village church in the middle of nowhere. That is, if it hasn’t closed for lack of patronage.
There is an historic irony in the oscillating fortunes of Northern Ireland’s Presbyterians and Catholics. The 1798 rebellion was a fight in which the two communities were side by side against the British. The lack of representation greatly irked both of them, and they looked to revolutionary France and the United States for inspiration and support. After the uprising failed, an uneasy alliance of the British, the Irish Ascendency and the Catholic Church made sure these two powerful and continuing influencers of Irish politics and history would never again combine in opposition to British rule.
That is, until now. That is, at least, my hope.
References
[1] https://bernie-okane.medium.com/you-reap-what-you-sow-the-irish-plantations-and-brexit-995176117285
[2] James Bradshaw, The Collapse of the Catholic Ireland, 13 Jan 2020,
https://mercatornet.com/the-collapse-of-catholic-ireland/46453/