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Seán Keyes is the finance correspondent for the Currency, a subscription news website.
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I spoke to a Sinn Féin supporter in the years after the Good Friday Belfast agreement, I think it was during one of the interminable negotiations trying to get DUP to participate and have the institutions up and running, and she said one thing about the peace deal that I thought was perceptive, if not very diplomatic.
She said “The Unionists are too thick to realise that they’ve won, and the Shinners are too cute to admit that they lost.”
Mindsets may not have changed for some at least, but I think that calculation may have changed in the years since. First off, there’s peace. In that sense alone, everybody won; that can’t be underestimated. But secondly, the Unionists may have won the war, if you want to call it that, but the nationalists may yet win the peace.
Personally, I don’t think that we will have a border poll in the next couple of years, politics just isn’t aligned for that, even if you have Sinn Féin in power on both sides of the border, which is an open question in itself. But I think it’s certain we’ll have a border poll in the next couple of decades, the pattern of political and demographic movement in the north just makes that inevitable.
The one outside factor, underestimated in my view, that could impact this in an unpredictable way is Scottish independence. The SNP have announced their intention to have a referendum in October next year, along with a sophisticated legal strategy to defeat the London Conservative government’s determination to prevent it. That’s almost a no-lose strategy. If the Tories don’t fold immediately, they just demonstrate every more clearly the case for independence.
If you are against independence, you might point to the opinion polls that show support for independence marginally behind, 49 to 51, much less than the margin for error, but still behind. If you were for independence, you might point out that during the last referendum campaign, in 2014, that’s when support for independence really took off, going from 25 per cent to 45 per cent, making the current 49 per cent a good starting position. If you’re against, you could say that well might be dry now, with opinion polarised. And if you’re for, you could say… Boris Johnson.
If Scottish independence comes off, and that’s a very big if, that would effectively leave northern Unionists with nothing to be united with; Scottish independence would most likely have a bigger impact on the lives of people in Derry and Dublin that it would on the lives of people in Dover and Derby.
But that is a very big if, and we should be aware of it, but we can’t sit around waiting for it to happen. Possibly a more important thing to pay attention to is the mess over Roe v Wade being overturned in the US. If you haven’t kept up, Roe v Wade was a constitutional ruling from the US Supreme Court 50 years ago. Prior to that, abortion was legal in only a few states; the Roe v Wade decision set aside all those laws at the stroke of a pen and said that abortion was protected by the constitutional right to privacy, making it entirely legal in all 50 states, regardless of state law.
Last month, the now conservative-dominated court said no it isn’t protected, so all those old laws that haven’t been repealed, and a bunch of new ones kick in, making abortion entirely illegal, or so restricted as to be impossible, in huge swathes of the US. That’s obviously the opposite direction of travel to what has happened in our own country, and that is meaningful, I think.
In 2016, the Citizens’ Assembly about abortion was set up by Enda Kenny to produce recommendations on the topic. It’s clear what he was doing. He was kicking the issue into the long grass, because he thought it was politically toxic, and it was a convenient way to do nothing about it for a few years, and be able to fob off any questions – sort of what Fianna Fáil did with corruption and tribunals. And it worked. Enda Kenny was out of office by the time of the referendum came.
The Citizens’ Assembly, in case you don’t know, gets 99 ordinary punters, chosen at random, to hear expert presentations on an issue, debate it themselves, and recommend a question that should be put to the wider electorate. Sounds good, sounds democratic. Which is exactly what it was designed to do. To sound good in a government press release, to allow a minister to look into the camera and say that his government has taken action, and not require them to actually do a thing, that was its purpose.
The fact that it actually worked well was pure luck. Pure, dumb, blind luck. I’ll give one small example of how it worked well. One of the issues that was floating around was to allow abortion only in the case of rape and incest. That could sound like a good compromise, it’s the sort of thing that would allow that minister to look into that camera and say ‘Well obviously we have to compromise and I think that the government has struck a fair balance here.’
In a two-minute interview, that is the sort of thing that government ministers can say, and sound convincing. In fact, there are many countries who have laws just like this. But if you take time to sit down and think it through, you can see how stupid this idea would be. What threshold of proof would you use? Would the woman have to have made a complaint of rape to the gardaí? Clearly it wouldn’t be possible to wait until a verdict was handed down, but what if a not-guilty came later? Or what if the pregnancy thought to be the result of rape turned out later to be from consensual sex with the woman’s partner?
And would accused rapists in court be able to mount a defence of saying that the allegation was made only to in order for the woman to access an abortion? Those issues, and dozens more that require thoughtful input, were sorted through by the Citizens’ Assembly, and the result was that a coherent and reasoned proposal was put to the people, and it informed public debate.
The fact that the Citizens’ Assembly seems to have been a very good idea is not down to far-sighted statesmanship, it was purely a political stroke to take an issue off the agenda for a couple of years. But it worked, so let’s not knock it. Lots of good ideas come from dumb luck, someone was trying to do one thing and hit on an idea that worked for something else. Viagra was developed as a drug for heart disease. Microwave ovens were developed by people re-heating frozen hamsters and trying to bring them back to life. Seriously, that’s true.
I think that part of the culture war in the US about abortion can be blamed on the fact that there was no public debate, and pretty much no democratic input into introducing abortion in the first place. Its proponents essentially got a short-cut around Congress by getting the Supreme Court to rule that it was included in the itself-presumed right to privacy. I’m not a legal scholar, so I won’t comment on that, but if there had been public debate and more democratic legitimacy behind that decision, I think they wouldn’t be where they are now.
So back to a border poll in Ireland. In the old days, the north was the ultimate zero-sum game. Anything that was good for themmuns was bad for usins. But the result of the Assembly elections is clear. That’s just not true any more. In particular, the Alliance party vote seems to make it clear that there is a big swathe of vote from the Unionist community – probably young, middle class and liberal – who just don’t care about Unionism. It’s not on their agenda. That’s not to say that they aren’t interested at all, it’s just not the most dominant issue for them in the way it was for basically everyone in the north for the last century.
As I say, I think most of this demographic comes from a Unionist background, but I’m sure there are some from a Nationalist background too, and it’s growing rapidly. The bottom line is that this is the demographic that will swing a border poll.
As I said, I think that border poll is coming, but not coming very soon, although there is a possibility it could be on us before we expect it, because, events, dear boy, events.
The worst possible thing that could happen would be to have that poll Brexit-style, people voting with no clear understand of what they are voting for, leaving one or both sides aggrieved when the effects don’t match what they expected on polling day.
Political reality right now is that Unionists simply won’t discuss a United Ireland. They are doing the political equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and signing ‘La la I’m not listening’. But they aren’t the only show in town. There is now a large middle ground in the north, and when it comes the border poll the side that wins will be the side that listens best to, and takes into account best, the concerns of that middle ground.
And, that will vastly improve the sort of country that we all live in for decades into the future.
