I recently returned to a house outside Dublin that loomed large in my childhood. Playing with cousins alongside the canal that once kept supplies of Guinness flowing through the Irish midlands; illicit mouthfuls of the grown-ups’ Bewleys fudge; the day we torched the abandoned, rundown stables in the bonfire to end all bonfires. Happy times.
Or that is how it seems decades later. The less misty-eyed reality was no doubt different. For a start there was a lot of rain, and central heating was slow in coming to that particular part of county Kildare. In the 1970s, the Republic of Ireland was also a troubled place. Economically weak, socially repressed and politically fraught, it was very different to the dynamic, open country of today.
Those profound changes were one of the subjects of discussion the other evening when I caught up with some of these cousins. Ireland’s transformation during our lifetime was visible all around — from the opportunities in the growing technology sector to the super-sizing of the villages to which we once cycled to buy sweets, now new satellites of Dublin. It was a poignant backdrop to another, predictable, topic: Brexit.
The sorry mess that is the debate about the UK’s departure from the EU has, as we all know, become bogged down on how to keep Ireland’s land border with the UK open. The issue thwarted Theresa May’s attempts to get parliamentary approval for the withdrawal agreement she struck with Brussels and terminated her premiership. Meanwhile the search for a solution — technological, legalistic or mythological — has yet to be found. Its absence may still blow the next premiership apart.
Brexit’s disruptive force has stimulated another vexed discussion: Irish unification. With the integrity of the UK at stake, what does the future hold for Northern Ireland, and with that the whole of the island of Ireland? Nationalists have used Brexit to call for a “border poll” on unification, a move others see as premature at best.
The view around the table in Kildare was equivocal. Some saw unification as more probable, fuelled by changing demographics and surveys that suggest rising support for a united Ireland. Yet the inherent problems — political, economic and social — are considerable; the upsides questionable. As one relative, until recently one of Dublin’s senior barristers, put it: having spent decades making Ireland a more modern and tolerant place who would want to import the tense, regressive sectarianism that has so disfigured the North? The discussion might have best been left for another day — or decade.
And yet it is increasingly on the agenda, as was made clear when I swapped the fields of Kildare for the coast and the Dalkey Book Fair. “Who’s afraid of a United Ireland?” was the title of one notable session. Judging from the panel in the packed church venue, not many people. What was striking to an outsider was the advanced state of thinking about the prospect of unification, from the need for a regional assembly in the north and representation for what would then be a minority Protestant community, to a flag for the unified entity. And the small matter of money.
Also remarkable was the apparent role reversal of recent decades. Whereas once Northern Ireland was the prosperous, more industrially advanced part of the island, it is now the republic that enjoys economic success. Dublin is being rewired to make way for US tech companies and banks; Belfast is still blighted by “peace walls” separating nationalists and unionist communities.
One should not read too much into one event. There are other views — as was made clear to me after the event by a member of the ruling Fine Gael party and a leading business lobbyist. Talk of unification was mistimed and potentially dangerous, they warned. The 1998 Good Friday peace agreement worked for all parties, rendering the border irrelevant. The focus should be on maintaining that. True and admirable, no doubt. But Brexit threatens to destabilise that settlement, and has unleashed discussions, unwelcome or not.
On one thing, however, all were able to agree: beware referendums. If there is one lesson to take from Brexit it is the pernicious and divisive effects of putting major constitutional questions to a binary vote with a narrow result.
