The meaning of the Good Friday Agreement. And what comes next.

Nationalists and unionists should rethink the meaning of Irish unity

For most of the time between partition in 1921 and the Good Friday agreement in 1998 Ireland’s nationalists and unionists made opposing errors about Irish unity. 

Nationalists (and armed republicans) cast Britain as the sole villain. If only the colonial power could be persuaded (or coerced) into going home, Northern Ireland’s unionists would concede and the border would fall. For their part, even as they pledged eternal fealty to the United Kingdom, the province’s unionists always feared they would be betrayed by the Brits at Westminster. The only way to hold on to power was to monopolise it at Stormont. 

The peace deal brokered by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern was possible because enough unionists and republicans came to recognise these twin misjudgements. The Provisional IRA accepted that the protestant, overwhelmingly unionist, majority in the six counties was the main obstacle to a united Ireland. And unionists acknowledged they could not safeguard their British identity by denying civil and political rights to the Catholic, most nationalist, minority.

The authors of the treaty that ended the Anglo-Irish war had seen partition as a temporary expedient. The expectation of David Lloyd George’s government was that political and economic gravity would over time deliver a united Ireland, albeit one still connected to the empire. To that end the 1921 Partition Act provided for an all-island Council of Ireland sitting above independent parliaments in Dublin and Belfast. For IRA leader Michael Collins the following year’s Anglo-Irish treaty bestowed the Irish Free State with freedom to achieve eventually  “the ultimate freedom”

The snag was that for a long time partition seemed to work. For all that republican rejectionists denounced the treaty, the absence of the unionists allowed the fledgling Irish state to pursue Eamon de Valera’s ruinous dream of a Gaelic, rural and rigorously Catholic society. Unity remained a rhetorical goal, but then all good Catholics want to go to heaven. Only not quite yet.

For its part,  the British government, tortured for decades by the Irish question, wanted above all else a quiet life. It stood by as Northern Ireland’s unionists scuttled the proposed Council of Ireland and built, in leader James Craig’s boast, a protestant parliament and protestant state.

Collins declared in 1922 that unionists could never be coerced into a united Ireland. They would have to be persuaded. It was another 50 years, however, before enlightened politicians such as the northern nationalist John Hume and the Irish prime minister Garret Fitzgerald restored the idea of consent to the heart of nationalism. In 1985 it was embedded in the Anglo-Irish agreement concluded by Fitzgerald with Margaret Thatcher - the political stepping stone to the 1998 peace. 

In the Good Friday accord the Provisional IRA added its signature, albeit grudgingly, to the consent principle. After nearly 30 years of killing, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness realised that the British could not be bombed out of Northern Ireland. In return, they received the assurance Britain had no “selfish”  interest in holding on to the province. The Provisionals, you might say,  accepted the logic that had persuaded Collins to settle with Lloyd George.

The considerable contribution to peace made by David Trimble, then leader of the Ulster Unionist party, came in his reading of the rites over Craig’s protestant ascendancy. Trimble obliged unionism, or enough of it, to admit it could not deny nationalism a political voice. If Republicans signed up to consent - and the Dublin government surrendered its constitutional claim to the six counties - unionists had to recognise the legitimacy of the nationalists’ aspiration for unity. 

The modern choice facing unionism, Trimble understood, was one between power sharing with nationalists in a set of new institutions at Stormont or accepting that the province would be ruled from London in close collaboration with Dublin. A decade later the same political awakening saw Ian Paisley, the hitherto fiercely sectarian leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, govern in partnership with the IRA’s McGuinness.

Twenty five years later the Good Friday institutions are in temporary abeyance because of a DUP boycott. The party’s present leader Jeffrey Donaldson says that the special post-Brexit trading arrangements for Northern Ireland needed to keep an open border with the south will push the north closer to the Republic and pull it away from Britain. He made the same “slippery” slope argument when he broke with Trimble to oppose the Good Friday accord. Now, as then, he does not have an alternative.

Unionism’s present discomfort is understandable. Demography has amplified the impact of Brexit. Catholics now outnumber Protestants in the province. In the Republic a modern, prosperous state has replaced the backward theocracy that seemed calculated to repel any rapprochement with the protestant north. 

The demographic shift does not of itself point to a nationalist majority in a referendum. Among many of the province’s young people secularism has replaced religious allegiance. And it cannot anyway be presumed that all Catholics want to dismantle the border. That said, the idea of a united Ireland now has a certain shape. 

The mistake - for unionists and nationalists alike - would be to continue to think in terms of a binary choice between a Northern Ireland forever under British rule or one fully absorbed by the south. In truth both look implausible. 

The British will not want to stay forever, but, even if it could afford the financial subsidies (Stormont receives £12billion a year from the London Exchequer), the Irish Republic could not simply swallow whole a state with approaching a million of its citizens accustomed to pledging allegiance to the United Kingdom.  

Nationalists and unionists should begin to rethink the meaning of unity. What’s needed is a little imagination and a glance at history. There are alternatives to the unitary state. A confederal Ireland, for example, might allow unionists to hold on to their Britishness while also acknowledging, as many do, an Irish identity. The process could start with, well, another look at Lloyd George’s Council of Ireland.