Workers’ voice missing on Irish unity

Pat Leahy, the political editor of the Irish Times, has commented on the “flurry of statements and events pushing the issue of a possible future united Ireland closer to the centre of political debate in recent weeks.”

There was a keynote speech from Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald who stated that the priority for the EU, under the new Irish presidency, should be a united Ireland. The party is also tabling a private member’s bill in the Dáil to compel the Government to publish a Green Paper on unity and establish a citizens’ assembly.

In the North, the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) held a conference, almost exactly on the 10th anniversary of Brexit, inviting discussion on the future of the island. Party leader Claire Hanna called for the Irish Government “to take the lead in planning for what this future might look like, as they did for the Brexit referendum outcome they didn’t even want.”

Promises

The two main parties in Ireland, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, too are entering the fray. Fine Gael has promised a paper on unification by November and Fianna Fáil has given its support to the Shared Island Fund, providing hundreds of millions of Euros of ring-fenced funding for North-South initiatives.

There have also been a number of academic and popular books on the subject of a united Ireland in recent years. Particularly comprehensive was Brendan O’Leary’s 2022 book Making Sense of a United Ireland.

In it, O’Leary argues for the need for the Irish Government to prepare for unity, and speculates in painstaking detail of the various processes for the referenda north-south and potential institutional forms a united Ireland could take.

Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach Michéal Martin recently speculated that the three strands of the Good Friday Agreement (internal Northern Ireland relations; North-south relations; and East-West relations between Britain and Ireland) “will always be part of whatever happens in the future. There will always be a British dimension, there will always be a North-South dimension.” This heavily implies the existence of Northern Ireland as a devolved entity, with sovereignty transferring from London to Dublin by means of a unity referendum.

O’Leary discusses this as his “model 1”, noting that it would be “constitutionally and institutionally conservative with a small ‘c”, though it may gain greater Unionist consent. He ultimately sides with “model 2”, a more unitary state, asking pointedly: “If the power-sharing institutions cannot function within the Union, why should they work better within a united Ireland?”

Last year, too, saw a book by journalists Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride, For and against a united Ireland.

Across four essays, both authors argued each side of the debate. The book is intended to promote dialogue and discussion and was accompanied by an extensive tour. It is also particularly useful as an assemblage of facts and statistics about the comparative merits of the respective health and education systems on the island and other more practical details which any scheme for unity would be forced to consider.

What lies behind this flurry? Crudely, there are elections in the North and the South in 2027 and it is, of course, an historic staple of Irish electioneering to invoke Irish unity.

Less cynically, though, the 10-year shadow of Brexit and the complications of the North’s position in both the single market and the UK internal market continues to cause stresses and strains.

Even without this, it is unlikely that the highly dysfunctional devolved Northern Ireland would lead to anything more than deadlock and division. That is the rational core of O’Leary’s ultimate rejection of simply transferring sovereignty from Britain to Ireland without tackling the issues underlying the current impasses at Stormont.

The issue with all of these discussions is that they essentially operate at the level of institutional debates about bourgeois governance schemes.

Working-class voice

What is largely absent from the debate is a working-class and labour movement voice, articulating how ending partition, unifying the island and, in the case of the North, rejoining the EU, could form part of a programme for uniting the working class across communities in the fight for a socialist Ireland.

The workers’ movement could transcend the polarisation between a federal state involving the current Six Counties and a unified bourgeois Ireland by discussing seriously how Unionist-minded workers could be accommodated in the context of unity.

Democratic demands around issues of national identity, however, must be married to a transformative social programme, involving the creation of an all-island national health service, mass council house building, increased workers’ rights, and ultimately the social ownership and democratic control of the economy.

The unions have shied away from this debate, semi-understandably worrying about its potential to divide the membership. Closing one’s eyes, however, will not make this question recede.

More likely, the bourgeoisie will continue to frame the debate and any practical preparations for a future referendum on their own terms. Workers need to prepare.