A Debate Breaks Out Over a United Ireland — Just in Time for St. Patrick’s Day

‘For and Against a United Ireland‘By Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBrideUniversity of Notre Dame Press, 177 pagesIs a united Ireland on the Hibernian horizon? That’s the question addressed in a new primer on the subject by two journalists, one from the Republic of Ireland— Dublin’s Fintan O’Toole, of the Irish Times — and one from Northern Ireland, Sam McBride, a stalwart of the Belfast Telegraph. Their book is structured almost Talmudically, each author arguing for and against unity, one of the great political questions looming for Europe.Messrs. O’Toole and McBride have also embarked on an American barnstorming tour to moot the debate. This correspondent heard them at the Irish Arts Center. That talk of unifying the six counties of Northern Ireland with the 26 counties of the Republic is even plausible is due to a provision in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that empowers the Secretary of State of Northern Ireland to call a referendum if he believes that there is a majority for reunification.That accord, brokered by President Clinton, brought to a close some three decades of violence between Irish republicans, largely Catholic, and Unionists, largely Protestant, who swore fealty to London. The bloody three decade feud, known as the Troubles, pitted the Irish Republican army and the British Army and Unionist paramilitary groups and claimed some 3,600 lives.British Army soldiers patrol the Lower Shankill area in front of a mural by the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), the largest Protestant paramilitary group in the district, February 6, 2003 at Belfast, Northern Ireland. Getty ImagesThe Good Friday Agreement left Northern Ireland under the rule of Great Britain — albeit with its own devolved parliament, called Stormont. A simple majority vote — similar to the one that delivered Brexit in 2016 — could unite the entire island under Dublin’s domain. At a meeting last week between britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and the president of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, the Irishwoman impressed on the premier the “clear need to prepare for the reunification of Ireland.”Call it the one state solution. An early Plantagenet king, Henry II, first claimed sovereignty over Ireland in 1171, but fuller control was secured by Tudor kings and then the 17th century conquest, still recalled in Ireland with a shudder, of Oliver Cromwell. The 1801 Act of Union dissolved the Irish Parliament and brought direct rule by London. Those chapters are written in blood, a colonial project — and a Famine — at close quarters.Partition came in 1921, following a long effort called “Home Rule,” which sought to make Ireland self-governing within the English Empire. The Easter Rising of 1916, though, was an armed insurrection aimed at establishing an independent Irish republic. While the rebellion was an immediate failure, it and its leaders have since passed into legend. William Butler Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916” reckons that on that day “a terrible beauty is born.” Partition was hardly an unusual strategy to adopt as the British Empire unwound and diversity gave rise to division between Muslims and Hindus in British India, Jews and Muslims in Mandatory Palestine, at Cyprus, and elsewhere. It requires no gainsaying of Ireland’s history of violence to reckon that erasing partition in the country is feasible only because of commonalities shared by the inhabitants throughout the island.Messrs. O’Toole and McBride write that around the question of a united Ireland hover the “ghosts of history, religion, family, and community.” In 1921 the vice president of Sinn Féin, Father Michael O’Flanagan, declared that the “boundaries of Ireland were marked by the finger of Almighty God when He surrounded it with the circling sea.” Sinn Féin’s founder, Arthur Griffith, declared that the “frontier of Ireland has been fixed by nature.”The motto of Sinn Féin is “Tiocfaidh ár lá,” or “our day will come,” a reference to the dream of unification. As Messrs. O’Toole and McBride tally, though, there are good reasons to be skeptical of a united Ireland. United Ireland, once a great industrial powerhouse — Belfast built the RMS Titanic — has now fallen on hard times and receives a subsidy of some 14 billion pounds from London. That tab would have to be picked up by Dublin.Voters in the South, who have consistently expressed a desire for unity in the abstract, might sour on the notion if they have to pay the price for a United Ireland in the form of higher taxes. At the same time Northerners are likely to be loath to give up the ministrations of the National Health Service and the BBC for free. Then there is education; in the developed world only Israel spends more time teaching religion than the Republic of Ireland.Mr. O’Toole writes that “to adapt T.S. Eliot, Irish idealism cannot bear too much reality.” On the other hand Mr. McBride, a child of the Troubles, writes that “much of what our forefathers were fighting for and against has gone,” meaning that the ancient divisions of faith and culture have given way to an island that is, largely courteous of American multinationals, not only peaceful but affluent. Is that dream worth risking for one of unity?

A Debate Breaks Out Over a United Ireland — Just in Time for St. Patrick’s Day

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