Social Items

TPQ
Showing posts with label Unionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unionism. Show all posts
Bleakley✍ looks at unionist parties attitudes to power-sharing after Sunningdale.

There is no way that we can have power sharing with republicans, who are subversives because they don't accept the existence of the state... There's nothing wrong with majority rule, Catholics have nothing to fear from Protestantism because Protestantism means liberty for everyone. - Fermanagh DUP councillor, 1981

The fall of the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974 marked the end of power-sharing government in Northern Ireland. The concept would not be successfully revived until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Since then it has firmly embedded itself as the only viable governing structure for the Six Counties despite virtually routine collapses and walkouts.

The Sunningdale Agreement emerged from the British government’s desire after the plug was pulled on the unionist regime at Stormont to stabilise the state by creating buy-in from the Catholic minority and undercutting support for the IRA. This meant guaranteeing a place in a new devolved administration for the SDLP, by then the largest nationalist party,

Today, Sunningdale is seen wistfully as the lost opportunity for a power-sharing resolution to the Northern Ireland conflict. SDLP deputy leader Séamus Mallon famously described the 1998 Agreement as 'Sunningdale for slow learners'. Many have noted the irony of Sinn Féin, once dedicated to overthrowing the state, leading an arrangement similar to Sunningdale.

What’s rarely acknowledged is unionist attitudes to power-sharing in the long interval between the first failed power-sharing experiment and the more durable arrangement established in 1998. Indeed, this omission is especially odd in that it was unionists who brought down Sunningdale in 1974.

Sunningdale

Infamously it was the Council of Ireland part of the Sunningdale package which helped galvanise ordinary unionists, but total opposition to power-sharing with nationalists was an integral part of anti-Sunningdale unionism. The bitter battle in late 1973 within the Official Unionist Party (OUP) between leader Brian Faulkner and malcontents led by Harry West was fought explicitly over power-sharing with nationalists.

Faulkner split from the OUP in early 1974 but his pro power-sharing Unionist Party of Northern Ireland saw little electoral success and by 1981 had formally dissolved. From the outside Sunningdale was assailed by the DUP and Bill Craig’s Vanguard, who joined with the OUP (now led by West) to oppose power-sharing under the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) umbrella.

Post-Sunningdale the British government attempted to chart a new political settlement by announcing elections to a constitutional convention to be held in May 1975. Anti power-sharing candidates under the umbrella of the UUUC won a majority of seats.

Surprisingly, not long after the Convention began Craig reached out to the SDLP to probe the possibility of a “voluntary coalition” but his maverick move led to a bitter split in Vanguard and he was left nearly totally isolated. The remnants of Craig’s Vanguard merged into the OUP in 1978 and the following year Craig lost his East Belfast Westminster seat to the DUP’s Peter Robinson. Robinson, backed by the UDA, anchored his campaign on being the only candidate who had always totally rejected power-sharing with nationalists.

The Constitutional Convention Report, issued in November 1975, made it clear that power-sharing, not cross-border institutions, was the primary unionist objection to Sunningdale. The Report’s conclusion would be cited by both the OUP and DUP for years to come:

Accordingly this Convention concludes... That no country ought to be forced to have in its Cabinet any person whose political philosophy and attitudes have revealed his opposition to the very existence of that State.

This line was significant in that it excluded any nationalist politician, no matter how moderate, from a cabinet role in devolved government in Northern Ireland.

In Spring 1976 a final attempt was made by the British to reach a political agreement. In February, a meeting between the UUUC and SDLP lasted only an hour. The unionist delegation would not permit the SDLP in a cabinet under any circumstances. A further meeting in March ended in acrimony as the unionists called for the return to a unionist-dominated Stormont government.

Three days later, Merlyn Rees, then Secretary of State, announced the Convention was over.

Despair

Merlyn Rees was replaced as Secretary of State in August 1976 by Roy Mason, a former coalminer from Yorkshire who had no time for political initiatives and much preferred to get stuck into the IRA. The late 1970s under Direct Rule was a time of growing confidence for unionism with the IRA under pressure, the threat of British withdrawal fading and power-sharing with nationalists a dead issue. The shock and humiliation of the loss of Stormont in 1972 had also faded somewhat and structural Protestant supremacy in Northern Ireland was more or less intact in Northern Ireland under British Direct Rule.

In 1980 Secretary of State Humphrey Atkins attempted to restart talks between Northern Ireland’s political parties. The OUP didn’t even show up, and it quickly became clear that the DUP had no interest in sharing power with the SDLP.

Atkins was replaced by Tory “wet” Jim Prior who immediately set about trying to coax a political initiative to life. In 1982 Prior introduced his “rolling devolution” plan where powers would gradually be granted to to an executive, contingent on support from both unionists and nationalists.

The OUP were reticent, restrained by divisions between devolutionists and integrationists. Many within the OUP still instinctively supported a return to majority rule at Stormont but spearheaded by Enoch Powell integrationist (i.e. integrating with Britain) thought grew more influential especially when Jim Molyneaux became leader in 1979.

The party seemed to have decided that the best way to fend off the DUP threat was to out-Paisley the big man himself. An OUP devolutionist, Edgar Graham, said Unionists were opposed to power-sharing or any “Irish dimension”. Furthermore, beyond just principle, the SDLP couldn’t be trusted with cabinet responsibility.(1)

The OUP’s manifesto for the October Assembly election was a staid retreading of unionist orthodoxy. The tagline was “Into the Future In True Tradition” and the cover had a photo of Jim Molyneaux framed as the successor to Lord Brookeborough and James Craig:

...we have been equally consistent in refusing to enter into power-sharing with republicans and any Irish Dimension designed to facilitate Irish unification or the annexation of this part of the United Kingdom by the Irish Republic. And once again we will oppose any attempt to foist such options on the Ulster people.

The DUP’s manifesto stressed the party’s consistency in opposing power-sharing; “there will be no power-sharing nor Irish Dimension if the Assembly is controlled by those resolved to oppose these twin evils".

That 1982 election is now mostly remembered as the first electoral breakthrough for Provisional Sinn Féin as a party. The party’s manifesto urged voters to “Smash Stormont” and was full of withering attacks on the SDLP, dismissed power-sharing as impossible and claimed loyalists had rejected all attempts to achieve reform, justice, or a united Ireland, and since 1912 had resorted to force.[2] Election literature frequently referenced the previous year’s republican hunger strikers.

The SDLP opted to partake in the election but, against the instincts of some representatives, boycott the Assembly. Having participated in a slew of political ventures in the preceding decade and now unionists were again stating their refusal to share power, the SDLP felt it would be a waste of time.

The SDLP boycott was buttressed when following the October election OUP deputy leader Harold McCusker had his SDLP counterpart Seamus Mallon stripped of his Assembly seat as a result of legal proceedings over dual membership of the Irish Senate. Mallon described his disqualification as the “symbolic disbarment” of the SDLP from political life in Northern Ireland.

The months following the election were the SDLP’s lowest point so far. The unionist position was unassailable and the British government seemingly disinterested in the fate of constitutional nationalism. The SDLP began to seriously consider a kamikaze move where they would resign from all their Assembly seats, and the possibility of Sinn Féin taking them in by-elections didn’t seem to phase them.

At the end of the year the unionist Belfast Telegraph published an editorial pleading with Catholics “even in their black despair” not to abandon “constitutional nationalism in favour of militant republicanism”.[3]

No Surrender

Meanwhile, the tone of the new Assembly was set in a controversy where Harold McCusker was alleged to have rejected Alliance’s John Cushnahan as chairman of the education committee because he was a Catholic.[4] John Hume commented:

The revelation that the Official Unionist Party through its allegedly most liberal spokesman will not have a Catholic, even one who accepts the Union, as the powerless chairman of a powerless education committee, of the powerless assembly, comes as no surprise to the SDLP.

In May the Alliance Party put forward an amendment conditioning a devolved government on power-sharing between unionists and nationalists; the OUP and DUP united to vote it down. Appearing before the assembly the following month Prior insisted that any proposal for devolution must have substantial support from both sides of the community. In response, DUP Chief Whip Jim Allister gave a robust speech:

if the choice is between having a power sharing government with the SDLP and republicans and no government, then we have no difficulty in saying we would rather have no internal government. [5]

That following month opening an Orange Arch in Ballymena, Ian Paisley:

We must say to the Westminster Parliament, and to Jim Prior, that we will not tolerate John Hume and the SDLP governing us or telling us how to be governed.[6]

In March 1984 a European Parliament committee published the Haagerup Report on Northern Ireland. Alliance embraced the report, which favoured power-sharing, while unionists bitterly attacked its authors. Speaking shortly before its publication to an American audience, Alliance leader Oliver Napier said:

Unionist leaders... should also recognise that continued intransigence serves only to further increase alienation of the traditional minority in Northern Ireland.
"Power-sharing within Northern Ireland is not a proposal which would involve a sacrifice of principle on their part. The refusal to contemplate any solution on these lines has been one of the major factors which has resulted in the growth of Provisional Sinn Fein. [7]

But the two largest unionist parties were unbending. In April the OUP published its policy document on devolution, “The Way Forward”. The distaste for devolution amongst some senior members was evident. The report opened by quoting the crucial anti-power sharing line from the 1975 Convention report, before then re-envisioning Stormont as a glorified county council without a cabinet or legislative powers. A prominent young member of the OUP, Jeffrey Donaldson, came out in support of the blueprint describing it as “positive, realistic and constructive.”[8]

In September the DUP released their devolution policy document which similarly paraphrased the 1975 Convention report conclusion and made the novel argument that as anti power-sharing loyalists would be excluded from power-sharing, power-sharing could never be truly inclusive and was thus unworkable.

Meanwhile, the SDLP had ignored the Assembly and were instead investing their energies into Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald’s New Ireland Forum. FitzGerald was alarmed at the SDLP’s slump following the Assembly election and (more urgently for him) Sinn Féin’s rise. Action needed to be taken to stabilise the SDLP.

Intensified dialogue between the British and Irish governments aiming to resolve the Northern Ireland problem unnerved unionists but a blunt public rejection of the findings of the report in late 1984 by Margaret Thatcher reassured them. By October 1985 it was evident that something was afoot and with a whiff of desperation Paisley and Molyneaux sent a letter to the Prime Minister signalling their readiness to talk about any “reasonable” proposal for a role for nationalists at Stormont short of actual minister jobs in a cabinet, meaning no power-sharing.

All changed, changed utterly

The Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed in November 1985 and for the first time institutionalised a consultative role for the Irish government in the internal affairs of Northern Ireland. The shock and anger of the unionist community was beyond even Thatcher’s own predictions.

For the first time since Stormont fell the British government had defied unionists and continued to do so by ignoring months of protests (and violence). Every previous political initiative in Ireland of the past century unionists had exercised a veto over. No more.

Kenneth Bloomfield, head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, commented privately:

Unionists are now beginning to realise that the choice facing them is whether to preserve the union or preserve their ascendancy.

Senior members of the DUP, like Peter Robinson and Jim Allister, began to float the idea of unilaterally declaring Northern Ireland independent from the United Kingdom, following the example of Rhodesia. This thinking coincided with a spate of DUP militancy; invading the Monaghan town of Clontribret and establishing a new paramilitary grouping, Ulster Resistance.

However, by 1987 with the Anglo-Irish Agreement firmly in place, for the first time since Sunningdale there was creeping evidence of some unionist politicians, gingerly, starting to broach the power-sharing taboo.

In January the UDA’s political wing under John McMichael published the policy document “Common Sense” which called for a power-sharing administration with nationalists. It had been drafted with oversight from McMicahel’s unionist law lecturer ally David Trimble.

In July a joint OUP-DUP Taskforce established to consider alternatives to the Anglo-Irish Agreement published its findings. The reported, entitled an “An End to Drift” called for dialogue with Thatcher’s government and unionist leaders should indicate that “no matter” (the phrase was printed in bolt type) should be excluded from the agenda, a concession that opened up the possibility of power-sharing with nationalists and some sort of Irish dimension.

“An End to Drift” was highly controversial, with both unionist leaders distancing themselves from its contents. Later that month the Belfast Young Unionists put out a letter signed by their chairman Ian Paisley Jr. insisting that “both leaders have made it quite clear that power sharing is not an option.” [9] Paisley Sr. told gathered Independent Orangemen at Portlgenone that his party would never agree to power-sharing with the SDLP and that the likes of Seamus Mallon and John Hume in government in Northern Ireland was unacceptable.[10]

Yet, Peter Robinson continued to send signals about his willingness to talk about power-sharing and an Irish dimension through 1988. In October all of Northern Ireland’s major political parties secretly met at Duisburg in Germany. Sinn Féin were unofficially represented by priest Alec Reid.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement had catalysed a remarkable thawing in unionist politics. Before November 1985 the position of every unionist party and politician (discounting Alliance) had been total rejection of power-sharing with nationalists of any stripe. Merely eighteen months later prominent unionist figures were now doing a historic volte face.

Acceptance

At the beginning of 1990 yet another Secretary of State, Peter Brooke, made yet another attempt to kickstart a talks process. OUP MP John Taylor, tipped as the next OUP leader, was profiled by a Dublin newspaper where he declared himself amenable to power-sharing and an Irish dimension, even praising then Taoiseach Charles Haughey, a long-time unionist bogeyman.[11]

The maverick nature of this offer was highlighted when days earlier Jim Molyneaux received a standing ovation at an OUP Association meeting for totally repudiating any power-sharing administration.

The new political realities hadn’t fully filtered down to the grass roots; former senior SDLP man Paddy O’Hanlon privately told the Irish government that he believed a “sea change in unionist psychology” would take another decade at least. It would become evident in the ensuing talks that Molyneaux personally had little interest in a power-sharing devolved government.

The Brooke Talks followed in 1991 and 1992 and although unsuccessful broke new ground; nearly all major unionist and nationalist parties for the first time (officially) shared a room and unionists (including the DUP) talked to Dublin. No longer were unionist parties calling for the Anglo-Irish Agreement to be abolished ahead of talks, only suspended. The presence of the Irish government at talks was also accepted.

The missing piece was Sinn Féin, still isolated by IRA violence. This was resolved by the IRA declaring a ceasefire in 1994.

Eventually following a second IRA ceasefire the Good Friday Agreement emerged in 1998 helmed by David Trimble’s OUP and the SDLP. The content of the deal was broadly familiar; power-sharing between unionists and nationalists with an Irish dimension.

Turnabout

David Trimble came under siege from within and without. Externally, the DUP and the smaller UKUP splinter party. Internally, Trimble’s own MPs turned against the deal, including hardliner Willie Ross, vocally opposed to power-sharing. They were joined by younger figures like Jeffrey Donaldson and young hardliners nicknamed the “Baby Barristers”.

Critics of the Agreement focused on emotive issues like Sinn Féin’s inclusion and the release of paramilitary prisoners but power-sharing with nationalists wasn’t off the radar. Ian Paisley said during the referendum campaign:

[I am] opposed to power-sharing with nationalists because nationalists are only power-sharing to destroy Northern Ireland.

Peter Weir, a high-profile “Baby Barrister” who later defected to the DUP defended his opposition to the Agreement in a Twitter exchange with John Taylor in 2019:

Power sharing John was never the problem it was the early release of terrorists, the lack of certainty on decommissioning and the vulnerable position it placed the RUC in.

It’s hard to square his declaration that power-sharing was “never the problem” with an editorial written by Weir for the journal of the Ulster Young Unionist Council in 1993 following the council elections:

We in the Ulster Unionist Party are fundamentally opposed to "power-sharing", in large part, because it is a complete contradiction of democracy... we must remember that to share power with Nationalists is an abrogation of our Unionist and democratic principles.
We must never forget that these people represent everything that we are are opposed to. If they held power in Northern Ireland they would destroy everything we believe in, and everything that we stand for. They are our enemies, and we simply cannot give them positions or platforms of power and influence.[12]

In that same magazine a future unionist leader and First Minister, Arlene Kelly, set out her opposition to power-sharing with the SDLP:

It should not be forgotten that the SDLP is a nationalist party, which wishes to see the demise of the state of Northern Ireland. They have no desire to be full citizens of the United Kingdom, and should therefore be denied the perks of this citizenship. They cannot have their cake and eat it, although they invariably do, often with the help of so-called unionists.[12]

It’s certainly possible for someone to undergo a political transformation. Four, five years is not a trivial length of time especially when you’re young. But it’s curious that two unionist figures who were railing against power-sharing with the SDLP in the early 1990s who then went on to oppose a power-sharing deal with the SDLP that same decade, would later assert that power-sharing was a non-factor in their opposition.

The ultimate irony of course is that those who had spent the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s professing a principled stand against power-sharing with even the moderate SDLP would then jump into power-sharing with political wing of the Provisional IRA. What was it all for?

Slow learners indeed.

References:

[1] Belfast Telegraph, 17 February 1982.

[2] Derry Journal, 08 October 1982.

[3] Belfast Telegraph, 31 December 1982.

[4] Belfast Telegraph, 2 December 1982.

[5] Belfast Newsletter, 30 June 1983.

[6] Ballymena Observer, 7 July 1983.

[7] Belfast Newsletter, 17 March 1983.

[8] Belfast Newsletter, 1 May 1984)

[9] Belfast Newsletter, 27 July 1987.

[10] Belfast Newsletter, 13 August 1987.

[11] Irish Independent, 13 February 1990.

[12] Ulster Review, Issue 11.

⏩Bleakley is currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history.

Unionism And Powersharing

Dr John Coulter ✍ Unionist MPs, MLAs and councillors should grasp the nettle of any speaking rights in the Dail and give themselves a platform of influence on the island Protestants have not enjoyed since the 17th century Glorious Revolution.

Nothing would give me greater pleasure as a Unionist than to address any committee of the Leinster House parliament about why Southern Ireland needs to negotiate a new Treaty to bring the 26 Counties into a closer relationship with the UK through a Union of the British Isles.

Sinn Fein election victories in Assembly and council elections in Northern Ireland have prompted forums to emerge talking about what a supposed new Ireland or Irish Unity might look at.

Again, I have no difficulty as a confident Unionist in speaking at such forums and outlining my own ideology of Revolutionary Unionism, which encourages my fellow Unionists to develop an all-island identity.

Just as republicans have been having debates on their aspirations of Irish Unity, so too, as a Revolutionary Unionist, I want to see a debate on my aspiration of Southern Ireland having this formalised much closer bond with the UK.

Unionists in the past have focused so much on what Dail speaking rights would give republicans, that they have never paused to consider the tremendous propaganda springboard any such concession by Dublin has given the unionist family.

In fact, unionists should unite and go a step further and copy the Irish government’s initiative of 1985 when it established the Maryfield Secretariat as a result of that year’s Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Unionism should establish either a Unionist Embassy or Unionist Secretariat in the heart of Leinster House.

Such a political tactic would throw Sinn Fein demands for Dail speaking rights and Seanad voting reform into a tizzy by giving the perception that Unionism was a truly all-island organisation.

The Ulster Unionist Council should mark the 110th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 by using 2024 to launch a Southern Unionist Council to reflect the concerns of the Southern Protestant population, and especially the views of the Southern-based Loyal Orders in border counties such as Donegal, Monaghan, Cavan and Leitrim.

In the 1920s, there was a significant voice within Southern Unionist opinion that Carson and Craig should have used the fledgling Northern state as a haven for political, financial and religious support for the minority Southern Protestants.

Southern Protestants then faced the physical threat from both the pro-Treaty Free State Army and the anti-Treaty IRA.

Many Southern Protestant families watched in horror as the Ulster Unionist Council openly retreated into the six counties and organisationally turned its back on the all-Ireland organisation of an Irish Unionist Party.

Southern Protestants were then left with two options – they either moved out or got involved largely with Fine Gael. In the border counties of Donegal, Cavan, Monaghan and Leitrim, the Orange Order specifically became the rallying point for Protestant political activity, whilst further south, the Church of Ireland became the voice for liberal Protestant opinion.

This development of a liberal – even ecumenical – Protestant theological ethos in the South should not be misinterpreted as Southern Protestantism turning its back on the evangelical principles of the Reformed Protestant Faith.

Rather, it was a pragmatic move by Southern Protestants who had come to terms with the harsh reality – especially in the west of Ireland – that if they wanted to survive in a Catholic-dominated state, they had to ‘keep their heads down politically’.

Tactically, they knew they could not rely on their Northern Protestant counterparts for support. They were on their own as a minority and the only way to gain effective and meaningful political representation was to involve themselves with the Southern political parties – not establish potentially provocative Unionist organisations.

This feeling of betrayal was not only shared by many in the Southern Protestant community, but by a significant section of the ultra-Right Carsonite Unionist lobby in the new Northern Ireland.

Whilst Craig was the guiding political hand in the new state, Carson had been mobilising messiah who had conceived the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912 and armed it through the Larne gun-running escapades. Hardline Carsonites had wanted a nine-county geographical Ulster as the Northern state whereby the three Southern counties with Catholic majorities would be ethnically cleansed and used as a buffer zone with the new Free State.

The Carsonites held the view the Free State’s provisional government – under the direction of republican hero Michael Collins – had, during the early 1920s, supported IRA attacks on the North, hoping to force it into a union with the South. Indeed, many Carsonites held the opinion that Collins – once he had dispensed militarily with the anti-Treaty forces in the Irish Civil War – planned a full-scale invasion of Northern Ireland.

Whilst this plan effectively died with Collins’ assassination by anti-Treaty rebels in 1922, these same hardline Carsonites wanted to take advantage of the conflict in the South during the civil war and open up a second front by invading the Free State itself.

It is doubtful whether Carson himself would have approved such a venture, although it became a military Holy Grail amongst many of his more hardline Right-wing supporters. Their plan was to establish a Protestant-controlled state comprising around 18 of Ireland’s 32 counties.

However, both invasion plans were effectively mothballed as the two fledging states concentrated on political stability in the late 1920s rather than further bloodshed and territorial expansion.

This expansionist ethos did not die with Carson in 1935. Half a century later following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Unionist political backlash saw a series of fringe and mainstream organisations founded to combat Dublin’s role in Northern affairs.

In 1986, one such Right-wing loyalist group, the Ulster Movement for Self-Determination (MSD), advocated an independent Ulster. MSD’s emblem was a nine-county Ulster and part of its philosophy was that an independent Northern Ireland would annex the three remaining Ulster counties from the Republic.

Whilst MSD was a political movement with no paramilitary connections, it is difficult to imagine how its aims could become a reality without sparking another civil war. Not surprisingly, by the loyalist ceasefires of 1994, MSD was largely defunct.

The ‘Northern say in Southern affairs’ debate was realistically reopened two decades ago in 2003 by Sinn Fein when it launched a strategy document, The Ireland of the Future - National Representation.

A key plank was Northern representation in the Oireachtas, which if it became reality, would further strengthen Sinn Fein's claim to be a truly all-Ireland party and would increasingly isolate the moderate SDLP as a relevant voice of nationalism on the island.

At first reading, the Sinn Fein proposals would also appear to be ‘a red flag to a bull’ to Northern Unionists. Republicans would be hoping that Unionists would misread their demands as another political paving stone on the path to joint authority in the North and ultimately a united Ireland.

However, Unionists should avoid making the same mistake as they did in 1985. They completely missed the point that the 1985 Agreement gave them a say in the running of Southern affairs, too.

In the aftermath of the silver jubilee of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, there needs to be an increasing mood within Unionism that Northern Protestants should ‘return the serve’ on the cross-border debate and start interfering, commenting on and even trying to influence the internal affairs of the Republic.

Numerous Unionists already travel south to speak at various functions - a strategy, which in the 1980s could have led to people being disciplined by the Unionist parties.

However, the new ‘look South’ tactic should not be misinterpreted as Northern Unionism warmly embracing the Republic or facing up to any prospect of future Irish Unity, but rather a desire by Protestants to copy Sinn Fein and open a ‘second front’ politically in the current limping along peace process.

The real danger is that if the peace process stalled or even collapsed, and if constitutional unionism does not seize the initiative and organise in the South, loyalist extremism may steal that mantle from unionism and start exploding bombs in the Republic. 2024 witnesses the 50th anniversary of the horrific Dublin and Monaghan bomb massacres.

The price for total failure in the peace process will be the return of the mainstream paramilitaries to the fore. The practical danger is that there may still be those within modern loyalism who could be preparing an Omagh or an Enniskillen for a Southern location.

That thinking must always be sidelined. Terrorist violence should never be an option, or alternative no matter what the political stalemate.

Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
Listen to commentator Dr John Coulter’s programme, Call In Coulter, every Saturday morning around 10.15 am on Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. Listen online. 

Unionism Must Seize Dail Gauntlet

Mike Burke 🔖 reviews an edited collection of Unionist writing.


Introduction

The Idea of the Union is an edited collection of 25 essays by leading unionist commentators and academics that aims to make a moderate and reasonable case for the union. It fails spectacularly. Large parts of the book are an embarrassment, which goes well beyond the ill-considered decision to have Baroness Hoey write the book’s foreword. Hoey’s petty and sectarian comments about nationalist influence that caused so much controversy after the book’s publication are, unfortunately, indicative of the views of many of the book’s contributors.[1]

The 2021 edition of the book, at 422 pages, is much weightier than the 139 pages of the 1995 edition. It warrants a considered review. Evaluating an edited book is always difficult because the various authors bring diverse interests and approaches to the task at hand. This diversity is evident in The Idea of the Union, even allowing that almost all the contributors write from a vigorously unionist point of view. The chapters cover different periods, from partition to the protocol. They use disparate conceptual frameworks including legal, constitutional, cultural, geopolitical, economic and historical. But commonalities do emerge from all this variety. I examine several conspicuous themes that appear in multiple chapters, and show how select authors contribute to the development of each theme.

The Idea of the Union counsels a retreat to a sinister past, takes a derisive view of nationalists and republicans, supports a multifaceted regime of unionist supremacy, demands a veto over constitutional change that fundamentally undermines democratic equality, and distorts history to serve narrow ideological ends.

In a recent letter to the editor in the Irish Times, Patrick Fitzpatrick urges people to listen to unionists’ views of Ireland’s future (Fitzpatrick, 2022). Columnist and former UUP advisor Alex Kane admonishes Sinn Féin to understand unionists’ perceptions and concerns before inviting them to join a united Ireland (Kane, 2022b). I trust everyone, north and south, will listen to and understand what unionists say in this book. For the most part, their views are small-minded and bellicose, and contribute little to discussions of the way forward.

The Unionist Time Machine

The book’s unionism is retrograde in two principal ways. It wishes to reconstitute parts of the unionist ancien regime and it attempts to resurrect the stale ideas and timeworn projects of unionists David Trimble and Arthur Aughey. Trimble died last week after a short illness.

In the first instance of retro unionism, some contributors wish to turn back the clock to 1967, before the mass mobilization around civil rights, the temporary disarming of the RUC, the abolition of the B Specials, the dissolution of Stormont and the imposition of direct rule (Smith1; Polley; Gudgin1).[2] Back, that is, to a period of unrestrained unionist rule and seeming constitutional permanence.

Other authors would recede to a more recent past, to 1997 or so, before the Good Friday Agreement. Their aim is to undo that settlement and erase all its direct antecedents including Sunningdale, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Joint (Downing Street) Declaration and the Framework Documents. They envision a regime that institutionally spurns nationalist and republican interest in shared governance, parity of esteem and democratic constitutional change (Aughey1; Dudgeon; Lowry; Smith2).

The two groups of unionist time travellers—those returning to 1967 and those to 1997—may, happily, arrive at a similar destination: a governance system in which unionists form a voluntary coalition with a moderate centre or perhaps obeisant nationalists as part of a United Kingdom secured against both constitutional change and institutionalized southern input. That the authors could seriously contemplate such arrangements is a measure of how hopelessly out of touch they are. There is, of course, an equality-based case to be made for reforming the Assembly and Executive to take into account Alliance’s recent consolidation of the centre ground. But the authors go well beyond adjustments to the operations of institutions to tear away everything positive that nationalism sees in the GFA. The cavalier ease with which they shred the Agreement and overturn its popular ratification indicates the tedious hubris that suffuses the book.

The Idea of the Union is so mired in the past that it spends little time talking about a reconciled and improved future.[3] Professor Nicholas Allen calls the book “a troubling unionist manifesto” and notes that: “There is next to nothing here of unionism as a programme for the improvement of society, the alleviation of poverty, the increase of educational opportunity, or as a resource to respond to climate catastrophe” (Allen, 2021, p. 1). 

The co-editors, John Wilson Foster and William Beattie Smith, responded quickly and angrily to Allen’s criticism. How could unionists devise such programmes “while they are harassed daily by an increasingly emboldened nationalist front with only one goal in its sights: getting Northern Ireland out of the UK and into a fantasy united Ireland, abetted by Irish governments” (Foster & Smith, 2021, p. 1). Foster and Smith’s position seems to be that the book’s contributors could escape from this stultifying harassment long enough to research and write their chapters exploring what the co-editors admit are “important issues;” but they just couldn’t break free sufficiently to think about the future of the north (Smith & Foster, 2021, p. 1). There is no favourable way to describe the co-editors’ argument here: it’s just idiotic to suggest that nationalist advocacy of Irish unity prevents unionists from thinking of how to move forward. Foster himself has written elsewhere about the agenda for discussions of the north’s future and proposed various kinds of consultative forums that should be established (Burke, 2020). In the book, though, concern with reviving yesterday’s politics obstructs engaging with tomorrow’s challenges, whatever might be the constitutional circumstance.

In the second instance of retro unionism, the book recycles the tired ideas and contradictory interventions of David Trimble and Arthur Aughey. As leader of the UUP, Trimble was directly involved in the negotiations that led to the Agreement and later served as the north’s inaugural First Minister. Along with John Hume, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts at finding a peaceful resolution of the northern conflict. Aughey is a prominent unionist academic, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Ulster and author of numerous scholarly works on northern politics and other topics.

Trimble makes two kinds of appearances in the book, as an authority on the Agreement and as an embodiment of civic unionism. On both counts, he leaves a mixed legacy. He endorsed and endangered the Agreement. He supported and repudiated civic unionism. The Idea of the Union bolsters the most disagreeable parts of Trimble’s varied political practice.

Invoking his status as an authority, Trimble writes a short chapter contending that the protocol is a “political betrayal” that “rips the very heart out of the Agreement” by demolishing the requirement for democratic consent to constitutional change (pp. 342 & 340). Other contributors call on Trimble’s privileged expertise to reiterate his argument that the protocol is incompatible with the GFA’s notion of consent (Foster1; Smith1). Hoey explains that because Trimble helped to construct the Agreement, “he should know” when it’s being violated (p. 7).

The book’s positioning of Trimble as an unquestioned authority on the Agreement is problematic. Trimble’s relation to the GFA and its aftermath is highly complex. On the one hand, he was instrumental in helping to bring about the peace settlement and gaining, for a while, majority unionist consent to its terms. Many commentators praise Trimble for these formidable achievements. On the other hand, he quickly moved to undermine some of the GFA’s basic provisions. In the moments after the Agreement was reached, he circumvented other talks participants to try to achieve outside negotiations what he failed to achieve inside them. Trimble attempted to impose on everyone his own highly contested interpretation of the GFA’s provisions on decommissioning, with initial help from Tony Blair’s side letter and Bertie Ahern’s prevarication (Browne, 1999; Watt 1999). His futile quest continued long after the Agreement had been democratically endorsed and led to frequent suspensions of devolved government that impeded progress for years. Trimble made another attempt to undercut the GFA in July 1998, as parts of the Agreement were being incorporated into domestic British law. He cooperated with anti-Agreement unionists to try to alter the GFA’s majority consent clause by imposing a unionist veto over constitutional change. He maintained all the while that he was not violating the Agreement. Other architects of the GFA understandably disagreed with him, and his attempt to change the Agreement after the fact proved unsuccessful (Hansard, 1998; Burke, 2021a).

If Trimble did not fully understand or accept the Agreement’s provisions on decommissioning and consent, he seems also to have misjudged the Agreement’s relation to the protocol. The protocol does not violate the GFA’s consent clause, no matter how much Trimble and the book protest. As Justice Richard Humphreys points out in his review of The Idea of the Union, the courts have repeatedly ruled in clear and simple terms “that the claim of protocol incompatibility with the agreement is clearly wrong.” He continues: 

This is basic, entry level stuff. ... Detailed reasoned judgments from independent British courts seem to have had limited impact on the [unionist] understanding of this issue. (Humphreys, 2021, pp. 8 & 10).[4]

In a strange recent intervention, DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson seemingly refutes the position of Trimble and the book. He also appears to reverse his own initial stance on the protocol, which he confusedly continues to peddle. Whereas Donaldson regularly holds that the protocol violates the GFA, in March he began to make the additional and contrary argument that the GFA must be formally amended in order to create a violation between it and the protocol (Donaldson, 2022).[5] The March version of his argument came in response to yet another court ruling upholding the protocol’s compatibility with the Agreement. In short, Donaldson’s proposed amendment to the Agreement means to manufacture an inconsistency that doesn’t currently exist. Neither the book’s contributors nor the unionist appellants bringing their legal case against the protocol to the UK Supreme Court will be entirely pleased with Donaldson’s intervention. Clearly, Donaldson wants to have it both ways: the protocol unquestionably violates the GFA; but if it doesn’t, we need to change the GFA to make it so. However confusing and contradictory is Donaldson’s position, it’s at least more honest than that of Trimble and other contributors, who push as unvarnished fact a legal position that the courts have continually overruled.

The Idea of the Union plainly fails in its attempt to trade on Trimble’s purported expertise. Its summoning of Trimble’s civic unionism is equally unsuccessful.

Near the end of the book, three contributors refer directly and approvingly to Trimble’s civic unionist credentials. Academic William JV Neill and former UUP leader Mike Nesbitt appeal for an inclusive unionism and cite as precedent the Nobel lecture in which Trimble admits that the north had been a cold house for Catholics (pp. 361 & 378). Co-editor Smith, in his summary of the book’s case for the union, quotes Trimble’s ambition “to raise up a new Northern Ireland in which pluralist Unionism and constitutional nationalism can speak to each other with the civility which is the foundation of freedom” (p. 406).

Let me make two related observations here, one about Trimble and one about the book. First, Trimble was not simply a civic unionist.[6] He took both hardline and pragmatic positions. His contradictions and incoherencies spanned a range of ideological trajectories within unionism: cultural, liberal, civic, new, traditional, rational and emotional (Dixon, 2000, 2004; Patterson, 2004, 2012).[7] The Trimble of the Nobel lecture and the “pluralist parliament for a pluralist people” was also the Trimble of Vanguard, the Ulster Workers’ Council strike and decommissioning (Trimble, 1998). He was not opposed to triumphalism and supremacy, as he showed not just in Drumcree but in his 2002 address to a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council in which he characterized the UK as “a vibrant multi-ethnic, multi-national liberal democracy” and the south as a “pathetic sectarian, mono-ethnic, mono-cultural State” (Moriarty, 2002).

The second observation is that the book is by no means a civic unionist interpretation of northern politics, with the partial exception of the chapters by Neill and Nesbitt. Their reasonable contributions and their praise of Trimble’s civic-mindedness stand in stark contrast to the book’s overwhelming message of incivility and pettiness. Smith’s fleeting courtship of civility is contradicted by the rancour of everything else he says. His contributions, along with those of fellow editor JW Foster, are among the least generous in the book. The Idea of the Union magnifies the parochial as it marginalizes the civic aspects of a diverse unionism. It chooses to identify with the most illiberal and least civic of Trimble’s many sides.

Arthur Aughey, like Trimble, has a place of prominence in the book, which takes its title from one of his chapters. True to form, The Idea of the Union highlights unsavoury elements of Aughey’s unionism. In this section, I’ll discuss his and the book’s contribution to the notion of “culture war.” Later on, I’ll pick up this notion again and address other problematic parts of Aughey’s thought that the book reinforces.

In 1994, Aughey wrote a tract entitled “Irish Kulturkampf.” The next year, the Ulster Young Unionist Council republished it as a pamphlet, with an introduction by the Council’s Chair Arlene Foster (née Kelly). One prominent theme in this work is that nationalists and republicans—variously described as ignorant, narrow, backward looking, reactionary, nativist and racist—are conducting a “systematic cultural attack” on Protestantism and unionism (Aughey, 1994, 15). This concept of kulturkampf or culture war is now a staple of unionist discourse. Aughey didn’t invent it, but he helped to popularize it. He also directly implicated Irish reunification in this campaign of cultural subordination by legitimizing the idea that, for Protestants, a united Ireland suggests “race death” (Aughey, 1996, 23).

JW Foster enthusiastically endorses—even extends—the idea of culture war, although he does not use that precise term. Just as Aughey argues that nationalists turn culture into a weapon to assault Protestants, Foster suggests that they weaponize every conceivable issue, not just cultural ones, in their relentless attacks against unionists. Nationalist and republican positions on legacy, human rights, healthcare, the economy, the Irish language and countless other political issues become, in Foster’s eyes, mere “fronts” for the reunification campaign that continuously oppresses unionists (p. 17). Similarly, former UUP councillor Jeff Dudgeon discovers war in the courtroom. He sees the pursuit of justice through the courts—in such cases as the torture of the hooded men, the murder of Pat Finucane, the massacre in Ballymurphy and the internment of Gerry Adams—as examples of the republican “lawfare industry,” which uses “law to achieve the ends once reserved to war” (pp. 288 & 292). Dudgeon is particularly irritated that in each of these four cases the courts confirmed the republican narrative of the conflict. He urges the British government to shut down the lawfare industry by eliminating all avenues of legal redress for historical cases, in seeming anticipation of Westminster’s recent legacy bill.[8] On the legal battlefield, there must be no judicial or quasi-judicial validation of enemy narratives that challenge unionist or British orthodoxies. 

This distorted unionist lens sees war everywhere.[9] And its twisted logic prescribes that if this is war, then the stakes must be correspondingly high. They are, according to Foster. He reinforces Aughey’s linked concepts of culture war, Irish unity and race death, again borrowing the ideas but not the exact words. Foster warns of the plans of nationalists who actively advocate for a united Ireland. What these politically involved nationalists really desire is “power over unionists or an island cleared of Protestants” (p. 87). He further cautions that a 32-county republic will entail “extirpation of unionism on the island” (p. 82). Servitude, mass clearance and extirpation are very high stakes indeed. Readers would be justified in dismissing this constructed war as an unhinged delusion, except that its rhetorical waging has real consequences.

Humphreys is concerned about the book’s failure to indicate a willingness to abide by the results of a border poll supporting Irish unity. He believes that a unionist commitment to play by the rules might help to temper “the bogeyman of loyalist ‘resistance’” (Humphreys, 2021, p. 14). If anything, some of the book’s contributors are moving in the opposite direction by openly playing the Orange card. Smith, for instance, explicitly raises the likelihood of “intense resistance” by loyalist paramilitaries should constitutional change occur without unionist consent. That is, loyalist political violence may well follow a democratic border poll conducted under the provisions of the Agreement, which clearly do not require unionist consent to Irish unity. To Smith, the main problem is not the potentially violent loyalist response to a democratically produced outcome; rather, it’s the unbearable provocation and “moral absurdity” of the Agreement’s failure to institutionalize unionist privilege in a border poll (p. 405).

A similar concern arises over the book’s adoption of Aughey’s notion of culture war. While Aughey suggests that the proper unionist response to the Irish kulturkampf is to emphasize generosity and openness to diverse cultural expressions, his and the book’s use of the sensationalist imagery of war and devastation points to another kind of response. It’s easy to predict how the loyalist street might react to tales of Irish Nazis and commissars—to borrow Aughey’s metaphors—who are on the march behind their “United Ireland” banners to attack Protestant and unionist culture, with the ultimate aim of domination, sectarian clearance and extirpation. The street would erupt. In fact, instances of “culture war” in contemporary unionist discourse are, almost without exception, intended to stoke popular outrage in aid of mobilizing against the attacking enemy rather than to promote unionist generosity towards the “other”.[10] Aughey’s and Foster’s scenarios are dangerous scaremongering, pure and simple. They instill fear as a means of rallying unionists, which in turn may intimidate nationalists from holding, voicing or acting on a preference for unity. Many other damaging ramifications can flow from the politics of fear, as the history of the north shows. We need to ask just what kind of case for the union is this book making.

The Most Odious People Ever (MOPE)

Liam Kennedy, emeritus professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast, coined the acronym MOPE to signify that Irish nationalists view themselves as the Most Oppressed People Ever. For him, MOPE is a shorthand way of belittling the Irish people’s catastrophic historical experiences, blaming the victim while absolving the oppressor, and delegitimizing contemporary nationalist campaigns for change, including constitutional change. A few years ago, I heavily criticized his use of this notion (Burke, 2016). Now, I think it’s time to wrest MOPE from Kennedy’s grasp, so I reconceptualize the term to mean the Most Odious People Ever. In my usage, MOPE is an evidence-based summary of the offensive depiction of nationalists and republicans in the pages of The Idea of the Union.

In what is arguably the book’s most repulsive image, academic and former Royal Navy Reserve officer Geoff Sloan suggests that nationalism is a virus for which unionism is the vaccine (p. 63). I suppose that in some quarters this pandemic reference might be considered witty or de rigueur. I’m not in those quarters. In many ways, Sloan’s insult is but the nadir of a cascading set of derogatory remarks spewing out of various authors’ mouths. Let me take a quick and selective alphabetical walk through the book’s objectionable barrage.

For Aughey, Irish nationalism is incorrigibly sectarian, and the people who advocate for a border poll are tribal bullies driven by a “destructive neurosis” (pp. 238, 352 & 353). Foster sees nationalists and republicans as racist and hopelessly irrational, witless captives of theocracy and folk belief (pp. 79, 17 & 20). They are diehard cancel-culture warriors who are unsleeping, muscular, noisy and vigorous in pursuit of political dominance and a united Ireland (pp. 31, 13, 20, 29 & 28). Arthur Green, co-founder of the unionist Cadogan Group, views Irish separatist thinkers as reactionary and immature; their Irish story is whiney, crippled, inhibited and stunted (pp. 38-40). Edgar Haslett, an ardent integrationist who died in 1996, employs Kennedy’s conception of MOPE only to confirm the accuracy of my reconceptualization. For him, the nationalist view of Irish-British history is mostly propaganda, a self-pitying sob story that eschews objective analysis and has no relevance to today’s debates (pp. 190-91, 193 & 200). Conservative analyst Henry Hill regrets that UK-wide devolution did not fulfill unionism’s worthy goal “to kill nationalism stone dead” (p. 267). Neill’s story of the duplicitous nationalist spider trying to lure the innocent unionist fly into its dangerous web mars his reasonable if vague case for reimagining unionism (p. 364). Unionist journalist Owen Polley argues that the loathsome republican movement must be publicly humiliated in an act of contrition for its crimes, a position recalling Ian Paisley’s bigoted “sackcloth and ashes” moment (p. 248; Paisley, 2004, no page (n.p.)). Academics Patrick Roche and Brian Barton decry the role of nationalist leaders and politicians, who are sectarian, inflexible, negative, stubborn, extreme, and feckless (pp. 163 & 164). Smith depicts the southern state as blinded by illusion and myth. It is a ruthless exploiter that advances its relentless irredentist campaign through diplomacy and bad faith (pp. 184 & 187). During the northern conflict, it cynically leveraged Provisional violence “to advance its selfish political agenda” (p. 394).

I could offer many other examples, but I think I’ve made my point. There is, however, one related issue that deserves some additional discussion: the book’s use of Anglophobia.

Anglophobia serves three principal functions for the many contributors who employ the term. First, it emphasizes that Irish nationalists are an especially hate-filled people animated by anti-English, anti-British and anti-unionist feelings. That is, it confirms that they are the Most Odious People Ever. Hoey suggests that the Irish, especially those living in Ireland, love anti-English rhetoric (p. 8). According to Foster, many Irish Catholics believe that their anti-Britishness is part of an “ethnic type” that should govern all behaviour and tolerate no exceptions (p. 133). What better proof is there of Anglophobia than that hostile unionist analysts like Hoey and Foster should declare that it’s what the Irish really feel.

It’s ironic that such a spiteful book filled with open animus towards Irish nationalists and republicans should berate the Irish for purportedly being driven by hate.

Anglophobia serves a second function. As part of the book’s generally contemptuous view of Irish nationalists, it helps to diminish and dehumanize those who wish to end British rule in Ireland. It is a prelude to and justification for the book’s support of a political regime of unionist supremacy and nationalist subordination in the north, which is the subject of the next section.

Third, Anglophobia is an easy and lazy explanation of Irish and northern politics. It’s another form of victim blaming—akin to Kennedy’s version of MOPE—that both holds the Irish primarily responsible for all difficulties and minimizes or erases the substantial unionist contributions to conflict and division. Smith, for instance, identifies Dublin’s Anglophobia as the major cause of regular breakdowns in relations between the Irish and British states (p. 405). Many authors point to Anglophobia as the primary driver of Irish support for the protocol (Bassett, Foster2, Polley, Roche & Barton). For Foster, Anglophobia has specific effects that shape a destructive republican separatism and distort Irish-English relations (p. 30). But it also has general effects that are evident in every corner of Irish life: “the national narrative which is the Republic’s Story of itself, and which infuses every important aspect of society, is sadly still anti-British and anti-unionist” (p. 17).

I can’t emphasize enough how generic and empty is the book’s use of Anglophobia as an explanation. Anti-English sentiment is by definition a dominant cause of every Irish, nationalist or republican initiative that unionism opposes. It is so well established as a ubiquitous root cause that there is no need to provide concrete evidence of how it actually works or to weigh the relative contributions of other explanatory factors. Simply saying the word “Anglophobia” completes the explanation.

Supremacy and Subordination

The book’s unionism is ultimately founded on a supremacism that relegates nationalists and republicans to a subordinate social and political status.

Many scholars of unionism tend to minimize the supremacist elements of unionist politics and ideology. They point to unionism’s wide diversity of beliefs and practices to disprove the narrowing stereotype of a supremacist core. They also argue that regular displays of triumphalism, what Colin Coulter calls “swaggering supremacism,” are fuelled more by a profound sense of disempowerment than by self-satisfied feelings of superiority (Coulter, 1994, p. 14). In this section, I’m not directly concerned with such swagger or its reputed causes, although sound-and-fury unionism is related to what I address. I’m looking at a form of supremacism that derives from and links together various chapters of The Idea of the Union.[11] It may not be as openly provocative as triumphalism but it is no less real and no less pernicious.

There are at least five interconnected variants of unionist supremacism that appear in The Idea of the Union. British and unionist culture is superior to Irish and nationalist culture; the British conception of citizenship is better than its Irish counterpart; unionist identity in the north must have a privileged status denied to nationalists; nationalists must curtail their advocacy rights; and unionists alone must have a superordinate set of voting rights.

Culture and Citizenship: Ascendancy still

The first two variants of supremacism—centred around culture and citizenship—are most evident in the chapters by Foster and Aughey. Foster is primarily interested in making a cultural case for the union, although his notion of culture is intimately linked to politics. Aughey defends the union in political rather than cultural terms, but he is not averse to becoming an officer in the culture war, as we saw above. For the most part, the book’s other contributors follow these two authors in conceiving of the union and unionism as some combination of cultural-political elements.

Foster believes that unionism is not merely a political phenomenon; it is “a deeply embedded cultural identity and allegiance.” He describes this allegiance in personal terms: “the constitutional union . . .  best expresses the historic and contemporary realities of my cultural and ethnic kinship.” Further: “I am a unionist because unionism is my culture” (pp. 79 & 78). But Foster’s unionism is not simply a cultural orientation based on ethnic affinity, social solidarity or shared history. It is a socio-cultural hierarchy grounded in ascendancy. His study of Irish literary culture convinced him “of the superiority of unionism over republicanism” (p. 87). British culture ranks above Irish culture because it is bigger, broader and has more intellectual capacity. The south “does not have enough cultural storage space” to accommodate unionists (p. 83).

Aughey prefers a political to a cultural definition of unionism, calling it “a very pure political doctrine” (p. 238). He explains: “The idea of the Union is the willing community of citizens united not by creed, colour or ethnicity but by a recognition of the authority of the Union. Its relevant concept is citizenship and not nation” (p. 226).[12] Aughey creates a political hierarchy mirroring Foster’s system of cultural stratification. Aughey’s argument in support of the union is that the British notion of citizenship is inherently superior to the Irish notion. British citizenship is rational, modern, inclusive and based on equality. Irish citizenship is romantic, reactionary, exclusive and “deeply imbued with the spirit of racism” (p. 228).

Foster’s and Aughey’s portrayals are simplistic, their contrasts erroneous. But that kind of critique is not my main concern here. I wish to focus attention on both authors establishing their positions by unequivocally asserting British and unionist supremacy over Irish nationalism. We begin to see here an unmistakable congruity in the book’s general approach to unionism. Derogatory conceptions of nationalists, republicans and the Irish state produce direct formulations of the superiority of unionist culture and politics. And, as I examine next, this form of thinking culminates in support for a hierarchy of unionist privilege and entitlement in the contemporary politics of the north.

Identity: Reducing nationalism

The book’s third variant of supremacism explicitly champions an elevated status for unionist identity in the north. This form of unionist privilege operates at the nexus of culture and politics. The following schema is an abbreviated but accurate representation of the book’s unequal classification of unionist and nationalist identities in the north:

  • Unionism = Britishness + Union
  • Nationalism = Irishness – Unity.

Unionists must have their British culture plus their preferred constitutional arrangements: the north must remain part of the UK. Nationalists, in contrast, can have their Irish culture but not their favoured constitution: Irish unity is out of the question. These asymmetrical formulas, by their very nature, reduce nationalism relative to unionism. They define unionism as the indissoluble connection of culture to constitution, nationalism as the necessary separation of the two (O’Dowd, 1998). Nationalism cannot ever be unionism’s equal. 

The GFA notionally resolves the constitutional impasse between nationalism and unionism by a democratic vote in a border poll. The book resolves it by an antidemocratic decree, unilaterally claiming that unionism has constitutional supremacy over nationalism. I’ll return in the next two sections to the whole issue of unionism, a border poll and democracy.

The unionist schema outlined above has long been a central part of Foster’s thought. Reasonable and moderate unionists simply “desire to retain their Britishness in constitutional as well as cultural terms” (p. 12). Nationalists, on the other hand, must reconcile themselves to limiting their ambitions to those that can be met inside the constitutional framework of the union. Haslett explains the societal benefits of constraining nationalism:

With acceptance of Northern Ireland as an undisputed part of the United Kingdom, the threat (of Irish unity) would be removed and nationalist culture would become an enriching ingredient for everyone in a multi-cultural society. There never has been any impediment put in the way of the practice and enjoyment of Irish culture. If it were not exploited in pursuit of republicans’ wider political agenda it could become a source of pleasure for all of us and an important factor in building understanding between Northern Ireland and the Republic (p. 201).

Haslett’s argument, reprinted from the 1995 edition of the book, articulates what has become a conventional unionist demand for the development of a “non-political Irishness” that sees nationalism stripped of its constitutional aspirations (Kennedy, 1995, pp. 35 & 36).[13]

In demanding that nationalists drop a defining element of who they are, unionism refuses to accept nationalists qua nationalists. This refusal is a powerful declaration of supremacy. In this contrived universe, little if anything can be accomplished so long as nationalists continue to aspire to reunification. Constitutional nationalists must become constitutional unionists as a precondition for reconciliation and stability in the north and for understanding and normalcy in Belfast-Dublin relations. That is, all constitutional entanglements would be cleared immediately if only nationalists abandoned their goal of Irish unity. And everyone in the north and south could join hands to celebrate Irish sport, song, dance, theatre and literature.

It’s truly depressing that a book published in 2021 purporting to make a moderate and reasonable case for the union could regurgitate such a crude supremacism and prejudiced resolution.

Advocacy: Shut the fuck up about Irish unity

The book’s inegalitarian perspective on fundamental political rights is the fourth variant of supremacism. There is little likelihood that nationalists will entirely remake their identity by relinquishing their aspiration to Irish unity. Some nationalists even show a heightened inclination to pursue their constitutional goal, actively and peacefully. The book wishes to close down that pursuit by restricting nationalist and republican advocacy of a united Ireland.

The unionist narrative on nationalist constitutional expression can be usefully characterized as “shut the fuck up about Irish unity.” Foster captures the essence of this position: nationalists “should soft-pedal unification . . .  since not to demand unification is obviously the only chance for it someday to happen by consensus” (p. 87). I’ll unpack the full meaning of this quotation in due course, especially its duplicitous reference to unification by consensus. For now, I’ll concentrate on the unionist desire for nationalists to keep their constitutional mouths shut.

Unionist contributors to the book are not the only participants in this narrative. The DUP, UUP, TUV, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and other notable commentators in the north and south frequently adopt the same discourse. The SDLP employed it in the recent Assembly election campaign in an unsuccessful attempt to gain electoral advantage over Sinn Féin. I identify the narrative as unionist because it often proceeds from unionist sensibilities, serves the primary unionist objective of maintaining partition and connects to the book’s broader sense of unionist supremacy.

The narrative takes two forms. The first is the familiar story that a border poll is divisive; the second that constitutional change is a debilitating distraction from more important agendas.

Aughey, Foster and Smith equate a border poll with division, political instability and social tumult (Aughey2; Smith2; Foster1) . Talk of a border poll should cease, they urge, because it unsettles and aggravates unionists. This first form of the narrative is partial and partisan, capturing only the unionist tendency of the north’s constitutional dynamic. It emphasizes, almost exclusively, that there is no unionist consent for constitutional change. It says nothing about the equivalently significant fact that there is no nationalist consent for maintaining the constitutional status quo (Burke, 2021b). Humphreys captures the striking one-sidedness of this narrative: 

Generally, people who say that one cannot coerce hundreds of thousands of unionists into a united Ireland have no real problem with coercing hundreds of thousands of nationalists into a United Kingdom (Humphreys, 2018, pp. 84 & 85).

The glaringly conspicuous truth is that a border poll is divisive because the border itself is divisive. To be sure, the prospect of constitutional change disturbs those citizens who do not want change; but no prospect of constitutional change equally distresses those who desire change. To shut up about Irish unity in order to avoid division, as this form of the narrative demands, is to settle the constitutional divide in unionism’s favour. It is to say that keeping unionists constitutionally happy is more important than is allowing nationalists democratically to pursue their legitimate constitutional aspirations.

The second form of the narrative stresses that advocacy of Irish unity is a frivolous pursuit that diverts attention from the north’s pressing social and economic problems. It suggests that you cannot—at one and the same time—mobilize for constitutional change and address the rising cost of living, healthcare reform, income inequality, educational restructuring and the like. Again, the book’s solution is to have nationalists shut up about unity.

Aughey sets the overarching parameters of this type of narrative. Nationalists’ belief in the inevitability of a united Ireland pushes them to insist that preparations for unity must begin immediately. This kind of reasoning, Aughey asserts, takes the air out of other issues: “The policy agenda and political language will be determined by only one issue, how to achieve unity.” Pursuing a united Ireland reduces the complexity of the GFA “to only one idea” and makes reunification “the only priority” (p. 349). In short, advocates of unity have just one issue, one idea, one priority.

Others have picked up on Aughey’s conception of the suffocating oneness of Irish unity. The unionist Curatorial Group is so enamored that it reproduces Aughey’s argument in its own name (Curatorial Group, no date). Unionist commentator Alex Kane takes the same position as Aughey, arguing that “Sinn Féin now lives and breathes for a border poll . . . it occupies their every waking moment” (Kane, 2022a, n.p.).

The narrative of obsession gathers strength despite its manifest absurdity. That it was immediately employed against the Scottish National Party’s recent announcement of a second independence referendum suggests that the narrative is an unthinking ideological reflex mechanically applied (BBC, 2022). In the north’s case, there is no evidence to suggest that nationalists and republicans are preoccupied with Irish unity and a border poll. The SDLP constantly kicks the whole question further down the road. Sinn Féin, understandably, uses the opportunity provided by Brexit as a springboard for unity initiatives. But the party’s election manifestos, even since Brexit became a salient issue in 2016, do not give priority to unity; they routinely devote the same attention to reunification as to other matters.[14] And instead of pursuing just one issue, one idea or one priority, the party continues to publish policy papers on the full range of social and economic issues, north and south. Whatever one might think of such proposals, they are at least as detailed as any that other parties produce. Many different matters seem to occupy Sinn Féin’s waking moments. The civic nationalist group Ireland’s Future also has varied concerns. It conceives of reunification in the broadest possible terms, and hopes to encourage discussions of citizenship, rights, identity, and a host of socio-economic matters.

Nationalists and republicans are clearly capable of doing more than one thing at a time, advocating for unity and addressing other issues. But the purpose of the unionist narrative of obsession and suffocation is not to be historically accurate. It is to shove nationalists and republicans away from Irish unity by constructing a bogus and self-serving discourse of blame. Unionists are in effect saying to nationalists: “shut up about a border poll and roll up your sleeves so we may all work together on the real issues; keep talking about Irish unity and you will impede social and economic progress.” The narrative conveniently blames nationalism and obscures the heavy unionist responsibility for hindering progress.

The two forms of the shut-the-fuck-up narrative, that nationalist advocacy of a border poll is both divisive and distracting, are illustrations of what I term the law of constitutional inertia. The law states that “a constitution at rest tends to stay at rest, unless and until people actively mobilize to change it”.[15] For unionists, curtailing nationalist rights of constitutional expression helps to keep the constitutional status quo comfortably at rest. Taking away the means of change blocks the end of change. This narrative is not essentially about divisiveness or suffocation, but about ensuring that unionists get their way on the constitution. The narrative forms themselves are mere masks.

Democracy: My vote counts, yours doesn’t

The fifth and final kind of supremacism is the book’s claim to expansive electoral rights for unionists. One of the defining elements of modern liberal democracy is that the votes of all citizens are formally equal. Many contributors to The Idea of the Union wish fundamentally to undercut that democratic equality and introduce a system in which only unionist votes count.

The book destroys vote equality by demanding a unionist veto over constitutional change, although it shies away from using the language of “veto”.[16] It no doubt avoids that term because “veto” has such undemocratic or antidemocratic connotations. In fact, the book goes to great lengths to evade addressing what the unionist veto means for democracy in the north. Foster and Smith use many euphemisms for veto, suggesting that constitutional change occur by free consent, express consent, joint consent, parallel consent, collective consent or consensus (pp. 78, 405 & 87). Aughey resurrects John Hume’s idea of “uniting people and not territory” as a formula for constitutional change requiring unionist agreement (p. 352). Sloan employs the notion of “geopolitical realities” to ensure that the north forever remains part of the UK, just as unionism wants, regardless of majority opinion (p. 62). All these terms and phrases are pleasant-sounding substitutes for the grim reality of an undemocratic system of unionist privilege. A veto by any other name is still a veto.

The book’s unionist veto over constitutional change doubly disadvantages nationalists. It nullifies nationalist votes in a border poll and it negates nationalist opinion on the constitutional status quo.

Let’s examine first how the disadvantage works in a border poll. As we know, the GFA prescribes a simple majority of 50 percent + 1 as the threshold for winning a border poll. A unionist veto fundamentally contravenes the Agreement’s majority consent rule. Suppose that a border poll produces the following vote pattern:

  • an overall majority for unity
  • a nationalist majority for unity
  • a unionist majority for union.

This is the very kind of result that the book’s unionist veto is designed to subvert. Under the Agreement, Irish unity wins this border poll solely because of the overall majority, even if that majority is by one vote. But under a unionist veto, the exact same vote pattern yields the opposite constitutional outcome: unity loses and the union is maintained. Unionists win in defiance of overall and nationalist majorities, even if those majorities are substantial. In effect, nationalist votes in favour of unity do not count at all in the border poll result. Nor do the votes of other individuals who contribute to the overall majority by backing change. The only votes that matter are unionist votes; they entirely determine the outcome. If unionists votes are tallied first, there is no point in counting any of the remaining ballots. Better still, only unionists need go to the polls. Non-unionist votes are completely superfluous, whether they support unity or union.

The unionist veto in effect values unionist votes at 1 and nationalist/other votes at 0. It is a grossly biased scheme that rules out democratic constitutional change. I’ve yet to hear any reasonable or sensible defence of this kind of privilege. Certainly the book provides none.

The book’s notion of unionist veto carries a second major disadvantage for nationalists. The veto is unreciprocated. That is, the book offers unionists a veto over constitutional change but does not give nationalists a corresponding veto over maintenance of the constitutional status quo. Unity cannot happen without unionist consent; but the union carries on undisturbed without nationalist consent.[17] The unionism expressed in this book is so consumed by supremacism that it can’t even comprehend the deep unfairness and inequality in this lack of reciprocity. Nationalist constitutional preferences—either in support of change or against the status quo—hold no worth to supporters of a unionist veto.

In his critique of The Idea of the Union, Humphreys offers a comprehensive summary of the case against a unionist veto over constitutional change. Such a veto:

. . .  is a betrayal and a nullification of the most central core element of the agreement. A few obvious points:

1. Consent of 50 per cent plus one of the total valid poll is the only rule that treats both (unionist and nationalist) aspirations equally.

2. This is what unionism signed up to in 1998.

3. This is what a majority of the people of the region and of the island approved.

4. This is what the UK government on behalf of Northern Ireland solemnly agreed in a binding international treaty that remains binding.

5. It would be a parody of democracy to change the rules just because nationalism might succeed.

6. The notion of “parallel consent” [unionist veto] rigs the system, making the nationalist aspiration impossible because unionists by definition won’t give consent without ceasing to be unionists.

7. It also tears up the core concept of the agreement of parity of esteem by unfairly creating a double standard whereby the test for Union is different from the test for unity.

8. This makes nationalist votes effectively worthless, making unionist votes the only ones that count.

9. Such a negation of basic equality of civil and political rights is fear in the face of the democratic process masquerading as heroism.

10. If a majority for unity happens, unionist consent as the minority won’t be required, and that’s an inevitable feature of any fair, equal and democratic process. Britain, with all of its dignity and principle as seen from London, has had to let go of possession of a lot of territory over the years by yielding to democratic choice, and Northern Ireland would be no exception.

11. Every reasonable person would reject a mentality that would seek to impose a minority’s state on an unwilling majority, replicating pre-1994 South Africa on Northern Irish soil (Humphreys, 2021, pp. 13-14).[18]

The book’s brand of unionism rejects any democratic resolution of the constitutional question and instead decides the issue by calling forth discredited ideas of unionist superiority, privilege and entitlement. The north will remain part of the UK, just as unionists demand, even when there is no democratic basis for union.[19]

Distorting and manipulating history

In his introductory chapter, Foster promises that the book’s contributors will “set the historical record straight” in “the battle between historical truth and republican ideology and politics” (p. 17). The book’s back cover highlights this promise: “Irish separatist nationalism has had a fair innings. Now it’s time for reason and reality to go to bat.” These assurances describe a binary opposition between nationalist and republican propaganda on the one side, and unionist reason and truth on the other. They could and perhaps should be quickly disregarded as yet another tiresome illustration of the book’s supremacist unionism, another repetition of the same old imperialist trope. But it is worthwhile to explore how successfully the book establishes its claim to historical accuracy and truth. It is not at all successful.

Much of the book’s historical discussion is about apportioning blame for the conflict that erupted in the late 1960s. Let’s entertain a parsimonious model that the main historical agents in the north are nationalists (including republicans and the Irish state), unionists (including loyalists and the old Stormont regime) and the British state. Ben Lowry, deputy editor of the News Letter, explicitly identifies these leading protagonists, but many other contributors work with the same model in mind. If we were to express, as percentages, the causal weights that the book attaches to these various explanatory factors, the model of conflict in the north would look something like:

  • Northern conflict = 85%Nationalism + 14%BritishState + 1%Unionism.

The general model is that nationalism/republicanism carries by far the heaviest blame for conflict in the north; the British state shares some culpability mainly because it doesn’t always fully back every unionist whim; unionism and Stormont are relatively blameless. Our earlier discussion of Anglophobia as an explanation anticipates the imbalance of the causal weights in the general model. The book determines these weights ideologically, not empirically. Far from setting the historical record straight, as Foster promises, the book imposes an ideological explanation disguised as a scholarly one. And it projects this historical model into the present to conclude that nationalists and republicans are primarily responsible for contemporary division and dysfunction in the north, with Britain sharing some of the blame. As before, unionism is barely implicated.

Let me briefly illustrate how the model works. Barton’s examination of partition sets the causal weights that other contributors apply to the Stormont years and beyond. He emphasizes the republican rising of 1916 as a principal cause of partition. He minimizes the explanatory impact of naked unionist coercion that had the active and tacit support of the British state. He has next to nothing to say about the crucial parts played by unionist sectarianism and British duplicity in the placement of the gerrymandered six-county border. Roche and Barton sugarcoat the oppressive nature of unionist rule in the north. According to them, the south’s hostility to the new regime and northern nationalists’ refusal to embrace its parliament largely excuse any subsequent excesses by the northern state. Gudgin buries how the brutal loyalist, RUC and B Special responses to early civil rights protests set the north on a violent path (Gudgin1). Smith’s lopsided analysis of the crucial years from 1969 to 1972 faults the British state for betraying unionism by capitulating to republican terrorism and nationalist aggression (Smith1). Lowry plays word games, misrepresents the evidence and relies on sham statistics to conclude that state collusion in murder is not just a nationalist myth but a calculated lie. According to his analysis, security-force collusion is not responsible for a single conflict-related death.[20]

The misleading “explanatory” model is but part of the problem. The book also distorts the historical record to the point of completely inverting history. It turns history on its head by claiming that Britain is a cultural colony of Ireland and that the colonizing Irish are energized by the mission of bringing their superior culture and civilization to unionists and the British (Foster3; Aughey2; Neill). In this topsy-turvy world, the colonizer becomes the colonized; the oppressor, the oppressed; the superior, the subordinate. At the stroke of a unionist pen, Perfidious Albion transforms into Perfidious Hibernia. A similar reversal of the historical record that is remarkable in its sheer audacity portrays the civil rights movement using discrimination as a stick with which to beat unionism (Gudgin1).

In a final corruption, the book directly manipulates history to support the political and ideological campaigns of contemporary unionism. Aughey’s chapter on the constitution best illustrates this abuse of the past to assist the present. Aughey recalls fondly the years of Mary Robinson’s presidency of Ireland (1990-1997). It was a time characterized by several encouraging developments: a serious attempt to listen to and understand the views of unionists, an emerging ethos of cooperation, a new respect for the diversity of cultures in Ireland and a fresh appreciation of unionism’s constructive role in Irish history thanks to the work of revisionist historians.

This shining portrait of the 1990s that Aughey draws in 2021 is markedly different from the somber picture he presents in 1994, writing in the middle of Robinson’s tenure. In the mid-1990s, he does not sense any encouraging developments around him; he sees imminent danger everywhere. Recall that these are the years in which Aughey discerns an Irish kulturkampf—a concerted campaign by a narrow and sectarian nationalism to attack unionist and Protestant culture.

Aughey’s contrary depiction of the same period serves an important political and ideological function for unionism. Reimagining the menacing Irish kulturkampf as the benevolent Mary Robinson years allows Aughey to conjure the present as a serious deterioration. Robinson’s presidency is long gone, he warns; unionism really is in peril now. Many contributors join Aughey in representing a border poll as a major current threat from a resurgent and bigoted nationalism bent on sowing division and discord. The book’s brand of unionism needs a nationalist or republican “other” to despise and fear; it needs a powerful approaching enemy against whom to muster.[21] In Aughey’s hands, history becomes whatever unionism needs it to be. He gives unionism the same aggressive foe in 1994 and 2021, even though he has to remake history to do it.

Conclusion

Unionism is a much more diverse social, political and ideological force than this book suggests. In addition to the lack of civic unionist appeals, there is a dearth of working-class voices in the book’s sometimes proudly patrician focus on “the higher professions” (p.24). Perhaps unionists unrepresented or embarrassed by The Idea of the Union will share more fully their thoughts on the future of the north. Years ago, Norman Porter (1996) articulated a generous sense of civic unionism. More recently, the public statement of 105 civic unionists and others confirmed a strong commitment to equality, fairness and tolerance (Wilson, 2018). Currently, there are many grass-roots initiatives in which unionists work with other communities in a spirit of cooperation and mutuality. All these manifestations of unionism have infinitely more to offer to contemporary debates than does the book’s noxious project.[22] Unionism should move on from the retrograde attitudes, supremacist presumptions, undemocratic schemes and self-interested distortions that are the mainstay of The Idea of the Union.


Notes

[1] For some critical responses to Hoey, see Collins (2022), Murphy (2022) and McCord (2022).

[2] The names in parentheses refer to chapter authors. Some authors—JW Foster, WB Smith, Arthur Aughey, and Graham Gudgin—have written more than one chapter. I append numerals to an author’s name when it’s necessary to distinguish between chapters written by the same author. Smith1, for instance, refers to the first chapter written by co-editor WB Smith, starting on p. 168. Smith2 indicates Smith’s second chapter beginning on p. 389. I use the same notation for the other authors of multiple chapters. Sometimes, largely for stylistic reasons, I refer directly to page numbers to indicate which chapter I am examining.

[3] Neill and Nesbitt never get beyond the vaguest of platitudes in their generally well-meaning discussions of reconciliation. Haslett’s reference to reconciliation as “jabberwocky” and Dudgeon’s dismissal of it as “a dead letter” are sentiments that are all too common in the book (pp. 200 & 292).

[4] Brendan O’Leary (2022) makes the same argument as Humphreys, that the unionist position on the protocol’s incompatibility with the GFA is simply untenable. Gallagher (2022) finds that the British government’s arguments about the protocol, which mirror the unionist position, are a political construction that have no historical or legal foundation.

[5] Technically, Donaldson is calling for an amendment to the Northern Ireland Act, a piece of British legislation implementing part of the Agreement. His amendment of the NIA would materially alter the corresponding provisions of the Agreement.

[6] As Neill seems to recognize (p. 368).

[7] In an analysis that he admits “may well be too sympathetic to Trimble,” Dixon explains or explains away Trimble’s inconsistencies by examining the constraints and pressures the unionist leader faced (Dixon, 2004, 480).

[8] The British Government introduced the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill in the House of Commons on 17 May 2022. The Bill in effect bars prosecutions for Troubles-related offences. It also bars new civil claims, stops inquests that have not yet reached the stage of a substantive hearing, and prohibits any investigations outside of those conducted for information recovery under the Bill’s authority.

[9] Unionist historian Henry Patterson views northern politics similarly: “all areas of public policy are a battleground for republicans” as they pursue their insidious agenda of ethnic provocation and Irish unity (Patterson, 2004, p. 181).

[10] Michael Gove’s anti-Agreement tract is an example of the generic use of the notion of culture war (Gove, 2000). This nationalist war against the Protestant, Unionist, Loyalist (PUL) community is a recurrent theme on the Unionist Voice website. Interviews and focus groups with individuals involved in the flag protests in 2012-13 provide many other illustrations of the importance of culture war in mobilizing communities against what is construed to be a threatening enemy (INTERCOMM & Byrne, 2013; Halliday & Ferguson, 2016). Research by Paul Nolan and others shows that culture was one of six significant drivers of the flags protests (Nolan et al., 2014). Allison Morris examines how the current protocol protests by young loyalists are activated by perceived threats to their culture (Morris, 2022). The street politics of which culture war is a part reflect a deep and multidimensional dissatisfaction among some loyalists and unionists with the direction of politics in the north. The way in which the book uses culture war is a particularly cynical exploitation of that sense of deprivation. Neill’s chapter in The Idea of the Union is an exception to the general use of culture war as a means of closing ranks and preparing for battle. He frames part of his analysis in the discourse of a culture war but in the end suggests unionists must transcend that discourse by being generous, open and civic-minded.

[11] This supremacism is, however, not limited to the book’s contributors, as I examine briefly in the body of the paper. See also Burke (2020).

[12] Armstrong too emphasizes constitutional politics: “Unionism is, strictly speaking, a political allegiance to the integrity and membership of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” (p. 386).

[13] Dennis Kennedy leads unionism’s call for nationalists to develop a purely cultural or non-political Irishness (Kennedy 1999, 2005 & 2009). See also Roche (1995), Aughey (1996) and Walker (2017). In the book, Foster refers to “non-political Catholics or even nationalists” (p. 16). The conception of the “political” in Foster’s discussion is hypocritical and contradictory. As Foster makes clear, nationalists or Catholics who prefer unity are “political,” but those who prefer union are not.

[14] With the exception of the 2019 Westminster election manifesto, which has “Time for Unity” as its overall theme. Many party manifestos, including Sinn Féin’s, are available on the CAIN website (CAIN, 2022).

[15] With due respect to the Canadian “living tree doctrine” of constitutional evolution, which suggests that a constitution can grow and change over time. My law refers specifically to the constitutional change provisions of the Agreement. The Canadian doctrine is more general, referring to how developing social understandings can lead to expansions in the scope of human rights protections. In (partial) conformity with my law, the living tree doctrine still requires an active intervention—in the form of a judicial ruling—to inject new life into a constitution that is at rest (Centre for Constitutional Studies, 2019).

[16] In the book’s one use of the term that I noted, Aughey speaks ironically of “the unionist ‘veto’” (p. 347).

[17] The lack of reciprocity is consistent with the unionist narrative, discussed earlier, demanding that nationalists shut up about Irish unity because a border poll is divisive. Both “no reciprocity” and “no talking” devalue nationalist rejection of the constitutional status quo. For a more complete discussion of reciprocity and constitutional change, see Humphreys (2009 & 2018) and Burke (2021b).

[18] Humphreys is specifically critiquing Seamus Mallon’s notion of parallel consent to constitutional change, which gives unionists the kind of veto that the book endorses. Related to the concerns he expresses here, Humphreys directly challenges unionists to take “the democracy test” (Humphreys, 2021, p. 15). That such a challenge needs to be issued is indicative of the book’s highly questionable attitude towards democracy.

[19] Aughey is particularly brazen in his use of democracy as an argument of convenience. In the first edition of The Idea of the Union, he says that there is a democratic basis for the union as long as unionists are the majority in the north. But he is concerned that unionists could lose their majority status and that the north could be voted out of the UK. To counter this possibility, he suggests that unionists start thinking of themselves as a UK-wide minority and claim constitutional permanence as a right of minority citizenship. That is, even with no democratic basis, the union is to continue. For Aughey, democracy is simply an opportunistic argument to be employed or discarded as circumstances warrant. The important thing is to keep the north in the UK, on any basis (Aughey, 1995).

[20] Lowry continues to cite the woefully outdated and wildly inaccurate estimate that the state was responsible for 10 percent of conflict-related deaths (p. 313). Both Relatives for Justice and the Committee on the Administration of Justice pointed out years ago that the 10 percent figure is a serious underestimate because it does not take into account deaths caused by security-force collusion (RFJ, 2014; CAJ, 2015).

[21] Hoey encapsulates the book’s overall approach. In referring to the north’s centenary, she looks back on 100 years of threats and envisions even greater threats in the next 100 years.

[22] Three (perhaps four) of the book’s contributors signed the civic unionist statement. I leave it to them to explain how the statement conforms to the view of unionism expressed in the book.


References

Allen, N. (2021). “The Idea of the Union: a troubling unionist manifesto.” Irish Times. 18 December. Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-idea-of-the-union-a-troubling-unionist-manifesto-1.4748072

Aughey, A. (1994). “Irish Kulturkampf.” Ulster Review. (October): 11-16. Republished as a pamphlet by the Ulster Young Unionist Council in February 1995, 17 pp.

Aughey, A. (1995). “The Constitutional Challenge.” In The Idea of the Union: Statements and Critiques in Support of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. ed. J.W. Foster, 46-52. Vancouver: Belcouver Press.

Aughey, A. (1996). “Obstacles to Reconciliation in the South.” In Building Trust in Ireland. Studies Commissioned by the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, 2-51. Belfast: Blackstaff Press in association with the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation.

BBC. (2022). “Nicola Sturgeon to launch fresh Scottish independence campaign” 13 June. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-61785553

Browne, V. (1999). “If it fails, the fault lies with leaders who fudged.” Irish Times. 30 June. Retrieved from the Factiva (Dow Jones) electronic database of new articles [cited below as Factiva].

Burke, M. (2016). “Mope ‘N’ Dope.” Review of Liam Kennedy, Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? The Pensive Quill. 30 March. Retrieved from http://thepensivequill.am/2016/03/mope-n-dope.html

Burke, M. (2020). “Nationalism = 0: The Formula for Peace and Stability in the North of Ireland?” The Pensive Quill. 1 January. Retrieved from https://www.thepensivequill.com/2020/01/nationalism-0-formula-for-peace-and.html

Burke, M. (2021a). “Academics Discussing Border Polls.” The Pensive Quill. 27 March. Retrieved from https://www.thepensivequill.com/2021/03/academics-discussing-border-polls.html

Burke, M. (2021b). “Is There Consent for Union? Taking the Reciprocal Test.” The Pensive Quill. 8 September. Retrieved from https://www.thepensivequill.com/2021/09/is-there-consent-for-union-taking.html

CAIN. (2022). “A Selection of Political Party Manifestos.” Updated on 3 May. Retrieved from https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/politics/election/manifestos.htm

CAJ. (2015). Committee on the Administration of Justice. The Apparatus of Impunity? Human rights violations and the Northern Ireland conflict: a narrative of official limitations on post-Agreement investigative mechanisms. January. CAJ and Queen’s University Belfast. Retrieved from https://caj.org.uk/publications/reports/page/4/

Centre for Constitutional Studies. (2019). “Living Tree Doctrine.” 4 July. Retrieved from https://www.constitutionalstudies.ca/2019/07/living-tree-doctrine/

Collins, T. (2022). “Forward-looking unionists must speak up.” Irish News. 13 January. Retrieved from https://www.irishnews.com/paywall/tsb/irishnews/irishnews/irishnews//opinion/columnists/2022/01/13/news/tom-collins-forward-looking-unionists-must-speak-up-2558004/content.html

Coulter, C. (1994). “The Character of Unionism.” Irish Political Studies 9:1: 1-24.

Curatorial Group. (no date). “Border Poll as destructive neurosis.” Retrieved from https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/irish-studies/civic-space/pro-union/border-poll/border-poll-syndrome/

Dixon, P. (2000). “Understanding Unionism: Ideology and Politics.” Review Article. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 23:3 (July): 205-213.

Dixon, P. (2004). “‘Peace within the Realms of The Possible’? David Trimble, Unionist Ideology and
Theatrical Politics.” Terrorism and Political Violence 16:3 (Autumn): 462-482.

Donaldson, J. (2022). “Exclusive: Sir Jeffrey Donaldson writes for Unionist Voice and reveals he will pursue legislative change to the Northern Ireland Act.” Unionist Voice. 24 March. Retrieved from https://unionistvoice.com/news/exclusive-sir-jeffrey-donaldson-writes-for-unionist-voice-and-reveals-he-will-pursue-legislative-change-to-the-northern-ireland-act/

Fitzpatrick, P. (2022). “United Ireland debate.” Irish Times. Letter to the Editor. 7 April. Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/united-ireland-debate-1.4846246

Foster, J.W., and W.B. Smith (2021). “‘The Idea of the Union’.” Irish Times. Letter to the Editor. 22 December. Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/the-idea-of-the-union-1.4761276

Gallagher, N. (2022). “The misuse of the Good Friday Agreement in Ministerial protests over the Protocol.” History and Policy. 6 July. Retrieved from https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-misuse-of-the-good-friday-agreement-in-ministerial-protests-over-the-protocol

Gove, M. (2000). The Price of Peace: An analysis of British policy in Northern Ireland. London: Centre for Policy Studies. July. Retrieved from http://www.finfacts.ie/MichaelGove.pdf

Halliday, D., and N. Ferguson (2016). “When Peace is Not Enough: The Flag Protests, the Politics of Identity & Belonging in East Belfast.” Irish Political Studies 31:4 (December): 525-540.

Hansard. (1998). House of Commons Debates vol 316 cols 1188-223. 22 July. Retrieved from https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1998/jul/22/status-of-northern-ireland

Humphreys, R. (2009). Countdown to Unity: Debating Irish Reunification. Dublin and Portland: Irish Academic Press.

Humphreys, R. (2018). Beyond the Border: The Good Friday Agreement and Irish Unity after Brexit. Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Merrion Press.

Humphreys, R. (2021). “Cometh the Day.” Dublin Review of Books 139 (December): 1-17. Retrieved from https://drb.ie/articles/cometh-the-day/

INTERCOMM and J. Byrne (2013). Flags and Protests: Exploring the views, perceptions and experiences of people directly and indirectly affected by the flag protests. December. Retrieved from http://www.thedetail.tv/system/uploads/files/353/original/Report.pdf?1386858265

Kane, A. (2022a). “In reality, a border poll occupies Sinn Fein's every waking moment.” Irish News. 8 April. Retrieved from https://www.irishnews.com/paywall/tsb/irishnews/irishnews/irishnews//opinion/columnists/2022/04/08/news/alex-kane-in-reality-a-border-poll-occupies-sinn-fein-s-every-waking-moment-2635984/content.html

Kane, A. (2022b). “Mary Lou McDonald needs to understand unionist mindset and concerns.” Irish News. 22 April. Retrieved from https://www.irishnews.com/paywall/tsb/irishnews/irishnews/irishnews//opinion/columnists/2022/04/22/news/alex-kane-mary-lou-mcdonald-needs-to-understand-unionist-mindset-and-concerns-2648014/content.html

Kennedy, D. (1995). “The Realism of the Union.” in The Idea of the Union, 27-36.

Kennedy, D. (1999). “Politics of North-South Relations in Post-partition Ireland.” In The Northern Ireland Question: Nationalism, unionism and partition. ed. P.J. Roche and B. Barton, 71-96. Aldershot and Brookfield, USA: Ashgate.

Kennedy, D. (2005). “Nationalists must now abandon unity aspiration.” Irish Times. 31 October. Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/nationalists-must-now-abandon-unity-aspiration-1.1262125

Kennedy, D. (2009). “The Case against the Belfast Agreement.” In The Northern Ireland Question: The Peace Process and the Belfast Agreement. ed. B. Barton and P.J. Roche, 246-264. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

McCord, R. (2022). “Unionist people deserve better.” Irish News. Letter to the Editor. 17 January. Retrieved from https://www.irishnews.com/opinion/letterstotheeditor/2022/01/17/news/dup-s-brand-of-ourselves-alone-unionism-is-a-thing-of-the-past-2560634/

Moriarty, G. (2002). “Trimble says Republic is sectarian and pathetic.” Irish Times. 11 March. Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/news/trimble-says-republic-is-sectarian-and-pathetic-1.1053269

Morris, A. (2022). “Powderkeg of loyalist discontent threatening to erupt this summer.” Belfast Telegraph. 2 July. Factiva.

Murphy, A. (2022). “People are being targeted for delegitimization.” belfastmedia.com. 15 January. Retrieved from https://belfastmedia.com/people-are-being-targeted-for-delegitimization

Nolan, P., and D. Bryan, C. Dwyer, K. Hayward, K. Radford and P. Shirlow. (2014). The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest. December. Supported by the Community Relations Council & the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Ireland). Belfast: Queen’s University of Belfast. Retrieved from https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publications/the-flag-dispute-anatomy-of-a-protest

O’Dowd, L. (1998). “’New Unionism’, British Nationalism and the Prospects for a Negotiated Settlement in Northern Ireland.” In Rethinking Northern Ireland: Culture, Ideology and Colonialism. ed. D. Miller, 70-93. London and New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

O’Leary, B. (2022). “The precarious and the perfidious; Twenty-five succinct essays on the complex operation of the Northern Ireland protocol.” Irish Times. 19 March. Factiva.

Paisley, I. (2004). “Extracts from Speech by Ian Paisley, then leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), at the North Antrim DUP Association annual dinner, Saturday 27 November 2004.” CAIN. Retrieved from https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/dup/ip271104.htm

Patterson, H. (2004). “The Limits of ‘New Unionism’: David Trimble and the Ulster Unionist Party.” Éire-Ireland 39:1 & 2 (Spring-Summer): 163-188. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/170171

Patterson, H. (2012). “Unionism after Good Friday and St Andrews.” Political Quarterly 83:2 (April-June): 247-255.

Porter, N. (1996). Rethinking Unionism: An Alternative Vision for Northern Ireland. Belfast: Blackstaff Press.

RFJ. (2014). Relatives for Justice. “RFJ respond to SoS Progaganda [sic] Myths.” 16 April. Retrieved from https://www.relativesforjustice.com/rfj-respond-to-sos-progaganda-myths/

Roche, P.J. (1995). “Northern Ireland and Irish Nationalism,” in The Idea of the Union, 128-134.

Smith, W.B., and J.W. Foster (2021). “Our new book tries to fill the gap in expression of unionist views.” News Letter, Letter to the Editor. 29 July. Factiva.

Trimble, D. (1998). “David Trimble's Address at the Waterfront Hall, Belfast, Thursday 3 September 1998.” CAIN. Retrieved from https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/dt3998.htm

Unionist Voice. (various dates). Retrieved from https://unionistvoice.com/

Walker, B. (2017). “Playing party politics over Irish unity always backfires; History shows efforts to promote reunification: have resulted in more support for unionism.” Irish Times. 28 August. Factiva.

Watt, N. (1999). “Differing interpretations of Prime Minister's last-minute letter.” Guardian. 5 February. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/feb/05/northernireland.tonyblair

Wilson, J. (2018). “A Positive Challenge To Northern Ireland Nationalists.” The Pensive Quill. 27 February. Retrieved from https://www.thepensivequill.com/2018/02/a-positive-challenge-to-northern.html

📚 John Wilson Foster and William Beattie Smith (eds), The Idea of the Union: Great Britain and Northern Ireland—Realities and Challenges, 2021. Belcouver Press. ISBN-13: ‎978-0993560729

⏮ Mike Burke has lectured in Politics and Public Administration in Canada for over 30 years.

Retro Unionism

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)