Moderate Irish Nationalism is talking at Unionists, not with Unionists, and that will set us all back.

Philip Wilson is a Belfast-based writer who is involved in Northern Irish politics. He has a Master’s in Politics from King’s College London

When Irish Nationalists like Simon Coveney and Matthew O’Toole suggest that Brexit, and not the protocol, is the problem, they deny Unionists their full place in the United Kingdom and implicitly dilute the vote of Unionists as full citizens of the UK. In no sense can this be interpreted as in the spirit of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, but the same figures continue to namedrop the agreement in the hope that it’ll provide enough cover for the conscious decision to break it — which I will come to later.

What’s more, post-Brexit a section of Nationalism has — as Patrick Murphy eloquently set out in the Irish News — reverted to a soft-sectarianism which has much time for warm platitudes, little for listening and engagement, and is prone to defaulting to a lecture to Unionists (usually via the not quite representative proxy of the DUP) that they get over the protocol because Unionists are to blame for this situation. Why? Because a majority of Unionists had the temerity to vote for Brexit. I confess, as a remainer, I am not among their number, but there is more than a hint in tone, when this stock finger-wagging lecture is regurgitated, that Brexit is Unionism’s ‘original sin’. I often see it wheeled out by people who have no answers to Unionist concerns, so they drop it in and move the topic onto the sin that Brexit is happening at all. As much as I still disagree with it, Unionists had every right to campaign to leave the EU and to expect their rights to be respected. Nonetheless, this refusal to honestly engage with those Unionist concerns about the protocol feels like a tacit acknowledgement that this protocol cannot stand on its own merits as a respectful Brexit solution for the Unionist community, along with the rights of Unionists under the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

For my part – as is the case with a growing section in our wee country – I feel more Northern Irish more than British or Irish, and I have some sense of European identity. I voted remain for a series of reasons: hard-headed economic facts, listening to the concerns of Nationalists about the North/South dimension of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, a sense – albeit not with raw enthusiasm – of Europeanism, geopolitical influence and some solidarity with other European nations. None of that is to say that I voted remain without misgivings, which included the overreach of bodies like the ECJ, the Franco-German carve ups away from smaller EU member states, the calamity of the Troika’s policy across the EU after the crash, the absence of transparency and democracy in European institutions, and the social dissent that the post-crash rise European immigration was causing the UK. However, when all else is stripped away, Nationalists cannot justify how a Remain/Leave vote on “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” can justify the emaciation of east-west relationships and Northern Ireland being left as a European satellite without real representation in the laws that it will follow. We can already see the early outworking’s of this in Unionism as pressure is being placed on North/South relationships, the DUP’s line has hardened – against Arlene Foster’s instincts — and Jim Allister’s TUV is thriving in the latest polls.

With all this in place, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that we saw the beginnings of a compromise attitude after Brexit as Martin McGuinness and Arlene Foster came together to put forward a joint declaration to Theresa May about Northern Ireland’s Brexit considerations. The TUV’s Jim Allister has since objected to this as a sign of concession that Northern Ireland should be any different to the rest of the UK, but it pointed towards a goodwill, compromise and mutual respect that has long since evaporated.

Counting on Sinn Féin to uphold that approach would be naïve, but we ought to expect more from of the SDLP and moderate Irish Nationalism more generally. Colum Eastwood’s “dial down” the rhetoric calls in recent days lacks the moral authority of a Seamus Mallon after he opportunistically pivoted – before retreating – after the Brexit vote towards border poll advocacy. Likewise, Colum Eastwood’s recent warning of a protocol-based threat to power-sharing [5] was yet another sign that even the SDLP’s leadership is in no mood for listening and engaging with Unionism. Instead, it — along with Alliance and the Green Party — is leaning into an almost biblical attitude of reverence for this protocol as the only means forward. It is not lost on me that there is a echo of the Paisleyite “Never” approach in this ‘my way or the high way’ comfort zone attitude.

With all that said, it’s not just that SDLP Nationalists aren’t listening as the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is breached; they helping to destroy what their party’s best, in Seamus Mallon and John Hume, understood: the process of peace isn’t legal document or a technical fix; the foundational lessons are that it has to be based on mutual respect of traditions and their rights, a series of relationships across North/South and east-west, and in developing and fostering good faith across communities so that we can come together. Colum Eastwood’s approach couldn’t contrast more with Seamus Mallon’s parting plea for parallel consent mechanisms in committing to deep cross-community engagement for shared solutions in choosing a future. I must caveat that I’ve found some people in the SDLP, including thoughtful commentators such as Gareth Brown , to be more committed to reconciliation and genuine engagement than I sometimes see in the Alliance Party. Regrettably, the quite green political views of Colum Eastwood are a world apart from the compromise, engagement and listening instincts that we saw from the likes of Gerry Fitt, Seamus Mallon and John Hume. Those figures understood the proverb that it is easier to tear down than to build, and that uniting peoples was more important than focusing on united land.

As we’ve heard this week from economic experts at Ulster University and Queen’s University Belfast, the protocol will be enormously economically costly and painful because of our embedded supply chains and trade with the rest of the UK [8]. That may not matter enough to the people who treat the EU’s stance and this protocol as an article of faith, but it’s quite a potent cocktail alongside Unionism’s refusal to consent, the breach of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and the rupture of Northern Ireland from the Act of Union’s safeguards on trade within the union. Returning to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement — as promised — in the past week alone, the leading UK constitutional expert, Vernon Bogdanor, and the — man whose career is defined by compromise — Unionist leader for the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, David Trimble, have both laid out a compelling case as to how the protocol breaches the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Included in Bogdanor’s assessment, among other things, is that it deprives Northern Irish citizens “of their equal citizenship”. Similarly, Trimble explains that:

“under the Protocol, the laws governing 60 per cent of economic activity in Northern Ireland would no longer be made at Westminster or by the devolved Assembly, but by an outside law-making body, the EU, and those laws would be subject to interpretation by a non-UK court, clearly the constitutional position of Northern Ireland would be changed without the consent of the people of Northern Ireland as required by the GFA.”

It should go without saying that David Trimble’s opening comment that “the Protocol clearly rips the Good Friday Agreement apart” should jar with a section of Nationalists.

Unfortunately, it speaks to the lack of cross-community good faith that political Nationalism doesn’t appear interested in seriously engaging with Bogdanor’s constitutional expertise or the moral authority that Trimble’s arguments, and proposed solutions, hold. To my mind, senior Nationalists won’t engage with these points because they’re well aware that Unionism is being ridden roughshod over — in a manner that they know that they wouldn’t tolerate. Bouyed by the backing and clout of the EU and the White House, some leading Nationalist voices in Ireland have calculated that the spirit of listening and compromise is all well and good until — at a time that it is most needed — that requires real restraint, empathy and compromise to the Unionist tradition. If Nationalism was to go that extra Mallon mile then it would do more for NI-ROI relations, cross-community goodwill and the advancement of the peace process than any number of warm speeches could ever hope to achieve.

The culmination of these points is that the communities here are increasingly on a collision course, the peace agreement is being torn up in spirit and letter, and the pre-requisite good faith that the peace process must build off is in real decline. By no means do I have a silver bullet to this — albeit, Trimble’s proposals are worth taking seriously — but I leave it simply that peace, reconciliation and advances will never be built on disrespecting the Unionist tradition by imposing this on them, and no amount of legal or political demands can change that. For the sake of our joint future, it’s time that moderate Irish Nationalists rediscover that compromise and empathetic approach that Seamus Mallon intuitively grasped. If you’ll pardon the pun, I’ll never say never, but I won’t hold my breath.

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