Why are Sinn Féin and the SDLP so poor at furthering the unification issue in the south of Ireland?

Ben M is a slugger reader from Dublin

Support for unification has advanced, at best, modestly in 21st-century Northern Ireland. The percentage of people who want it straight away rarely seems to deviate from the 30-40% range that it was in the late 20th century. What has changed is a growing middle ground of people who might consider saying yes to it in the right circumstances. The growth of this middle ground shows in other ways. For example, they are less interested in voting along sectarian lines and more likely to identify as Northern Irish, instead of British or Irish.

There are many indications in polling that enough of these middle-ground voters could be persuaded to vote yes in a border poll under the right circumstances to pass the 50% threshold in a border poll comfortably. What are these ‘right circumstances’? The simplest answer is if they get attractive and reassuring answers on bread-and-butter economic issues in post-UI Ireland. Taxes, pensions, the health service, and so on.

Of all the players in the UI issue – Unionists, Nationalists, and the British and Irish governments. There is only one who can answer these questions – the Irish government. Two facts logically follow from this. First – UI can’t happen until the Irish state answers these questions. Secondly, the Irish state persuading enough middle-ground NI voters with attractive answers to bread-and-butter economic questions is the ONLY realistic route to UI happening. As well as being the only realistic route to UI happening, all the signs are it’s achievable. Recent decades have seen most of these bread-and-butter economic issues decline in NI under the UK’s stewardship, while (except housing) it has been the opposite story south of the border.

This brings me to this article’s point – why are Sinn Féin and the SDLP so poor at advancing the UI issue via this route?

SF is the official opposition in the south – why don’t they leverage this fact more? As the official opposition, don’t they have enough standing to elicit concrete information from Irish government departments? Can’t they get the Irish Department of Finance to provide provisional information on what health or education spending might look like in a UI?

I understand the Irish state’s commitment to the post-peace process arrangements. They were hard work to gain, and their importance was recently reinforced with partners like the EU and the US in the aftermath of Brexit. Still, why can’t SF & the SDLP at least get the Irish state to talk about the possibility of UI in tandem? Irish politicians are fond of saying they believe UI will happen in their lifetimes, why can’t SF & the SDLP pin them down to even talking about distant timeframes in the 2030s?

SF is likely 18 months away from coalition formation talks in Dublin. Why don’t they make more of this? Why don’t they have a series of UI position papers on what they will want in those coalition talks? It would force all the other southern parties to debate these issues and have positions on them.

If they could advance measures like this, SF & the SDLP have every chance of turning more and more middle-ground NI voters to yes voters, because they’ll be giving them the one thing that is holding them back now – concrete answers and facts.

Northern nationalists have to “win” a border poll before the British government will even consider holding one. The Secretary of State must think it is “likely” to be won before it is held. The path to this first win seems crystal clear. Get the Irish state to provide concrete details on bread and butter post-UI questions, and thus get NI polls consistently showing enough middle-ground voters saying yes to UI on that basis.

Which brings me back at the end of this article to its title. Why are SF & the SDLP missing so many opportunities and possibilities to follow this route to UI?