Review: Constitutional change in Ireland will likely be slow, consensual and evolutionary, not quick, revolutionary or violent…

Now does my project gather to a head.
 My charms crack not, my spirits obey, and time
 Goes upright with his carriage.—How’s the day?

Prospero, Act 5, Scene 1

FOR AND AGAINST A UNITED IRELAND by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride, Royal Irish Academy, 170 pp, £18, 20th October ISBN 9781802050356

THESE DIVIDED ISLES: BRITAIN AND IRELAND PAST AND FUTURE by Philip Stephens, Faber and Faber, 274 pp, 28th August 2025

It’s rare I get sent a book worth the reading never mind a review. Much in the Northern Irish space is about the contested (and largely unknowable) history of our conflicted past rather than the future. But in recent weeks I’ve had two well worth the effort.

Each raids the past for insight but is not bound by it. Stephens cites the historian FSL Lyons’ observation that to “understand the past is to cease to live in it”. So this is a purposeful exploration of the past to find means to unlock the present and the future.

He traces Anglo Irish history from D’israeli’s speech on Ireland’s plight on the edge of the great famine in which talked about “a starving population, an absentee aristocracy and an alien Church” to Blair, Ahern and the “End of History” era of the 90s.

In the midst of the long journey of the republic whose prosperity is today a given in most discourses, Stephens notes how the south was so unprepared and unanchored from the north that in the tumult of 1969, Jack Lynch called for the UN to intervene.

With exceptions (like the Lemass O’Neill meeting in 1965) the two parts of the island had followed a separate development that led to a huge amount of divergence between the two spaces. Even Corn Flakes packets looked and felt different to the touch.

Both men in their way represented a turn away from the traditions of their respective spaces. Stephens references Macmillan who said that the rebels of the revolution “now enjoy the most conservative, clericalist and reactionary government in Europe”.

In part what paved the way for such rapprochement was on one hand Lemass’s determination that unity could only “rest on firm and unshakable economic foundations” which dovetailed with O’Neill’s ambition to modernise NI’s industrial base.

On Fianna Fáil’s return to government in October 1961 Lemass had decided to take on the IRA and effectively wrap up its Border Campaign within a year by firing up the Special Criminal Court to arrest and detain members of the organisation.

Whilst he denounced IRA’s violent campaign largely against the RUC as  hindering the cause of unity he, like O’Neill in the north, did not have universal support of his own party. A problem that later became fatal to the Northern Irish Prime Minister.

When the conflict ended both places had changed utterly. The reforms initiated by Lemass matured, and as Stephens notes “autarky had made way for openness”. Secondary education (available to a few until 1966) had helped transform the economy.

In Northern Ireland fair employment reforms that few paid attention to in the 70s (in part because of the violent foreground but also because of enormity of the problem) worked over time to remodel the career opportunities of the Catholic middle class.

This period of transformation in both jurisdictions is only lightly covered in either book. Yet it is hard to understand the paradoxes that beset the unity question in Ireland today without accounting for the social and economic changes in this period.

The genius of the O’Toole/McBride book lies in the simple geometry of forcing each author to look at the question from a view obverse to those traditionally held by the societies from which they’ve emerged: it’s a luxury rarely afforded in Irish discourse.

O’Toole, the older of the two by a whole generation, has been a senior narrator of Irish liberal thought both at home as a regular contributor to the Irish Times since his mid twenties, and overseas to The Guardian and the New York Review of Books.

McBride is very much a journalist of the post conflict era who cut his teeth writing for one of the longest continuously running daily newspapers in the world, the Belfast News Letter, once a voice for the united Irishmen, now the unionist paper of choice.

Each brings a different perspective both in generational terms and their respective world view points through four essays that asks each author to cast an empathic eye on both the case of unity of the island then to treat its counterpart similarly.

What emerges is a rare act of political generosity that allows each to explore commonplace assumptions through an unfamiliar lens. Unlike much work in this space there are no assumptions about which outcome the reader will swing towards either way.

For my money the better pieces at the away games for each of them, with gems such as Fintan’s “there is an enormous gap between wishing and doing” and the south’s pre-occupation with its own ongoing struggles with growth and development.

The years of separation means that in spite of the direction of travel the secularisation of the south’s education system has slowed to a glacial speed. There are other profound divergences in health, government and many institutional ways of working.

Sam’s advocacy for a united Ireland is full of truth telling. He doesn’t pretend that the Republic is a foreign place as was often the case amongst unionist friends of my during the Troubles. Distilled in this way a UI is just potential future destination.

There is a strong critique of what went wrong in the past in Northern Ireland, and the tangible change now abroad in the south towards John Hume’s idea of “extraordinary diversity – for a small island we are probably one of the most diverse in the world”.

It’s refreshing to hear each take up cudgels on behalf of “the other”, and not for its own sake, but for the insight it brings to lazy conventional thinking. So Fintan to point out that there is nothing “natural about nations”. And no future is inevitable.