Thoughts on the John Taylor interview…

I have just read Alex Kane’s interview with John Taylor in The Irish News and the ensuing posts on Slugger by Arnold Carlton and Mick Fealty. The lede of it all was Taylor’s statement: “… the reality that there is going to be a united Ireland.” Beneath this big prediction is Taylor’s criticism of political unionism since his own involvement in the mid-1960’s out of which he offers advice to present day political unionism i.e. start having conversations about unification in order to play a role in shaping the unification that occurs. Given that John Taylor is a unionist, it is defeatist – a call to make the best united-Ireland terms available. But it can also be viewed as of the same feather as his fellow County Armagh man Seamus Mallon’s statement that 50+1 is not the basis for a successful unification. If unionists followed Taylor’s advice and nationalists followed Mallon’s, would we not, in the knowledge that the future is promised to no one, be able to stop worrying and hoping about the future and create some political space for improving our present? Mallon, this is only a personal view, struck me as impressive in a way that Taylor did not – we who grew up in the 1980’s and 1990’s are allowed to prefer one to the other because night after night on the local news it was Mallon, Taylor and a handful of others who wearily responded to the often horrific events of the day with condemnations of violence and appeals for calm that, to give credit where credit is due, were important to hear and helped to sustain the very large centre of people who may have been thoroughly riddled with prejudice, bitterness and most faults imaginable but possessed the power to be peaceful.

Along with his prediction that unity is inevitable, Taylor’s comments were implicitly self-critical of his long career but Kane (another Armagh man) gets some explicit, naked mea culpas from Taylor. On the question of being, on occasion, a not so sneaking regarder of loyalist paramilitarism and of making other baleful comments Kane asked, “Are you conceding that your language has, at times, been both crass and offensive?” “I am,” said Taylor. So there it is. Comments about Leo Varadkar’s ethnicity and other off-beat Twitter comments in his retirement, one guesses, were also retracted when Taylor lamented unionism’s inability to reach out to migrants.

More fundamental of Taylor’s reflection of his own role in political history was the admission that Brian Faulkner was right all along – that Faulkner answered the failings Taylor identified, specifically that Unionism should accept political change, that unionism should reach out to nationalists, that unionism should build a broad coalition, that, to take it a little further, late-stage Faulkner was the unionist equivalent of Micheál Martin’s Shared Initiative strategy. Famously, Seamus Mallon once noted that the GFA was Sunningdale for slow learners and Taylor fits that denomination because Faulkner desperately needed Taylor’s support for power-sharing and didn’t get it. Make no mistake that Taylor’s criticism of unionism is self-criticism too.

Taylor made other points: the British government and people aren’t committed or even interested in the union and the DUP and Ian Paisley harmed the union. It is worth noting that Taylor, who tacked to the harder pole of the old Unionist Party for most of his career, expressed no understanding of Paisley: “He was bad news for Northern Ireland – and whether the deal with McGuinness was a genuine change of heart, I have no idea.” For about half of the unionist electorate, ’twas ever thus. And for those who are constitutional unionists by default but don’t vote Unionist, such as descendants of Faulknerites or those in that 20% bloc who are (possibly) unionist by default or inertia, Taylor’s inability to understand Paisleyism is amplified. And as for John Taylor’s change of heart, which is perhaps even more radical than Paisley’s, and arriving, like Paisley’s, when the hour is late, is it genuine? I have no idea.

To misappropriate Yeats, Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, Mick Fealty’s put it in the grave. But the ghosts are alive and well. Mick’s piece redirects to what Taylor’s morose inevitability did not do. It goes to the 20% voting bloc that doesn’t vote capital U or capital N (cue a lot of comments about Alliance voters’ second preferences), to the persistent gap between the declining Unionist vote on the one hand and the static UI polling on the other, and especially to how nationalism should approach getting NI and the island from where it is now to a place where unification can be achieved. In my own opinion, Micheál Martin’s Shared Island Initiative might work because it is not (too?) frightening to capital U’s and certainly not frightening to the 20% bloc that seems to default to small u whereas the Sinn Fein approach – the romantic Ireland approach with a fig leaf or two – has problems for both those groups. Just as Faulkner could not even get a John Taylor to support his vision, the comment section responding to Mick’s post shows the difficulties of breaking the wheels out of the deep romantic ruts that carry us along. What Taylor might have said, and what capital U’s might do, in the spirit of Arnold Carlton’s different path, is match the spirit and approach of the Shared Island Initiative by working to create an NI that doesn’t pretend to an antique romantic Protestant Ulster but commits to a functioning, well (or at least earnestly) governed polity for all. Taylor might have articulated an NI that is involved in the island, that accepts that there are, in fact, many United Ireland’s outside of the constitutional question, such as the island’s natural ecosystems, such as the GAA and the rugby team, such as an emerging all island transport system, and let that alternative form of unionism, in Mick’s words, “speak for itself.”