Last time I met Garret FitzGerald was in Dublin airport. He was on his way to London, but when I asked him what for, his guard came up and he deftly waved the conversation onto other things. A lifetime in the cut and thrust of what Seamus Brennan famously called the senior hurling of Irish politics made him wary of anyone even vaguely associated with the media.
FitzGerald was unusual for a southern political leader (and indeed a former Irish Taoiseach) of either major party in that he had almost native understanding of Irish politics north of the border. His lasting contribution to the architecture of the peace was the Anglo Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher, which shaped the landscape for the peace process that was to follow.
He was the embodiment of constructive constitutionalism, putting him in line with Lemass, Jack Lynch and latterly Bertie Ahern, all of whom he knew well, even if they adhered to a different political tradition from him. He had a good political brain and took to the hard work of bringing reconciliation to seemingly irreconcilable warring factions, north and south, earnestly.
So I guess it is no coincidence that this week his party, Fine Gael, has taken the opportunity to launch a new initiative to get ready its approach to the question of how to bring about a united Ireland in time for its Ard Fheis in the autumn. Simon Harris says he wants the blueprint to demonstrate constitutional ambition via patient institution-building rather than triumphalism.
The choice of Professor Deirdre Heenan to facilitate the work demonstrates a degree of seriousness. Heenan is no flag-waver. She co-chaired the UK Labour Party’s Heenan-Anderson Commission on poverty and social exclusion in Northern Ireland, and sat on a major review of the North’s health and social care system. She also serves on the Irish President’s Council of State.
It promises to examine the questions unity advocates have ducked for years: the fiscal cost, the future of public services, all-island infrastructure, labour mobility, EU market access. It promises genuine progress, although the time to judge will be at its launched in the autumn. But any sensible approach will seek to build on Fianna Fáil’s Shared Island Initiative.
And yet preparation is not persuasion. Unity’s first real world acid test is not just whether it can persuade people to leave the UK (which is where most recent nationalist rhetoric on the subject seems to have stranded itself) but to take a chance on a state that is both culturally familiar yet politically foreign to a majority of those who live in Northern Ireland.
Take the reaction of the new UUP leader, Jon Burrows, who dismissed the plan as a “pet project” and pointedly recalled that the Republic amended Articles 2 and 3 to drop its territorial claim. The old articles were a claim; the revised ones reframe unity as as a political project that has to be actively, democratically won. Something wider nationalism has barely begun to internalise.
So a blueprint alone is not enough. The unaligned middle, that growing bloc who identify as neither unionist nor nationalist, are conspicuously unmoved by blue-sky constitutional thinking. The census now shows three major groups, not two. religious background no longer maps onto voting patters. Even Catholic support for unity has rarely reliably topped sixty per cent.
Here Micheál Martin’s quieter approach deserves more credit than it gets. The Taoiseach prefers careful, shared research into problems both parts of the island face, followed by targeted investment to bring lives closer through infrastructure, health, the Dublin–Belfast corridor. It risks looking timid beside the rhetoric of imminent referendums. But it yields concrete results.
The newly published Seán Lemass: The Lost Memoir (ed. Ronan McGreevy, Ériu) offers a striking precedent. Lemass recalled John A. Costello’s 1949 declaration of the Republic — when Costello also announced that partition would end within three months — and dismissed it as…
…just play acting and, if anything, making the situation worse than it had been, because the natural reaction of the unionists in the North was a consolidation of hostility. That is why I always felt that anything of that kind would make partition more permanent, more secure than anything else – you could not break it down this way.
Every “set a date” demand is the modern echo of Costello’s gesture. The grand declaration hardens the hostility it means to dissolve. Convergence — making unity feel less like a leap and more like the formalisation of a life already shared, and it helps to minimise any perceived loss. And loss is what the persuadable middle fear most.
Which brings us to Sinn Féin, whose strategy, viewed from a distance, may be the strangest of all. After many years of being billed as unity’s chief political advocate, the party has yet to table a proposal of its own for what a united Ireland would look like. Its policy is two-pronged: demand a border poll, and demand that everyone else produce the vision first.
Nor can you set out a blue print without asking those you want to persuade to come to the table to tell you what they want: a key flaw in both the Ireland’s Future’s faltering campaign and the SDLP’s efforts in the same space. That may just be reflective of how switched off non committed voters are to whole conversation about constitutional futures as any flaw in the design itself.
The middle ground has be persuaded into a united Ireland. And you can’t do that by telling them the arithmetic is already on your side. In contrast, the wisdom of FitzGerald’s generation of constructive constitutionalists was that the cause must not just be right but also attractive, so that people want what is on offer rather than simply running out of alternatives. Listening is a superpower.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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