Sixty years on from Lemass-O’Neill, actions are beginning to speak louder than words

“When people begin to work together it’s a habit that will grow.”

― Seán Lemass

“In the spring,
at the end of the day,
you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood

During a week which has been understandably dominated by the conviction of Jeffrey Donaldson, one important piece of news slipped under the radar: the announcement of a number of new funding lines under the Irish government’s Shared Island Initiative which takes its commitment overall to €1 billion between this year and 2030. A bit more than a drop in the ocean.

The change over my lifetime has been profound. When Sean Lemass (whose memoir I’m currently in the middle of reading). came into the Taoiseach’s office in June 1959 (a month before my birthday) Dublin had a deeply embedded protectionist regime in place against trade with Belfast and the rest of the Northern Ireland. Over the next seven years he sparked profound change.

As with DeValera, Fianna Fáil left policy on Northern Ireland entirely to its leader to decide. In that October, in a speech at Oxford, Lemass laid out his core thinking: later to be published as One Nation. In it, he laid out a number of key principles, the most important of which (and the one that lasted longest), was that NI Protestants could not be coerced into a United Ireland.

This is something northern nationalism has been slow to warm to. At the time Lemass was laying out these high minded thoughts in the south, where power was fought over between Dev’s Fianna Fáil and ragbag coalition of others, Northern Ireland had put in forty years as a single party unionist state which would by the end of decade unceremoniously and tragically explode.

Sixty years on and the protectionist border Lemass inherited has dissolved. And the principle he set out at Oxford, has quietly become the operating assumption of the whole Shared Island enterprise: cooperation offered without precondition, benefits without constitutional strings. In this regard the most telling item in this commitment is not the rail money or a cleaner lough.

Cricket is a sports whose demographics run against the grain. In Northern Ireland it has historically been played by people of a largely Protestant background. In the South it is followed and played by Catholics. The rise of the Ireland team, competing at World Cups and beating Test nations, has lifted its profile well beyond the enthusiasts. Its flag consists of only shared symbols.

So the €3.5 million from the Irish Government toward redeveloping the Stormont ground for the 2030 T20 World Cup, is matched by £3.5 million from Stormont’s Department for Communities with £1 million each from Cricket Ireland and the host sports association, shows the logic of the whole initiative in miniature: with important benefits to both jurisdictions.

Doing it together makes more sense than doing it apart.

The largest single item in the €377 million package is the €228 million committed to the Derry, Belfast and Dublin rail corridor: which track renewal, continuation of the hourly Enterprise service, and the works north of Dublin to allow Enterprise trains to by pass commuter services and bring the Belfast to Dublin journey under two hours.

Earlier southern planning exercises, the National Spatial Strategy of the early 2000s being a good example, were full of overarching ambition but since it was cast on a single grand plan, much of its proposals were never implemented and what was completed simply stopped at the border. Synergies were not so much ignored as completely designed out of the system.

By contrast Shared Island starts through small, deliverable pilots that track what’s possible/desireable. It treats Northern Ireland not as an extension of Irish sovereign territory, as per the old language of Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution (amended under the terms of the Belfast  Agreement), but as a hinterland of the Southern state worth investing in on its own terms.

The Derry to Dublin upgrade will be a substantial gain for north east Donegal, a part of the Republic since partition has long been better connected to Derry and the rest of Northern Ireland than it was to its own capital. Finally, the money is there on the table and an imperative to start getting the work done rather than just talking and blaming someone else for it not getting done.

What people in Northern Ireland are not seeing, is the importance of the governance model that drives these decisions. The initiative sits in the Taoiseach’s office (the equivalent in the UK would be the Cabinet office). This is not simply so that the most senior minister in government can drive it, but this is where the government’s agenda is chosen and driven each year.

So each department in Dublin is asked to find elements of its programme, that have a north south component, and each will have a ministerial champion. So rail sits with Darragh O’Brien of Fianna Fáil, who holds the combined transport and climate brief in Dublin, working opposite the Sinn Féin Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins.

Lough Neagh and the Ulster Canal fall to the Fianna Fáil Housing and Heritage Minister James Browne, whose counterpart is Andrew Muir of Alliance at the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs. Health cooperation links Fine Gael’s Jennifer Carroll MacNeill with the Ulster Unionist Mike Nesbitt.

Childcare connects Fianna Fáil minister Norma Foley the DUP Education Minister Paul Givan. Cricket and community run through Fine Gael’s Patrick O’Donovan and DUP Communities Minister Gordon Lyons. Enterprise and digital skills strands tie the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil ministers Peter Burke and James Lawless to Sinn Féin Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald.

This political spread matters as much as the detail of each project. These are not nationalist ministers quietly receiving Dublin’s cash. DUP, Ulster Unionist and Alliance ministers are delivery partners, which makes any lazy reading of the fund as a purely nationalist project very hard to sustain. It’s a powerful strategic use of Strand Two of the institutions of the Belfast Agreement.

It is also worth being clear about where the good ideas come from. The Lough Neagh catchment programme came out of sustained, unshowy contact between civil servants on both sides of the border, the kind of working relationship that spots a small but real problem and engineers a way through it: a dividend of continuous contact rather than political theatre.

In this the initiative recalls the cross border cooperation that flourished, briefly, during the last big thaw. In 1965 Taoiseach Seán Lemass travelled to Stormont to meet the Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, the first such meeting since partition. The visit was arranged not by politicians but by two senior civil servants, Ken Whitaker and Jim Malley.

For a few years afterwards the two administrations cooperated cautiously on tourism, trade and electricity before the Troubles closed that experiment down. The Shared Island Fund is an attempt to recover that practical, problem solving spirit, this time on the firmer ground of the Good Friday Agreement rather than the goodwill of two well meaning individuals.

And yet Unionists are cautious about the scope of this funding. When money flows one way from a government whose constitutional aspiration is well known, vigilance is better than paranoia. Unionist ministers should be able to stand in front of their own voters and sell the tangible results as goods in themselves, and all delivered without constitutional strings attached.

And from a nationalist point of view, the initiative cannot work as a Trojan horse, and nor should it try to be one. Its credibility rests entirely on the benefits being mutual and offered without precondition. The moment it is seen to carry a hidden constitutional invoice, it fails on its own terms. Its strength is that it asks nothing in return but cooperation.

There is also a leadership opportunity here for Northern nationalism. Having called for power sharing and having done so much to shape those institutions, nationalism now has the chance to follow the Irish Government’s lead and show that it can and will use those institutions to make Northern Ireland a better place to live for all its people, unionist and nationalist alike.

That is a more convincing argument for the ongoing political value of the historic Belfast Agreement than any number of impassioned but ultimately bloodless speeches.

The thread from Lemass runs straight to Micheál Martin, whose initiative this is. He has leant heavily the same core principle: ie, that unionists cannot be coerced and cooperation must earn its keep in practical benefit. Where Lemass had goodwill and two civil servants, Martin has a billion euro and his whole cabinet.