With regard to the Republican’s shellacking in Texas there’s an interesting element (in a multifaceted range of reasons as to why the cliff edge there was so steep) there that we could take notice of with regard to our own situation in Northern Ireland.
Political strategists like to look for groups within its own support whose numbers are rising, assume that future votes are in the bag, then build a strategy around that forecast. In a world of volatile electorates taking any group as read is a dangerous game.
In Texas, Republican mapmakers have learnt the hard way. As Mike Madrid noted on The Bulwark podcast a few days ago, Trump read shifts among Hispanic voters as a lasting realignment, and its congressional districts were redrawn accordingly.
What he called a “dummymander” or “gerrymasacre” of the five redrawn seats that could fall to the Democrats. In a district redrawn to give Trump a 15-point margin on 2024 numbers, the Tejano singer Bobby Pulido won his seat by 24.6-points.
Madrid saw the same error in the Obama-era confidence in that thought-ending phrase: demographics is destiny. In both cases the mistake was believing that demography (which is good at telling us what has happened) can predict how people will vote.
Much of the constitutional debate is exposed to the same error. The 2021 census delivered a symbolic moment: for the first time, people from a Catholic background (45.7%) outnumbered those from a Protestant or other Christian background (43.5%). Twenty years earlier the figures ran the other way, 53.1% to 43.8%. Too many have been tempted to read that as a countdown.
Whilst just ten per cent of pro unity voters won’t vote for nationalist parties, some 30% of the remain UK vote refuse to vote for explicitly pro union parties. Furthermore Remain UK voters are far more likely to give personality a priority over party identity than nationalist voters. This is one of the key factors that’s creating the current crisis of confidence within unionism.
Whilst veteran DUP figures like East Londonderry MP Gregory Campbell have acknowledged the 40-40-20 triple minority fact of life in Northern Ireland, his party has struggled to align its 20 plus years of dominance of unionist politics to this new reality.
Like many incumbents (much like the US Republican party in Red states) its relaxation into a tactical game, which relies on the idea its base vote had nowhere else to go, made it too easy to be dragged back to the Protestant only politics of its own origins.
As a result of the DUP’s loss of the First Minister’s job, probably for the foreseeable future, unionism has now freed itself enough to start a three way battle for its own destiny for the first time since the watershed Assembly elections of 2003.
This doesn’t make demography irrelevant. But past numbers cannot substitute for asking what people want, what they fear and what they might support. The Texas example challenges the idea of treating past trends as a proxy for future consent.
And yet (with the pressure off to capture the purely cosmetic role of First Minister) there’s a new diversification of view within the unionist sector which is allowing more material questions to arise within NI’s new evolving matrix of hybrid identities.
The, as yet unelected, leader of the UUP Jon Burrows’ offer to debate the future of Northern Ireland with its First Minister remains unanswered, putting a real question against the oft repeated assertion that unionists refuse to engage (more later).
Billy Kelleher made a related point on a Talkback panel this week, warning that without change in the here and now, a border poll will run as a sectarian headcount. Since the future cannot be read off a census table, so it must be prepared for now.
This is the case for the body Micheál Martin, announced last week. Each of its three scenarios can be tested against similar questions and, if properly funded, with a consistency that research commissioned for the advocacy of one outcome cannot offer.
The reasons why this is not a rival plan for unity is may be drawn from how Ireland’s Future has gone from filling the Waterfront to a hall in Banbridge. Its more confident assertions has created a blowback prompting unionists to fact check it.
As Shirlow stresses in the Irish News today:
It was the ‘soft’ side of the pro-UK community that unity campaigners thought would be so shocked at Brexit and the toxicity of unionism that they would shift constitutional sides.
Alas, the latte-sipping types have remained constitutionally rooted. That campaigning has instead awakened that diverse group who presently oppose Irish unity.
Unity advocates have, through their one-sided assertions and lack of caution, bonded a fractured group, from the uber-liberal to the bowler-hatted, around arguments for Northern Ireland to remain within the UK.
The launch of RenewNI typifies that awakening among a young group of pro-union thinkers who are pluralists and well-equipped to make compelling arguments for Northern Ireland remaining within the UK.
That galvanising of pro-UK sentiment and argument led a desire to engage front and centre in constitutional debates.
All evidence cuts both ways, which is why prediction is such a risky game. Faced with real uncertainty, the Taoiseach has not performed a U-Turn as Denis Bradley confidently asserts, but in learning lessons from nationalism’s history of failure, is (in line with Articles 2 and 3) preparing for several futures as the only constitutional (and resilient) way forward on shared island.
The Belfast Agreement puts consent at its centre: constitutional change depends on the choice of the people. As co-guarantor, the Irish Government can only prepare for each outcome the Agreement provides for, while respecting that one core principle.
A balanced process, open to participation and respectful of identity, is central to the Agreement: a state run campaign for a single result wouldn’t. Rather than turning its back on those who are not in favour of a united Ireland Martin’s embrace of what the Easter Proclamation termed ‘all the children of the nation’ is the only intellectually honest approach to an all island future.
Martin’s credibility will rest on how well the body operates, ensuringeach future face similar questions on the economy, healthcare, pensions, policing, security, public services, identity and the cost of transition. Yet Sinn Féin’s failed July proposals for a Green paper and a “dummymandered” citizens assembly (ie, without unionist input) look lame by comparison.
The new body’s assumptions and uncertainties should be published and publicly tested so wholly partisan forecasts are never again mistaken for irreducable facts. It must avoid Sinn Féin’s modern Parnellite folly and make sure that unionist arguments for their own preferrred outcomes are given full reign, and for those who fit in neither camp. None of which will be easy.
Gavin Robinson was dismissive, saying an “Ireland of equals” is “for the birds”, citing the vilification of Heather Humphreys in the south (where Sinn Féin’s own demography is destiny line has found a very willing audience among opposition parties), arguing that she was considered unsuitable for the Irish presidency simply because she had relatives in the Orange Order.
Yet Shirlow notes that while party-based unionism has stayed out of the debate, many pro-union people have not. An evidence base that cannot hear them (as a citizens’ assembly around one position only would do), or treats a whole section of the island’s population as unworthy, and will persuade no one. Shirlow finishes by noting:
Pro-unity campaigners’ experience of debate with unionists and others who asked serious questions was exposure to weakness of the unity argument, leading to advocates sulking off to self-imposed exile while falsely claiming that unionists did not want to engage, when in fact they did and increasingly do.
The taoiseach has opened a path to engage on equal terms and in so doing is showing parity of esteem and mutual respect for all constitutional positions. He is doing the opposite of sulking off.
No community on the island exists on its own terms alone. Each is shaped by all others, which is why the only honest preparation is one that holds every future to the same scrutiny and listens to everyone who would have to live in it.
That is not a liberal nicety but a strategic reality. One-sided campaigns break down on contact with the sceptical folk they need to win. The Taoiseach’s approach is founded on a clear understanding of how the exclusionary tactics of the past failed.
By drawing every side into the conversation, it can create ground on which an inclusive future may actually be earned.
“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
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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