Latest opinion poll moves Irish unity to the back burner

If we are to believe the results of an important new opinion poll, the reunification of Ireland looks to be further away than its proponents would like us to believe. It is over the hills and far away. 

Anxiety, amounting to fear of the consequences, among the Catholic community has put a spoke in the unity wheel. Though nationalists – nearly all of Catholic heritage – are moving into the majority in Northern Ireland, enough of them are concerned about the impact of such a fundamental shift, including the likelihood of a Loyalist backlash, to give them pause.

Asked in a large-scale Irish Times/Ipsos poll how they would respond if there was a referendum on unification, 55 per cent of Catholics said they would vote in favour, but 21 per cent said they would not, while the rest either didn’t know or had better things to think about. 

Protestants, less surprisingly, stood firmly in the unionist camp. Only 4 per cent of respondents favoured unity. Of the rest, 79 per cent would vote to retain the British link, with 18 per cent either undecided or not willing to address the issue. 

But, this being 2022, not 1922, “others” – avowedly secular and neutral, and almost certainly liberal – took to the middle ground: 35 per cent of these favoured the Union, 20 per cent Irish unity and the rest … whatever. 

In the Republic, the vote was more clear-cut. Two thirds of those polled said yes to unification against 18 per cent who didn’t know what they thought or didn’t much care either way. The one small surprise was the 16 per cent who actually thought Northern Ireland should remain as it is, part of the King’s realm. 

Analysts have pointed out that the desire of southerners to take back their fourth green field is wide, but not deep. If the cost of unification, both financially and in terms of the unrest that would follow, is factored in, many southern Republicans would apparently find an urgent need to be somewhere else on polling day. In place of A Nation Once Again, the prayer would go up, “Give us Unity, Lord, but not yet”. 

For Loyalists, the poll was a Godsend – or should have been. The Democratic Unionist Party (practically 100 per cent Protestant) chose to view it as confirmation that many of their Catholic neighbours are, as my parents’ generation used to say, loyal to the half-crown if not to the Crown itself and will always vote in favour of the NHS, the state pension and the “broo”. And this is probably the case, especially among those over 50. 

Sinn Fein was not amused, for it turns out that the 27 per cent of Catholics who expressed a clear preference for Irish unity corresponds closely to the number who voted for the party in the Stormont Assembly elections last May. Unless the party can “whip” the remaining Catholics, amounting to almost a quarter of the total population, into the All-Ireland camp, the result of a real-life Border Poll would be a humiliating defeat and a continuation of the existing constitutional stasis for decades to come. 

It is no longer outlandish to imagine a Sinn Fein-led government in Dublin and a Sinn Fein-led Executive at Stormont, and yet for there to be only glacial progress towards reunification, the party’s number one political objective and, ideologically-speaking, sole raison d’être. 

So, should unionists be crowing? Have they, to mix metaphors, shot the Republican fox? 

The answer is yes and no. Underlying the reluctance among one in five Catholics to risk constitutional change are three main concerns. 

The first is that they don’t want to reignite the Troubles. A British withdrawal from NI, opposed by most Protestants, would almost certainly cause Loyalist paramilitaries to rise up against the new Irish State. There would be blood on the streets. In that event, Dublin would have to send in troops, who would quickly become targets. Bombs would explode not only in Belfast and Londonderry, but in the Irish capital and other population centres. It is possible that the insurrection would be short-lived and that order would be restored within a year. But it is equally possible that it would continue at a low level for a generation or more, making the new Ireland significantly less attractive as a place in which to invest. 

The second reason why 21 per cent of Northern Catholics would vote for the Union, not unity, is, as the DUP leader Jeremy Donaldson has it, the lure of British money, represented by the £10 billion subvention (net of taxes raised) transferred annually from Whitehall to Stormont. If that money were to vanish, who would pay the salaries and pensions of civil servants, a majority of whom are Catholic? Who would pay hospital bills? Who would pay to keep the trains running? The Republic is rich. Its adjusted budget surplus in the twelve months to the end of November was €6.2bn (£5.33bn). But it is small, with a population of a little over five million, and has problems of its own, not least a healthcare crisis and an acute shortage of affordable homes. Nor can it rely on US multinationals to go on paying its bills for ever. Brussels and Washington would certainly step in, but with how much and for how long?  

Fear of the unknown is the third inhibiting factor. Northern Ireland has existed as a “nation” of the United Kingdom for a hundred years. While for much of that time Catholics were treated as second-class citizens, they at least knew their way around and what to expect. More to the point, as they have begun to move into the ascendancy not only in the civil service, but in the legal system, academia, the media and business, they no longer feel themselves oppressed. If anything, they are starting to enjoy the fact that in terms of dominance, the boot is now on the other foot. Like Hartley-Shawcross, exulting in the power of Britain’s post-war Labour Government, they are tempted to proclaim, “We are the masters now”. 

The Good Friday Agreement already guarantees nationalists their Irish identity. They can live and work wherever they like on the island of Ireland, the UK and across the European Union. And with an amended NI Protocol likely to be confirmed as a permanent feature of the commercial and political landscape, their status as British, Irish and European citizens is the post-Brexit prize that keeps on giving. 

If the DUP had any sense, it would seize on the Irish Times poll and withdraw its demand that the Protocol be scrapped. It need only be amended, a process that we are assured will be completed within the next eight weeks. Donaldson should then join the Executive as Deputy First Minister and announce his intention to make Stormont work as a devolved institution of the United Kingdom having close ties to the Republic. To its chagrin, Sinn Fein would then be the party obliged to make good on its boast to provide sound government within the existing system. Its clarion call for Irish unity would have to be issued alongside practical proposals on health, housing, education, business, agriculture, transport and the environment. 

It is a long shot, but if the two big parties could learn to cast off the worst of themselves, the 1.9 million people of Northern Ireland might actually find that the years ahead allow them to discover a shared identity as one people – no longer two tribes occupying the same space – whose mutual interest is best served by pursuing the same goals. As for Irish unity, it remains very much on the cards. Demography is expected to produce a significant nationalist majority by 2030. But it will happen when the time is right, not before.

The Irish Times poll was in many ways exhaustive. It did not, however, include the opinions of the people of Great Britain, the English in particular. What do they feel about partition continuing long into the future? Do they consider the £10 billion (and rising) annual subvention to be money well spent? Do they think the people of Northern Ireland are part of the British family or would they prefer to hand them over to their confreres in Dublin? Someone should commission a poll to find out.