Irish PM unveils stunt guaranteed to annoy unionists and Dublin voters

The Republic of Ireland’s governing party, Fine Gael, has come up with a stunt that shows contempt for its electorate and betrays its current attitudes to Northern Ireland.

Yesterday, the party announced that it will run former SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, as a candidate in this year’s elections to the European parliament. It’s not that it’s unusual for northern politicians to finish their careers down south. Austin Currie, a founder member of the SDLP and a minister in the Northern Ireland Executive, eventually served in a Fine Gael government.

This arrangement is slightly different though, for a number of reasons.

Mr Durkan will stand in the Dublin constituency, but his attention will be divided between the Irish capital and his former political beat in Northern Ireland. “It’s Leo Varadkar following through on the promise that he made last year that he wanted to ensure that Irish citizens in the north were not left behind,” the Londonderry man explained to RTE news. He believes Fine Gael is asking him to “reflect the interests and perspective of Northern Ireland, but also to serve the people of Dublin as well.”

Not many carpet-bagging politicians, no matter how shameless, launch their pitch to new voters by pledging first to represent people one hundred miles away, in a different nation-state. Perhaps he thinks that the European Parliament is so tenuously involved in the everyday affairs of the constituency that Dubliners will not mind being a secondary concern for one of their prospective MEPs.

More seriously, this move is clearly about broader political symbolism, but in that way too it creates problems.

Varadkar’s decision will resonate with some northern nationalists, though Durkan’s former colleagues in the SDLP will be seething at his decision to join Fine Gael, as they’ve just announced a shared policy platform with its main rival, Fianna Fail. But the Irish prime minister is also trying to persuade unionists in Northern Ireland that the proposed Brexit backstop is not a threat to their position in the UK. At the same time, he is implying that his party is entitled to speak for Northern Ireland in the European parliament.

Unionists are worried about the backstop precisely because they fear that they will be distanced from the political and economic life of the rest of the UK, while Dublin’s influence will increase as it becomes a conduit between Belfast and Brussels.

Varadkar can certainly assert that British sovereignty should be diminished in this way, if he’s going to be open about its intentions. Though he must then be prepared to answer the counter-argument that the principle of consent upon which the Good Friday Agreement is based is undermined by attempts to dilute Northern Ireland’s UK status and integrate it with the politics of the Republic.

It’s another thing entirely to dismiss unionists’ concerns as nonsense, as the Taoiseach and his sidekick Simon Coveney have done repeatedly, then to act in a way that confirms their fears.

Unionists believe, with justification, that the Irish government frequently acts as if the peace process established some form of joint authority north of the border. In fact, the Belfast Agreement established cross border cooperation in a limited number of areas, while excluding Dublin explicitly from a role in Northern Ireland’s internal affairs.

Previous administrations have tested these boundaries and, under Conservative prime ministers, the government has had to remind the Irish of the limits of ‘strand two’ of the agreement, which governs north-south matters. No Dublin prime minister in recent times has been as provocative as Varadkar, who, aside from his backstop antics, implied that the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference should be used to make joint decisions on the province in the absence of Stormont.

Mark Durkan is a reasonably well-known political figure across the island and it’s understandable that Fine Gael wants his name on its ticket. Presenting him as a potential voice for Northern Ireland in Brussels makes the move much more controversial: not least because his potential voters live in the Dublin area.

This new attempt to blur constitutional lines will strengthen unionists’ suspicions that Varadkar is using Brexit to bring Northern Ireland more firmly under Dublin’s influence.