Why Northern Ireland is heading out of the United Kingdom

The Twelfth Fortnight is well underway in Northern Ireland. It reached its climax today when thousands of Orangemen paraded up and down wearing white gloves and bowler hats to a cacophony of marching bands blaring out The Protestant Boys, Scotland the Brave and The Sash My Father Wore. On the Eleventh Night, to get participants in the mood, Irish flags and effigies of the Pope were burned on massive, out-of-control bonfires, some of them more than 100 feet high, made out of car tyres and wooden pallets.

Temperance was preached by the clergy, but not to the exclusion of drunkeness. All in all, a splendid celebration of Britishness.

Northern Ireland is a place apart. Half its population refuse to admit they are Irish; the other half deny they are British. The fourth “nation” of the UK, comprising two-thirds of the ancient province of Ulster, is connected to the rest of Ireland by a border that has been invisible since 1998, when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton put an end to The Troubles, but has been brought back into sharp relief amid the chaos of Brexit.

Remain is now by some distance the prevailing sentiment in Northern Ireland, which in 2016 voted in favour of continued EU membership by 56 per cent to 44 per cent against. Only the Democratic Unionist Party stands for the possibility of a hard border. At the same time, according to recent polls, some 60 per cent of Tory voters in England do not feel a strong emotional bond with their fellow citizens in Ulster. They would rather get a Full English Brexit than have to compromise with Brussels over the precise relationship between the EU and the least of their brethren. The Backstop, which would keep the entirety of the UK locked into the EU Customs Union until agreement is reached on the status and character of the Irish border, is anathema not only to the DUP, but to a majority of the English, who are asking themselves, what has any of this got to do with us?

Few English people ever travel to Ulster – maybe one in fifty. Far more of the English regard the Southern Irish as family than they do the conflicting tribes of the North. Of the hundreds of thousands of English visitors to the Republic each year, no more than a handful cross the border – usually to visit the Giant’s Causeway or to explore the locations of Game of Thrones. As for the inhabitants, the sympathies of ordinary Brits are more with the Catholic/Nationalist population than with the Protestant/Loyalist community, whom they tend to consider crude, unfunny and bigoted.

Google “English Tourists/Northern Ireland” and this is what you find:

“Is Northern Ireland safe to visit?” “How to stay out of trouble in Northern Ireland.” “What ID is needed to travel to Northern Ireland from England?” “Can you use British pounds in Northern Ireland?”

If you are English, does that sound like part of your country?

No one, other than Baptists and evangelicals worshipping in tin huts in the backstreets of Plymouth, can understand how, in the twenty-first century, same-sex marriage and abortion are against the law in Northern Ireland but it is okay to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake. Few outside of Glasgow, or perhaps Liverpool, divided as it is by an extension of the Irish border, can fathom what the Hell the Orange Order is about. They may loath the IRA and Sinn Fein, but they can at least fathom what they stand for. By contrast, they have no idea why an Orange banner on the Twelfth of July depicting Queen Victoria handing the bible to an African on bended knee should in the twenty-first century be inscribed The Secret of England’s Greatness.

We – for I am one of them – are the bastard children of Britain and Ireland, fostered but never adopted. We are also the whitest part of the UK. According to the 2011 census, out of a total population of nearly 1.8 million there were just 19,000 people of Asian heritage in NI and 3,600 blacks or Black-British. Since then, the numbers have crept up a bit, but most newcomers in recent years have been East European, predominantly Polish and Lithuanian. Neither of the native Christian communities has responded with enthusiasm to the perceived adulteration of their tribes, but elements within loyalism have gone out of their way to make migrants feel unwanted, breaking their windows, painting slogans on their front doors and pushing excrement through their letter boxes.

History, it is said, reveals the root cause of most human dilemmas. In the case of Northern Ireland, the facts are unmistakable. In the sixteenth century, Ulster was the most gaelic and anti-English Irish province. It had resisted the Norman invaders; now it was offering the strongest resistance to the Tudors. So determined were its leaders to deny English suzerainty that when Elizabeth I died in 1603, she believed her troops, under the command of Lord Mountjoy, had been defeated by Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, and that Ireland was lost.

But James VI put an end to all that. Benefiting from Mountjoy’s final victory in the field, he settled thousands of Protestants, mainly Scots, in the North, where they joined others of their kind who had been encouraged to move to what are now the counties of Antrim and Down. The native Irish – Catholics – were forcibly displaced or else reduced to servitude. Loyalty to the Crown and the newly established religion was all that counted.

Four hundred years later, we are where we are. The difference between 1619 and 2019 is that Catholics are in the ascendant and Protestants in decline. There has been a demographic  shift due partly to the higher birth rate of Catholics, but also to the decision of thousands of young Protestants to retreat to the motherland.

Within the next five years, assuming a hard or No-Deal Brexit, there will almost certainly be a border poll in NI, as provided in the Good Friday Agreement. Had Britain chosen to remain part of the EU, it is unlikely that that this would have yielded a majority in favour of Irish unity – though the proportion voting to join the ever more prosperous Republic would probably have exceeded 40 per cent. But three years on, the mood is shifting.

The Backstop, so hated by the DUP (which, with 36 per cent of the popular vote, holds ten of the 18 NI seats at Westminster, against seven for the abstentionists of Sinn Fein) would, in the view of the business community, the trade unions and the farm lobby, have benefited the local economy, keeping it simultaneously in the UK and – for most practical purposes – the EU. But the DUP, correctly, saw this as the thin end of the unity wedge and has consistently voted it down. It has been circling the wagons ever since.

Younger Protestants, especially the better educated among them, are much more at ease with a sense of their Irish and European identities than were their parents or grandparents. They may feel no inclination to speak Irish or engage in gaelic sports, but they can see where the smart money is headed. As good Europeans – made up of what might be called the Ryanair Generation – they are starting to turn away from the confusion and isolation of Westminster and towards Dublin and the continent for their economic salvation.

Today, the proportion of Protestants – formerly Unionists – prepared to consider unity may be less than ten per cent, but their number is growing. And with the Catholic/Nationalist community now almost half of the electorate and due to hit 55 per cent within the next ten years, the mathematics are inescapable. Only if Britain makes a success of Brexit and lives out the Johnsonian dream can radical change be avoided.

My guess is that a border poll held tomorrow would be won by the Unionists, backed by older Catholics nervous about their pensions. But in five years’ time, after a No-Deal Brexit, who knows? Once the Republic, with help from Brussels, bounces back from the hit it is bound to take when the UK finally leaves Europe, it will exert a stronger pull than ever on the North. A second poll, held in, say, 2030 would almost certainly result in a United Ireland, at which point – especially if the Scots pursue their own independence – England will be left with only the Welsh for company.

Unionists in England, as well as Ireland, will say, of course, that none of this is true and that the Good Ship Royal Sovereign, under an English captain, will be crewed forever by citizens from all four nations of the United Kingdom. And they may be right. Just don’t bet on it.