AS Mary Robinson justified when she resigned from the Labour Party because Unionists had been excluded from the negotiations leading to the Anglo Irish Agreement? Her resignation would appear to have implied support for the internal conflict assessment of the Northern "Troubles" and thus a rejection of elite arrangements which ignore both the street level veto demonstrated by the fall of the power sharing executive and the arguments of those Unionist politicians who favour full integration into the UK.
Like the Anglo Irish Agreement, Richard Kearney finds it difficult to take full account of existing political cultures and is at his best at interstate and transnational levels. He argues that in a divided community, one lacking Rousseau's "general will", the nation states involved, Britain and Ireland, need to pool their sovereignty on the lines of the Nordic Council. This council of five nations and three autonomous regions has shared sovereignty in a way that has allowed disputed territories to become demilitarised zones, a precedent which Kearney feels Northern Ireland might follow.
As the nation state leaks power both transnationally (upwards) and regionally (downwards), Northern Ireland could maximise its "subsidiarity within the UK and thereby develop to the full the special relationship with the Republic and play its wider part in the new Europe". This would be debated within Northern Ireland and endorsed by the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the Conference on Security and Co operation in Europe and the Council of Europe. If the Republic were to withdraw its endorsement, direct rule from Westminster would return.
Kearney's proposals are argued with the skill and conviction one would expect, but, as with the Anglo Irish Agreement, their acceptability at interstate and transnational levels is likely to far exceed their acceptability to the Northern Ireland majority. Significantly, he wishes away the crucial opposition which the Democratic Unionist Party would offer to his proposals by describing them as an "elect orally declining force"; similarly, when he claims Unionist and nationalist support for a pooling of sovereignty, he can only cite John Hume and Garret FitzGerald as evidence. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a contemporary unionist figure of similar status who might be quoted - a footnote quotation from Anthony Alcock, an obscure Unionist spokesman, only confirms the imbalance.
Many precedents are quoted in favour of the regionalist aspect of Kearney's argument, none of them very convincing. The decentralisation of power in Celtic Ireland neither proves nor disproves anything today, but more recent quotations taken from the writings of James Connolly, Sean Mac Bride and John Hewitt are also extremely questionable. Connolly may have had a vision of local democracy "inspired by the ancient Celtic model", but his writings on early Ireland owe a great deal more to Engels than to ancient sources and his picture of early Ireland in Labour in Irish History is particularly misleading.
Mac Bride is quoted as favouring four regional or even thirty two local parliaments", an obvious predecessor of recent Sinn Fein policy and, indeed, Eire Nua is in this book the regionalism that dare not speak its name. The poet John Hewitt's regionalism, though far more sophisticated and generous than Mac Bride's, was hardly "an answer to the identity conflict of his province", as claimed by Kearney, and there is truth in the assertion of the critic Richard Kirkland that Hewitt's regionalism is a mode of evasion rather than a resolution, "a way of posing delusory ethical debates on the question of bourgeois identity whilst circumventing any attempt to address political or territorial schism".
The emphasis placed by John Hume on European aspects of Irish conflict, on "these islands" and the "totality of relationships", makes him at once the politician who has most influenced and is most likely to accord with these proposals. Outside of Northern Ireland the proposals, should they gain currency, are likely to encounter their greatest resistance from the growing English nationalism of the Tory right and the Referendum Party. The latter, as if established in conscious anticipation of this book, pledges itself to defend Britain's right "to determine our national security and to control our own frontiers".
Nor are the seamless continuity between Tory and Labour policy on Northern Ireland and Labour indecisiveness on Europe and on Scottish devolution signs that an alternative government would cede further sovereignty in the context of Europe wide regionalisation.
The political culture of the Republic constitutes a further obstacle to the acceptance of the Kearney thesis. While Northern Ireland, in reaction to its Stormont legacy, now offers citizens wide possibilities of redress against discrimination on religious, gender, political or racial grounds, political clientism and administrative secrecy continue to characterise the Republic in a way which is entirely at odds with the participatory local democracy on which the proposals in this book presume.
European led regionalisation in the Republic would be a necessary concomitant to European regionalisation in Northern Ireland, but without an amelioration of the Republic's dominant political culture, regionalisation is likely to be but yet another challenge to the system's capacity for secrecy and patronage. Northern Ireland's democratic deficit is not unique.
While Kearney denies that his proposals are Utopian, they do combine an attractive vision and a disregard for obstacles in a very Utopian way, but one hopes that they will help to engender the kind of reasoned debate of which the Northern Ireland Forum must surely be the antithesis.