“The crisis,” wrote Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci in the early 1930s, “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” This seems true of much of the contemporary world in general – but, after the Assembly elections, of Northern Ireland in particular.
Gramsci ominously added to his dictum that “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. In Northern Ireland’s case the morbid symptoms have included a bloody 30-year conflict. They continue to manifest in Sinn Féin’s inability to come to terms with that conflict and in the DUP’s Brexit-induced death wish.
In fact three things have now died: unionist rule; the idea of “two traditions”; and Irish nationalism as it used to understand itself.
The death throes of the old order of Northern Ireland have been like those of the fat lady in an opera: long, loud and agonised.
What we might call the Orange Free State ceased to be in March 1972. When the then British prime minister Edward Heath prorogued Stormont, it was the end of the regime infamously defined by Sir James Craig in 1934 as “a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state”.
Heath decreed then that “it was necessary to consider how the Roman Catholics could be brought back into community life”. Fifty years on, they sure are back.
It is easy – and accurate – to say that the emergence of Sinn Féin as the largest party in the Assembly is largely a matter of symbolism. It makes little immediate difference to the workings (and indeed the non-workings) of power in Northern Ireland.
But symbolism is not a marginal question. It matters, if anything, far too much. Northern Ireland is still entangled by what Van Morrison sang of, in that fateful year of 1972: “all the chains, badges, flags and emblems.”
The difference between First Minister and Deputy First Minister may be, in institutional terms, meaningless. In the less rational terms of tribal one-upmanship, however, it is freighted with an excess of meaning.
What Michelle O’Neill’s ascent as putative First Minister means is that the old order is no longer dying. It is dead. Its long swan song has concluded.
Its death rattle was the DUP’s embrace of a very hard Brexit. In the wild abandon of that apparent triumph, it seemed possible for many unionists to imagine that what Bernard Shaw called the Kingdom of Orangia had been magically restored.
The 'two traditions' model was never adequate to the complexities of Northern Ireland but it, too, is now surely dead. The rise of Alliance has made it definitively defunct
Northern Ireland’s future could be unilaterally reshaped by a Protestant act of faith. Brexit would seal Northern Ireland forever in a closed room of British exceptionalism.
The indulgence of this fantasy merely galvanised support for Sinn Féin among Catholics and for Alliance among many pro-European Protestants. Unionist hegemony was already over but the DUP forced voters to issue, as they did last Thursday, its formal death certificate.
Yet, while the old is definitively dead, “the new cannot be born”. There is no alternative political architecture that can yet command a functioning consensus.
During the Troubles it was common to hear talk of the problem of the “double minority”, meaning that Catholics saw themselves as a displaced minority within Northern Ireland while Protestants felt themselves to be a threatened minority on the island as a whole.
But there’s now another double minority: both unionists and nationalists are minorities within Northern Ireland. The election shows that there is no majority for the kind of shrunken, ingrown Britishness embodied in Brexit – and none either for a United Ireland.
What there is, though, is a large and growing nonbinary identity. The “two traditions” model was never adequate to the complexities of Northern Ireland but it, too, is now surely dead. The rise of Alliance has made it definitively defunct.
This means, for a start, that the internal political architecture created by the Belfast Agreement is obsolete. It disempowers those voters who do not wish to place themselves within the old binary categories.
But it also means that whatever “the new” is, it can’t be a simple move from one monolith (a unionist-dominated Northern Ireland) to another (a 32-county republic that is merely an extension of the existing 26-county state). It has to be new in a much larger sense – innovative, nonbinary, rooted in fresh thought about how political identities and democratic states need to function in the 21st century.
None of those terms apply to the current regime in London. We cannot rely on the present British government to be an even-handed arbiter or even a responsible partner – let alone a source of positive innovation. Like two drowning men clinging to each other, the DUP and the Brexiteers hold the union in a mutually fatal death grip.
The onus is therefore on Irish nationalism to do the hard thinking. It must start by grasping what it means that the national aspiration was redefined in 1998 away from the reclaiming of the fourth green field and towards the creation of a new kind of political space that can be shared (as the rewritten Constitution has it) by people “in all the diversity of their identities and traditions”.
That’s also a kind of death certificate. Triumphalist tribalism was definitively disavowed by the Irish nation in 1998. Green cannot be the new Orange.