Stephen Collins: Talk of a united Ireland being inevitable is wishful thinking

Ireland may have changed beyond all recognition since Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins signed the Treaty in Downing Street 100 years ago this week but one thing that has barely altered in a century is the level of nationalist complacency about the inevitability of a united Ireland and the absence of a coherent vision about how it might be achieved.

When the Treaty talks began in October 1921, the Irish negotiators argued that the British should step aside and let the Irish people settle the Ulster question themselves. Lloyd George, the leader of the British delegation, suggested that persuasion was the best way to achieve unity and said Britain would be happy if it could be achieved.

Of course that was the rub. James Craig, the unionist leader, insisted on Northern Ireland retaining its separate status and there was nothing the British or the Irish could do about it short of waging war to enforce an all-Ireland settlement. The carnage that would inevitably have resulted was obvious to both sets of negotiators and neither side wanted to go down that road.

What the Irish delegation attempted as a fallback position was to persuade the British to agree to reduce the size of Northern Ireland so that most nationalist areas would be incorporated in the Free State. That too threatened to result in far greater bloodshed than had happened to date and the eventual outcome was agreement on a Boundary Commission to look at redrawing the border. The Irish fondly believed this solution would reduce the North to an unviable rump and that unity would follow.

Martyn Turner

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Major hurdles

When it came to the tense discussions that led to the Treaty in December 1921 it was not the North but the question of the oath and the scope of sovereignty that proved to be the major hurdles in the way of agreement. The British watered down their original draft of the oath so that it primarily expressed allegiance to the constitution of the Irish state followed by a pledge to recognise the crown. That was enough for the Irish delegation to sign but not enough for de Valera to accept the outcome and so the seeds of civil war were sown.

In the Treaty debates that followed there was barely a reference to the North and it didn’t feature as a major issue in the general election of June 1922, which saw 80 per cent of those who voted support parties and candidates who backed the Treaty. The Civil War that followed that election was fought because republicans refused to accept the oath. The conflict had little to do with partition.

What is most striking about the current debate over unity is that nothing has been learned from the past failure of aggressive posturing

When the Boundary Commission in 1925 failed to produce the radical changes in the border that the Irish delegation had expected, there was little the Free State government could do about it. What it did was negotiate a favourable financial deal that absolved the government in Dublin from having to pay a share of the UK national debt that was part of the Treaty divorce settlement.

In the decades that followed, North and South drew further and further apart even as the anti-partition rhetoric of successive governments in Dublin grew more extreme. Reality intruded with the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969, and it changed the rhetoric of political leaders in the Republic. In subsequent decades the Irish and British governments began to come together to find a common approach, which culminated in the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and the rewording of articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution to drop the territorial claim to the North.

Goodbye Border

In the early years of the 21st century it appeared as if Ireland and the UK had embarked on a new era of co-operation and goodwill where partition would no longer be a serious political issue and the people living on the island of Ireland would get on with their lives as if the Border didn’t exist.

That benign scenario has been changed utterly by Brexit. Relations between the two governments have deteriorated and the old rhetoric made its reappearance on both sides of the argument. Brexit propelled the issue of the Border back on to the political agenda, to the delight of Sinn Féin.

What is most striking about the current debate over unity is that nothing has been learned from the past failure of aggressive posturing or from the improvement in relations that resulted from the policies of conciliation and consent pursued by governments in Dublin since Jack Lynch was taoiseach.

Opinion polls have shown that a substantial majority of people in the Republic favour Irish unity, but they have also revealed a widespread reluctance to contribute to the financial cost and a complete unwillingness to accept that the British identity of the unionist people would have to be accommodated in a united Ireland.

It is remarkable that despite all of the suffering engendered by the Troubles and all of the work done to mould a complex political solution that respects the identities of both communities in Northern Ireland, the majority of people in the Republic are as blithely indifferent to the British identity of unionists as the Irish delegation who went to London a century ago.