100 Years after Partition: is Irish Re-Unification in Sight?

The centenary of the Northern Irish state comes amidst a deep crisis of unionism in the north and talk of a United Ireland growing across the island by the day. Ben Wray, Bella’s European Feature Writer, speaks to authors and campaigners for a United Ireland about the origins of partition and the prospects for re-unification.

On 3 May 1921, the UK passed the Government of Ireland Act, which was intended to divide Ireland into two governing entities: north and south Ireland. Both territories would remain British jurisdictions, and provisions were in place for their eventual reunification. 

The British southern state never got off the ground, rejected by the vast majority of people in the 26 counties in favour of independence, but the smaller six-county Northern Irish state held an election on 24 May, with the Ulster Unionist Party winning 67% of the vote. On the 22 June, the Northern Irish parliament officially opened. Ireland had been partitioned.

100 years on, the Northern Irish state remains, but increasingly its hook to the UK state appears to be on a shoogly peg. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the biggest party in Stormont and the leading voice of unionism in Northern Ireland for almost two decades, is in a deep crisis, ditching two leaders in the space of a few weeks, and with collapsing support in the polls. Sinn Féin, the Irish nationalist party, is on course to win the NI Assembly elections next year and thus take the First Minister’s chair in Stormont for the first time. Whatever the architects of partition had in mind, it wasn’t this.

Partition: A “compromise solution”, or an imperialist ploy?

The BBC is running a series to mark the centenary of Northern Ireland and in a piece on how the Irish border was created, Eimear Flanagan states: “Partition was viewed by the British Government as a compromise solution.”

He adds: “Nationalists had campaigned for ‘Home Rule’ for decades, seeking a devolved parliament in Dublin. But unionists, who were mainly Protestant, did not want to be ruled from Dublin.

“Unionists held a majority in the province of Ulster in the north-east, but in Ireland as a whole they were greatly outnumbered by nationalists, who were mainly Catholic.”

In this presentation, the British Government appears as the paternal, even-handed administrator, simply looking to keep the peace by negotiating a compromise, and with no intrinsic interests of its own. Kieran Allen, Sociology professor at the University of Dublin and author of the recently released ’32 counties: the failure of partition and the case for a United Ireland’, is unsurprised by the BBC’s depiction.

“That is traditionally how the British Empire is presented, that it’s a sort of neutral arbiter, between Hindus and Muslims in India, or being Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.”

Allen says that Irish partition was actually part of a broader Tory strategy towards Empire, which sought to deal with growing discontent in the colonies after WW1 by “whipping up chauvinism”. The creation of the six-county state in the north was specifically designed with this purpose in mind; as a bulwark against revolution.

“What they drew up was essentially an arbitrary division [of Ireland],” Allen tells Bella. “The original proposal for partition in 1912 was for four-counties, then there was a proposal in 1920 for a nine-county Ulster, and eventually they settled on a six-county Ulster, because, as James Craig, the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, said at the time, that was the largest amount of territory that would allow for ‘a decisive Protestant majority in which unionist power would be guaranteed, in perpetuity’. That’s why it happened.”

The violence against Catholics and nationalists who opposed the creation of the new state, especially in Belfast, provides further evidence of the sectarianism in the project from its birth. Ten per cent of the nationalist population were forced out of Belfast in the first years of the NI state. Those that remained were treated as second-class citizens. The fact that one party, the Ulster Unionist Party, was in power for over 50 years from 1921 to 1972, when Stormont was abolished, an unprecedented electoral domination in the western world, tells its own story. 

The less talked about side of partition is the impact it had on the 26-counties on the other side of the border, which became a “mirror image” of the northern state in its conservatism, Allen argues.

“What you have in the south is a revolutionary wave after 1918,” he says, “but with the the help of British guns and the British cajoling a section of the republican movement into suppressing their former allies, a counter-revolution developed. That counter-revolution meant suppressing all the social grievances, but it also meant using Catholicism as a kind of spiritual anti-depressant: ‘we are the most Catholic country in the world, we want nothing to do with divorce, nothing to do with abortion and so on’.

“The proof that partition produced this mirror image of conservatism is that it was one of the few countries in western Europe where there was no left-right divide.”

Today, while much has changed on both sides of the border, much still stays the same. In the north, a census poll due later this year is likely to show that there are more Catholics than Protestants for the first time, but also the number of people who don’t identify as either has tripled since 1990 to 18%. Still, nearly a quarter of a century after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Irish politics remains locked in a sectarian prism, evidenced over the past week by the DUP’s resistance to an Act for Irish language rights at Stormont. 

In the South, a massive Yes vote in the 2015 and 2018 referendums on abortion rights and equal marriage has shown the Catholic Church no longer is the dominant institution it once was. Nonetheless, it still runs 94% of primary schools, and is still politically shielded by the two conservative establishment parties which have dominated Irish politics in the 26 counties since independence, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, which remain in power at the Dáil today, in a three-way coalition with the Greens. Ireland is still shaped by partition.

Brexit and the crisis of unionism: short-term, or existential?

Boris Johnson was cheered to the rooftops when he turned up at a 2018 DUP conference to say that “no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement” which included border checks and customs controls down the Irish Sea. Two years later, after replacing Theresa May as Prime Minister on the back of such commitments and with the clear support of the DUP for his leadership, Johnson did exactly what he promised not to do, in the form of the Irish protocol in his Brexit agreement with the EU. The DUP had been duped. 

What has followed is a deep crisis of unionism in Northern Ireland, with the DUP at the centre of the recriminations. The party got rid of Arlene Foster as First Minister for her part in the protocol, only to junk her replacement, Edwin Poots, weeks later. Poots’ close ally Paul Givan, who has just been installed as the new First Minister to replace Foster, has now been told by the party that he has to go too. Meltdown would be putting it lightly. 

Profound questions have now been opened up for unionists: ‘If the protocol remains, are we really a full part of the UK anymore? And if the Tories are willing to betray us for a deal with the EU, what are we really worth to the British anyway?’

The rage and despair this existential crisis has brought on has been on full show as marching season has kicked in. One report in the Guardian of one such march heard from Joe, 63, terminally ill with cancer, who lit aflame a banner saying ‘United Ireland’ on it. Asked if the sort of violence seen in The Troubles could return within his lifetime, he said: “If that’s the way it has to be, then that’s how it’ll be.”

We have already seen rioting in April, and marching season has been described as a “tinderbox” with the ongoing ‘sausage war’ between the UK and the EU over the protocol looming in the background. It may be the case that Johnson can find another compromise with Brussels which can give the DUP an out, but Daniel Finn, features editor of Jacobin and author of ‘One Man’s Terrorist: A political history of the IRA’ (2019), tells Bella that the DUP now faces long-term electoral pressures which will not go away easily.

“The DUP has got this dilemma, because in the polls they are losing support in both directions – on one side to the Alliance party, which is a more liberal party, and on the other side to the Traditional Unionist Voice, which is a very-hard line unionist party. You can’t really win back both of those groups of people, so there is a re-alignment that is taking place which I think will continue.”

How likely is a border poll?

While the DUP is in crisis, Sinn Fèin is on the rise. The 2020 Republic of Ireland election gave the Irish nationalists the most votes in the 26-county state for the first time. In 1997, the year before the Good Friday Agreement, they had won just 2.5% of the vote and one seat in the south. Sinn Fèin were only kept out of power by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil agreeing a power-sharing deal, along with the Greens. Since then, polls show Sinn Fèin extending its lead to one-third of voters.

The party’s newly found support in the south has been built on focusing on social justice issues like housing and health, which has attracted young people in particular, but given Brexit and the crisis of unionism, Sinn Fèin’s growing support on both sides of the border is galvanising demands for a border poll. This is causing Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, which for years have paid lip service at best to the idea of a United Ireland at some point in the distant future, to have to adapt their rhetoric.

At the weekend, Leo Varadkar, the former Taoiseach and current leader of Fine Gael and deputy prime minister in the government, made waves after telling his party conference that it “should be part of our mission as a party to work towards” re-unification, and that “no one group can have a veto” on the issue. 

Following criticism of his remarks, including from Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, who told him to “dial down the rhetoric, particularly at this time of year”, Varadkar said that for many people, including in his own party, it was “always the wrong time” to talk about a united Ireland, adding that there was “no majority anymore” in NI for unionism or nationalism, and that a new middle-ground, particularly of young people, want to talk about it. 

Allen says Varadkar’s comments highlight the “massive shift in consciousness in the south” on the national question.

“It’s a fact that about 70% of the southern population are for Irish unity, and not just are they for it, they believe it will happen in the coming decade. And therefore Fine Gael, being a clever bourgeois party, are re-positioning themselves to say ‘we are for Irish unity as well’.”

Gerry Carlile, CEO of Ireland’s Future, a civic organisation campaigning for Irish re-unification, welcomed Varadkar’s intervention, but said that “planning and preparing should be well underway” in Dublin, citing the Scottish example pre-2014 referendum – where a White Paper was published on independence – as the sort of work that should be taking place in the Dáil. Specifically, Ireland’s Future are calling on the RoI government to establish a Citizen’s Assembly on the constitutional future of Ireland.

Pressuring the RoI state into seriously pushing for Irish unity is just one hurdle to overcome in getting a border poll. The biggest one is the UK state. The Good Friday Agreement contains a clause which says that the Northern Ireland Secretary “shall exercise the power [to call a referendum] if at any time it appears likely…that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom”. This leaves the power over Ireland’s future in the hands of a British minister, and on conveniently vague terms as to how the Minister is to decide whether NI “appears likely” to vote for Irish unity.

Carlile tells Bella that they believe “the criteria has been met” for a border poll, highlighting that a majority of Northern Irish members of the UK Parliament are for the first time pro-Irish unity. Ireland’s Future have written to Brandon Lewis to clarify what is the criteria the UK Government uses to decide whether a referendum should be held. 

Some have speculated that while the UK state may have had a material interest in holding onto NI in the past, today it may be quite happy to see it go, especially given that NI spending massively outstrips its tax revenues. Finn says that while he “wouldn’t dismiss that view out of hand”, there are good reasons to believe that they still have a “political interest”.

“A political interest doesn’t have to have a direct economic motive; there are questions about the general power and prestige of the British state in world affairs. The state relies to an extent on symbolic power – or soft power – as well as economic and military power, and its territory is part of the prestige of the state.

“And there is also the political factor of British nationalism. Even if you assume that Johnson’s government doesn’t have any particular interest in partition for its own sake and doesn’t really care about what happens in Northern Ireland, which is to some extent true when you see the way they reached their agreement on Brexit and the Irish Protocol, they also have to think about the knock on implications [of Irish unity], for instance in terms of what happens with Scotland.”

What kind of United Ireland?

If a border poll can be secured and a yes vote won, what would a United Ireland look like? As the possibilities of an end to partition have grown, an increasing number of thinkers on left and right have been putting their minds to this question. 

Michael McDowell, a former leader of Ireland’s first openly neoliberal party, the Progressive Democrats, has made the case for Irish unity based on minimal change to the current state structures on both sides of the border via a confederal system.

“A confederal form of unity would leave both jurisdictions largely intact and in which…only limited powers [would be] devolved by each part of the confederation to its institutions,” he argues.

This limited change vision is an attempt to reassure elites in the north and south that Irish unity can be achieved without the interests of either being undermined and to convince unionists in the north that they will still have important representation following re-unification. However, for many who are coming round to the idea of a United Ireland, it’s surely the prospect for transformative change across the island which motivates them.

In Northern Ireland, chronic low wages and sluggish investment rates – well below other UK regions – has led to many questioning what Stormont and the UK state have actually delivered in terms of improving living standards since the Good Friday Agreement. In the Republic of Ireland, the country has carved out a unique position within the EU as a tax haven, attracting some of the world’s largest companies to headquarter in Dublin, but that model has brought with it astronomical private rents as wealth inequality surges, some of the most expensive childcare in the EU, large primary school class sizes and the longest hospital waiting times in Europe. A poll found one-quarter of the electorate in the North said the lack of an NHS in the south makes them more likely to vote for the Union in any referendum. 

If constitutional change does not deliver social justice on both sides of the border, merely integrating the north to create a whole-island tax haven, then is that really progress?

For Carlile, emerging debates about what a United Ireland should look like is a healthy sign.

“The reality is the conversation is happening on the ground and right across this entire island,” he says. 

Ireland’s Future are currently setting up public meetings across the country to facilitate that conversation, and Carlile is optimistic about the Irish unity movement’s prospects.

“Without a doubt this is a very promising period,” he tells Bella. “Coming out of the pandemic, this is the time for change, the time to start thinking about what would make the country better.”

Comments (22)

Leave a Reply to Voline Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

  1. John Learmonth says:

    Has Ireland ever been ‘united’?
    Is Ireland like India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand even the USA a construct of the British Empire without which it would have never existed?

    1. Colin Robinson says:

      I think it was the Normans who first united Ireland as politically unified state.

    2. Voline says:

      In pre-Norman invasion Ireland there was an Ard Rí (High King) with suzerainty over the whole island. The last of these was Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair (r. 1166-1198). The office, and so the conception of a united Ireland, long predates a single English polity. The first “historical” (ie not at least semi-legendary) High King was Máel Sechnaill I (r. 846-860)

      The first king of the English, Æthelstan began his rein in 924. The first king of Scotland Coinneach mac Ailpein (Kenneth I to Sassenachs) united in his person the titles of king of Dál Riada, the Picts, and Alba in 843.

      1. Colin Robinson says:

        Yes, I suppose the institution of what was essentially a ceremonial, pseudo-federal overlord (where his over-lordship was even recognised) does suggest a conception of ‘Ireland’ as a whole, but this imagined community was hardly united. Even under the High King’s sacral lordship, the island remained divided among a multiplicity of petty kingdoms, with some kings owing allegiance to and/or warring with others from time to time, and the High King having actual power only within the realm of which he was actually king. Norman feudalism was the first politically unifying principle in Ireland.

    3. Brian Howard says:

      The name for the provinces of Ireland is “Cúige” meaning a “Fifth” – historically there were 5 provinces, Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht and Meath.

      You can’t have a Fifth of something without having something to divide into Fifths.

      There were hundreds of Kingdoms and divisions but there was recognition that there was a continuity of culture throughout the Island.

      1. Mark Boyle says:

        No there was not – there were five Viking city states whose culture was completely different from that of the various squabbling Irish fiefdoms. The only thing they had in common was a belief it was okay to attack weaker neighbours and steal their people for slavery – which kicked off eight hundred years of all of those on the British mainland and the Isle of Man despising those on the island of Ireland.

        Like Wales, any claims to being a singular unit at any point in history are plain old romanticisations rather than cold hard fact. The notion of there ever being a “united Ireland” before the English created one for political and legal admin purposes is pure and simple historical revisionism pumped into the heads of generation after generation of gulluble schoolchildren courtesy of the brutal Christian Brothers doing DeValera’s dirty work, as part of the general brainwashing of a largely ignorant peasant population that every problem Ireland ever had from then until now was all somehow “England’s fault” – even when Costello in 1972 called Ireland “a banana republic without the bananas”.

        Thus it came to pass that a “united Ireland” was spun by the coalition of Ireland’s new masters as the Great Panacea which would somehow solve everything. It wouldn’t, and they knew it, but they also knew there was zero chance of it happening, so it was a useful lie to spin. Most backward post-colonial countries used similar ‘creation myths’ as salves to their people getting anything but the land of milk and honey they were promised.

        It’s taken 100 years for the southern Irish to learn they were as cheated by their own as they were by their conquerors of old. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

        1. Colin Robinson says:

          Although you could trace the genesis of a united Ireland to the religious struggle between the ideology of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the revival of the concept of the patria (‘fatherland’/’motherland’) as a counter to the commonwealth of the English reformers.

          1. Colin Robinson says:

            The idea that a nation should live all in one “united” nation-state, one that doesn’t include foreigners, has been a force in world thought probably only since the French Revolution.

            Indeed, the revival of classical civic nationalism first materialised in the American and French Revolutions. But the matter under discussion here is the prospect of a united Ireland rather than the nature of Ireland’s nationhood. Mark and I were speculating on when and how Ireland first became a unified political entity, not a definable cultural entity.

            You’ve fallen foul of the straw man fallacy, I fear.

          2. Voline says:

            You and Mark are talking absolute rot. Mark is indulging in hackneyed anti-Irish racist tropes. (Go Rangers, eh Mark).

            You dismiss the High Kingship for not having effective control of the island. Then you say say that the Norman overloardship was the first instance of United Irish polity despite it never having effective control of the island.

            You affect a nice learned tone, though.

            So, about Wray’s article …

          3. Colin Robinson says:

            No, I said that ‘Norman feudalism was the first politically unifying principle in Ireland.’, not that ‘the Norman overlordship was the first instance of United Irish polity’. I agree that, in practice, the Norman Lordship exercised no more effective control of the island than the High Kingship did. Even under the Norman Lordship, Ireland remained divided politically among a shifting hierarchy of petty kingdoms and over-kingdoms, with power being exercised by the heads of a few regional dynasties vying against each other for supremacy. It wasn’t really until the rule of James I that the English authorities in Dublin succeeded in unifying the whole island under a central government.

          4. Colin Robinson says:

            Though I did say in my first contribution to the discussion that it was the ‘Normans who first united Ireland as politically unified state.’ On reflection, that was wrong.

        2. voline says:

          When are you talking about, Boyle? This is total ahistorical nonsense. Were there always Viking kingdoms in Ireland? Really? Before the Viking age? There were Vikings in Ireland in 100BC? 300AD? 700AD?

          The poleis of ancient Greece warred among themselves, yet still understood Hellas as a culture distinct from those without it. The same was true of Gaelic Ireland. Language, religion, even laws obtained on the whole island until the Viking invasion. The Brehon laws weren’t just the laws of one petty kingdom and were deeply part of the culture. So much so that they were adopted even by the Norman-Irish lords as they went native. Great Britain has never had a single legal system. Scotland has never ceased having its own laws different to England.

          Robinson and Howard, here, are spewing classic British colonialist ideology. “The natives weren’t even a people until we showed up. They warred among themselves.” (Unlike, English barons who never warred among themselves or rebelled against the King in London.) By the way Colin, the Normans *never* managed to unite Ireland under their rule. They may have *claimed* overloadship of the Island, but it wasn’t until Henry VIII that they were able to make that real across the island.

          The concept of Ireland as a culture, a nation, existed long before the “Old English” (Normans) showed up. We know of the Battle of Clontarf (1015), in which High King Brian Boru defeated a Viking and Gaelic allied army and broke the power of the Vikings in Ireland, because of an early 12th Century text titled Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib (“The War of the Irish with the Foreigners”). Hard to have a war against “the foreigners” if you don’t have a concept of the nation. Note that this text dates from before Strongbow’s Normans.

          The idea that a nation should live all in one “united” nation-state, one that doesn’t include foreigners, has been a force in world thought probably only since the French Revolution. And in my opinion it has only brought immense suffering to the world. But, that doesn’t mean that the racist, divisive (as in “divide and rule”), genocidal rule of the British state in Ireland is legitimate.

          If the people of the Island of Ireland decide that they’d like to be rid of the Monarchy, the Prime Minister, the House of Lords, the Commons, Whitehall, MI5, the British Army, the British cops, and all the rest, to live in one state, that is their right — as has now been recognized in international and British law. They may not make it a utopia, it may not even be better. But that’s up to them. At least they won’t have sneering, ignorant, British nationalists calling them “ignorant peasants” and gaslighting them.

          The Republic has been an over-centralized theocracy for most of it’s history. But partition, by depriving the new state of a religious-cultural-economic counterweight to Dublin and the Catholic Church, played a role in making it that way. Looking at current trajectories of politics and institutions in Ireland and Britain. it It seems to me that the Republic is a better place to make positive change than the necrotic, hideously corrupt, conservative, classbound Britain.

          Just compare and contrast the recent referendums in the two. Whatever you think of the EU as an institution, Brexit was a mess. The debates that played out in Britain’s media were shallow, lacking detail, and filled with the most absurd lies and marinated in xenophobia. For the abortion and same sex marriage referenda, Ireland convened Citizens’ Assemblies to thoroughly debate the issues, bring in expert witnesses, and heard from people affected by the current laws. The assemblies made recommendations to the Daíl, who translated them into proposals that were printed and sent to the entire electorate, who voted on them.

          That’s an impressively mature and democratic process. And something to build on for a better society. Meanwhile, the only hopeful path for the future of Scotland that I can see is getting the hell out of the centralizing, corrupt, incompetent British State.

          1. Tom Ultuous says:

            Great post voline.

          2. florian albert says:

            ‘partition, by depriving the new state of a religious-cultural- economic counterweight to Dublin and the Catholic church’

            The problem was, and probably still is, that the unionist population in the north east of Ireland, had no interest in playing this role. They did not regard themselves as Irish in the way that the Catholic population of the island did. Their determination to avoid being part of an Ireland, which had Home Rule within the UK, let alone an Irish Republic, was such that they had made serious, detailed military plans to prevent it happening.

  2. Mouse says:

    What would a United Ireland look like?

    Even if a majority in N. Ireland voted for it, which looks unlikely, it would look like a petrol bomb? It doesn’t even look like a majority in the RoI would vote for it if it cost them money. At least the civil war is over, and Ireland isn’t run by the Church so much, but it looks like they still have a long way to go before it doesn’t look like a petrol bomb. The prospect of RoI soldiers on the streets of Belfast? That wouldn’t go well. If you got hit by a brick, you would have to pay E100 to go to the A&E.

    1. Voline says:

      ‘Two-thirds of Irish would vote for united Ireland, poll says’

      ‘The poll questioned 3,000 people at polling stations after they had cast their ballots in local and European elections on Friday. Respondents were asked whether they would vote for or against a united Ireland if a vote were held “tomorrow.”’

      — Naomi O’Leary. ‘Two-thirds of Irish would vote for united Ireland, poll says’. Politico 26 May 2019.

      https://www.politico.eu/article/election-two-thirds-of-irish-would-vote-for-united-ireland/

  3. Tom Ultuous says:

    Will the (we are) the people accept the will of the people? I doubt it. They did so in the case of the GFA but that meant colleagues escaping long jail sentences.

    We in Scotland should get out of Britain first lest we become part of the solution.

  4. florian albert says:

    The idea that the partition of Ireland was part of a ‘Tory strategy’ makes no sense. Partition had been accepted by Asquith’s Liberal government before World War 1 broke out.
    Similarly, the statement that the 2020 Irish Republic election gave ‘the Irish nationalists the most votes in the 26 county state for the first time’ is plain wrong, unless Ben Wray manages to convince himself that either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael are not nationalists.

    In discussions on the ending of partition, wishful thinking often replaces common sense. It is doubtful that even the DUP idiocy of recent times has moved the dial much.
    A united Ireland would be one where Dublin takes responsibility, from Westminister, for the well-being of the Six Counties.
    I am far from convinced that there is a majority either side of the border which views this as likely to lead to better times for Ireland.

    1. Colin Robinson says:

      A united Ireland would also be one in which Westminster took responsibility for the 26 counties.

      Why can’t the six counties be independent? Why must they be part of any union?

  5. MBC says:

    There was a cultural unity to Ireland long before England which embraced law, language, literature, religion and mythic origins across the entire island of Ireland. Political unity is not everything. In England it was the opposite. Political unity was established but not cultural unity as colonising Anglo Saxon, then Norman kings gained suzerainty over native British peoples culturally disorientated and de-militarised after the fall of Rome. This is why English identity is so insecure today. Beyond empire (suzerainty) the English really don’t know what they stand for.

  6. Philip Raiswell says:

    As an English Catholic who suffered a brutal education at a Christian Brothers school in NW England in the 1970s, I feel that Irish reunification will happen at some point in the future. I also believe that at some point in the next 20-30 years the United Kingdom will end and we will have four separate countries, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. And then hopefully we will all get on better together!

  7. Graham Ennis says:

    I write on this as an Irish Citizen, who had to endure the thirty year war (“Troubles” if you are Not irish) and is still full of pain from things I now hope are part of history. I think reunification is now inevitable. But it will not come silently, or peacefully, until and unless there is a lot of Jaw Jaw, not War War, a lot of bare and stark looking at what Ireland is, and what it has become.
    Firstly, my lifetime has seen Ireland become the Country with the highest GNP per citizen in Europe. It now leads even Scandinavia. (No, that was not a typo)
    so the economic base is there, and the will of the people is there. But external forces will still delay things.
    The North is going to be greatly impacted by its half-bastard links to the EU.
    it is an underdeveloped, underperforming, second world state, that a majority of its inhabitants would rather did not exist.
    Indeed, its next legally elected Goverment will be in charge of a state they do not wish to run, or exist, either.
    But the forces now exerting themselves on The North will eventually force a choice. Poverty and sectarianism, or reunification with the South.
    None of this is certain, or even with any certainty as to the outcome, on either side of the ballot paper.
    That will now be determined by external European events, and internal UK events.
    So the best that can be hoped for, is a reasonably peaceful but dissatisfied Irish population, a lot of strange events, missed chances and mistakes, which with traditional irish luck and cunning, will deliver something like real departitioning and unity.
    We cannot even be sure of the basic timeline. (thats how things run in Ireland. ).
    So what I am saying is that fate, luck, and national identity are going to make the situation very difficalt.
    Season tickets will be provided.

Help keep our journalism independent

We don’t take any advertising, we don’t hide behind a pay wall and we don’t keep harassing you for crowd-funding. We’re entirely dependent on our readers to support us.

Subscribe to regular bella in your inbox

Don’t miss a single article. Enter your email address on our subscribe page by clicking the button below. It is completely free and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.