Let’s Not Make Reconciliation a Sisyphean Task

I’ve always had a thing for Greek myths and legends. These fantastical tales full of cruel and capricious Gods, wicked monsters and daring heroes have seeped into the very bedrock of western culture.

One of my absolute favourites is the story of Sisyphus.

Aptly for the purposes of this essay, this ancient Greek King proved too clever for his own good in cheating death and managed to greatly antagonise Zeus himself. He earned himself a fate far worse than what he would have otherwise endured as punishment for his hubris. His eternal punishment was that he would be compelled to spend each day rolling a large and heavy boulder up a hill. Imagine him if you will in your mind’s eye, muscles taut, teeth gritted, body slicked with sweat, spending every waking hour straining against this massive chunk of rock, desperately pushing it inch by grinding inch upwards to the brow of the hill. The twist in the tale of course is that all this effort is for naught, the boulder is enchanted to slip from his grasp just before he reaches the top and he is compelled to watch it roll all the way back to its starting point. Some tellings of the story I have seen twist the knife a little further, and have the Gods of Olympus compound the torment by telling Sisyphus he will be released from his bondage should he manage to get the boulder over the crest of the hill. They know he will never fulfil the condition; they’ve rigged the game and the promise is merely to enhance his agony.

It is no surprise to me that the story of Sisyphus is what has popped into my mind in recent days, as discussion over Leo Varadkar’s comments over the last weekend has continued online. To summarise, Varadkar made the point that treating reunification as ‘an aspiration’ isn’t enough anymore, that if you want a United Ireland you have to put the work in. To that end he says that…

“I have proposed the establishment of a forum for parties interested in talking about unity. I hope, at some point, in the term of this Government, that decision will be taken.”

In other words, a practical step towards reunification. After all, getting all the parties and stakeholders who support reunification on the same page with Irish government facilitation would be an enormous step forward in at least clarifying the argument of the pro-unity camp.

But a sneaking suspicion is beginning to take hold with nationalism that far from being pursued as an end in itself, stakeholders in Britain, the Republic and the North are trying to stealthily pervert the concept into being a pre-requisite for reunification. Under the Good Friday Agreement, the following is stated as being binding on all participants…

“(they) recognise that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively and without external impediment, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish, accepting that this right must be achieved and exercised with and subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland”

This paragraph contains within it the quid pro quo at the heart of the Agreement on the constitutional issue. While it accepts that reunification will require the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland (a big, if inevitable, concession by the nationalist side of the debate) it also was supposed to legitimise the pursuit of the aspiration for reunification. But in recent years, that aspiration has been increasingly qualified by the insidiously developed narrative that pursuing reunification comes at a cost to reconciliation, which is portrayed as a higher, almost spiritual pursuit in contrast to the tangible and earthly delights of reunification. Just as Christ promised the Kingdom of Heaven to those who devoted themselves to spiritual matters over earthly ones, so too are those who seek reunification encouraged to seek the path of reconciliation over politically uniting the two parts of the island.

Reconciliation in the north is a good thing in and of itself of course. Who can disagree that we would be better off in a world where the differences between the two sides of the constitutional debate were restricted solely to the political sphere, where people could just be people and where expressing a preference for either union, reunification or even have no preference at all wouldn’t come loaded with a whole panoply of pre-conceptions and assumptions that box most people in and assign them the label of either ‘themmun’ or ‘ussun’, depending on your point of view.

But here’s the apparent trap. Reconciliation, while a worthy goal, is an argument without downsides, up there with saying you support ending world hunger whereas reunification would involve a messy political process and there would be winners and losers at the end of it. By attempting to argue that reconciliation should come first before a serious effort is made at political reunification, and then allowing the corollary of that argument, that pursuing reunification undermines reconciliation, you try and lead people to the conclusion that if you pursue reunification you are undermining reconciliation.

The current Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, has come to exemplify this attitude among northern nationalists and other supporters of reunification with his continuing emphasis on putting reconciliation, as he sees it, before reunification, as this article from 2023 when he was still Tánaiste reminds us.

Martin can of course make a credible case for his vision. A peaceful Northern Ireland, one where differences are respected and people reconciled to the past, would be far easier to integrated into a hypothetical reunited Ireland than a Northern Ireland that was still divided and which had come out the other end of a bitterly contested referendum with a narrow win for the reunification side of the argument.

Northern nationalists and others on the island can’t shake that sneaking suspicion though that the southern establishment is less than keen on actively pursuing reunification, even as the actual southern electorate is broadly supportive of the idea.

The rationale some northern nationalists embrace to explain this reluctance is that whomever is Taoiseach should reunification occurs would see the entirety of their tenure swallowed by it. Some may appreciate the historical legacy of going down as the individual under whom Ireland was reunited, but many others who aspire to the office would probably only see a litany of problems to contend with that they would prefer not to happen on their watch. Just as I would argue one of the greatest barriers for the middle ground to support reunification in Northern Ireland is an unspoken dread of what would happen during a potentially tumultuous transition, so too do southern politicians face a similar barrier in their reluctance to having to actually deal with it should it happen. Instead of taking an active role in seeking reunification, other alternatives are explored.

Martin’s shared island initiative maybe one such alternative, predicated on the belief that building links without reference to the political aspect will in turn foster that reconciliation and perhaps, in the fullness of time, lay the groundwork for a more durable form of unity.

There is just one flaw with Martin’s approach in my opinion.

It isn’t going to work.

Like a modern-day Zeus, Martin is inviting those in favour of unity to put their shoulder to the boulder of reconciliation and to push forwards to the hill crest of reunification, only for that effort to never be enough. The boulder inevitably rolls back down the hill.

What Martin is doing, and what he himself said in 2023, is that he sees reconciliation as a prerequisite for reunification. But this treats reconciliation and reunification as two distinct parts of the same sequence. He seemed flummoxed in 2023 when he said…

“Perhaps most problematically, politics in Northern Ireland is still largely defined by green and orange and a zero-sum framing of community competition on almost every issue – even though that doesn’t reflect the day-to-day reality of life and often doesn’t reflect broader definitions of Britishness or Irishness. This complicates the achievement of parity of esteem, and the creation of political space in which the people of Northern Ireland have a right to identify and be accepted as British, or Irish or both. And, both north and south, there are persistent, often mindless, instances of abuse of others’ identity, beliefs, culture, or experience…too much time has been squandered over the last 25 years without fulfilling the potential of peace. Connected to that, there has never been sufficient, sustained focus on tackling entrenched sectarianism and disadvantage in Northern Ireland. And, we have simply not done enough to get to know and understand each other more since 1998. To build new connections over the barriers that grew up over centuries and during the Troubles. Beyond family relationships and individual connections, the fact is that we know too little of each other across the border and our different communities. Reconciliation has been the great miss in the 25 years since the Agreement. Many communities are as far apart today as they were in 1998.”

Now, once again, there is little objectionable in that speech and I don’t think anyone can argue that reconciliation really hasn’t moved as far forward as many of us would have liked (sometimes it feels we are going backwards). 25 years is an awful long time for there be no real movement on overcoming the fundamental dividing line in our society. But Martin shouldn’t be so surprised that so little has happened in 25 (now 27) years when nothing has been done to address the root cause of the issue and I would argue that we can’t really treat the divide in our society without diagnosing what that root cause is.

The root cause of our divide is partition, for it creates the question that people divide over, do you favour reunification or continued union? People in the north define themselves in relation to their answer. Nationalist and Unionist. There are of course the Others, who don’t have a preference (or at least one they care to express), but even the very word ‘Other’ defines them in relation to the core question. We are all born in the shadow of the border.

In answering the question, you are deemed to have picked a side (and even those who try not to are continually heckled by members of the other two preferences to reveal their ‘real’ opinion).

It is here that Northern Ireland’s fundamental instability comes into play. By that I mean the territory is too small to be economically viable (we are reliant on the subvention from Britain, but that’s an argument for another day on another aspect of the debate) and the number of committed unionists, by which I mean those who would vote to continue partition for understandable reasons of national belonging even if this results in a demonstrably inferior quality of life, is no longer a majority of the population. That fundamental instability means the idea of reunification is too obvious to ever fade away, the pro-union case can never ‘win’ the argument in terms of permanently putting the debate to rest. Instead, the pro-union vote must always hold off the pro-reunification side, unable to lose even once.

That kind of politics has an effect on people. One group is told that eventually ‘their day will come’, another group is exhorted not to be ‘the generation that fails Ulster’. One has faith that no matter how long things take all that is needed is one day where everything goes the right way, the other is on permanent alert to try and ensure that such a day never comes.

Martin believes reconciliation is the answer, but how can reconciliation succeed without tackling the source of the division? Our divide isn’t an ancient scar, it’s a raw and open wound which is always suppurating poison into our society and unlike Sisyphus, we are pushing uphill against a flood.

What I would argue Martin fails to grasp, and what I think Varadkar does, is that reconciliation and reunification are not on the same path. They are parallel journeys which are interlinked, and progressing along one eases progress on the other, but it is not entirely the same journey.

As Colum Eastwood wrote in his article for the Irish Times back in April…

“In particular, the creeping normalisation of the demand that reconciliation be a prerequisite for constitutional change needs to be addressed…The hard truth that those establishment voices need to hear and to understand is that while reconciliation is a moral imperative for our society, it’s hard for people to prioritise holding hands with their neighbours if they cannot feed their kids…. To that end there has, over the last number of years, been a trend of other people never involved in the SDLP telling us what the giants of our movement John Hume and Seamus Mallon thought about the future. I do not think any rise to the level of taking their names in vain but I know they would have had a wry smile and a raised eyebrow at least at some of the commentary. Take it from me – neither believed that the unity of our people was at odds with the unity of our country. Neither is a hostage to the other – they are complimentary. The Good Friday Agreement, easily and falsely interpreted as a full stop in conversations about the future, was in fact the beginning of the next paragraph in our island’s story.”

Which is exactly right.

Not only is reconciliation NOT a necessary step on the journey we must collectively pass through to reach reunification, but to treat it as such seems to me reductive and self-defeating. After all, if you make reconciliation a prerequisite to reunification, then you’ve just perversely incentivised those who oppose reunification to thwart reconciliation at every turn. Worse, framing it as a prerequisite means that those who seek reunification are unfairly cast as either selfish or provocative for articulating their desire for reunification with that desire framed as having an opportunity cost in pursuing reconciliation.

Instead of arguing that reconciliation must come before reunification, when the very nature of partition feeds division and acrimony that reconciliation wishes to bridge, surely a better approach would be to pursue the ‘moral imperative’ of reconciliation as if there were no prospect to ending partition, and to seek to end partition as a worthwhile goal in and of itself?

The Shared Island initiative is a wonderful program and we shouldn’t denigrate it or its achievements, but what Varadkar and Eastwood and McDonald are calling for is movement on the political side of the equation, engagement from the south on what a reunited Ireland would look like. THAT would be a real game changer on the debate.

We don’t have to be like Sisyphus. Pushing the boulder all the way to the top isn’t necessary to reach this particular summit.