“We’re between narratives, which means denial in the early stages is because of a desire to preserve last shreds of old imploding monoculture’

Last week the word reconciliation got a bad wrap in some quarters. Rory Carroll highlights one comment, from an old mucker of mine, Kevin Rooney, who found it to be a villainous roadblock on the road [not another A5? – Ed] to a united Ireland:

“The goal of reconciliation is very worthy but it is being manipulated and bastardised,” said Kevin Rooney, the founder of Irish Border Poll, a group that lobbies for a referendum. “It has become an undisguised unionist veto.”

Pretty awful, if you think it’s true. And he wasn’t alone. Brian Feeney used the former Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar’s presence at St Mary’s College this week to make the following point (largely at the current Taoiseach, Micheal Martin’s expense):

Martin has asserted the GFA “was about reconciliation”. It absolutely wasn’t. It created political institutions to manage the relationships between the three components of the problem: within the north, north-south and east-west. …most importantly, it created the democratic mechanism for achieving Irish national self-determination.

If I understand both Brian and Kevin on this correctly, I think what they mean is that there is no obligation for anyone to reconcile themselves to the perpetuation of NI under the current status quo, as the British part of our island. That’s reasonable.

Unity has a decent approval rating in Northern Ireland, the place it really matters, and most of those who hold such views don’t particularly want to see their own vision of what that means watered down with flag changes or commonwealth membership.

That’s a view they’re more than entitled to hold. Why should they be asked to water down their sense of what that means or to compromise their ambitions. And yet, without some form of reconciliation, they’ve made little progress toward the stated goal.

That’s in spite of the fact, as Brian states, the mechanisms for transfer are clearly laid out in the Belfast Agreement. The shining highway to all island freedom remains unencumbered by anything bar the ambition (or lack thereof) of its own advocates.

Reconciliation is already under way

There are other definitions of the word too. In recent years the Catholic Church has swapped confession for the older Sacriment of Reconciliation (between God and Man). But there’s also a more prosaic definition which relates to plain old finance:

“…the process of comparing different financial accounts, amounts, etc. in order to check that they add up to the same total or to explain any differences between them.”

There has been, for some time now, an ongoing form of reconciliation between north and south, east and west, largely obscured one, by the Troubles, and two by a globalisation process which has seen capital and people move

I was talking with Sam McBride earlier about his forthcoming collaboration with Fintan O’Toole and the Royal Irish Academy in which both will make cases for and against Irish Unity, when a distant memory from childhood came back to me.

In the 60s our annual holidays to Donegal needed a small triangular windscreen permit. Once, on the road between Antrim and Randalstown, I saw ours was missing. Pre the M2, my dad had to turn back for a 40 minute hack through town to Holywood.

Then, suddenly it seemed, we didn’t need one. As part of a wider European move Charlie Haughey introduced the Customs (Land Frontier) Regulations, 1968 as an SI and all (or most) of that friction was gone. Just as the fog of war was descending.

Afterwards came joint membership of the EEC, followed by the Act that set up the single market in 1992, obliterating customs barriers on the border: obscured by the peace process psychodrama until security was pulled back from the late 1990s onwards.

Stay unreconciled to reality, or move on

There was a short exchange on The View last week between another old friend (late of this parish, now columnist at the Irish News) Chris Donnelly and Professor Peter Shirlow. It demonstrated just how unreconciled to reality the UI debate has become.

Shirlow merely pointed out that in the time that’s elapsed between the signing of the Belfast Agreement that nationalism has failed to expand its footprint in the elections that have taken place in the intervening period. It did not go down well with Chris.

We can argue over polls (and really we on Slugger have done the hard yards on that), but election results don’t lie.  For all the many folks who have drifted from political unionism, political nationalism (ie, SDLP/SF combined) is becalmed.

That, in my view, is partly because the leadership of all parties (unionists included) are still far too focused on the conflicts of the past. Voters are by and large deserting unionism because they’re no longer really worried about defending the Union.

They have other priorities which neither political unionism nor political nationalism seems ready or willing to listen to never mind recognise or act upon. Their culture is not defined by Orange bands, the monarchy or indeed the Irish language.

Although it is likely that if you treat any of those things with contempt you will easily switch them off. These are the light preference voters which in most democracies decide where power and even (in our context) where constitutional destiny lies.

They are also the very folks within Northern Ireland who are the farthest down the track of the kind of reconciliation alluded to in the top quote of this blog essay. Their kids may be as likely to play Rugby as Gaelic. Mixed marriages are commonplace.

They prioritise school choice in terms of how they think their kids will get on in life, and often siblings can be flung out across State, Catholic and even Integrated schooling depending on what happens to be available. They’ve zero interest in polarisation.

This is why I think Kevin is making a fundamental (and from the point of view of an early as possible border poll catastrophic) miscalculation. This group is neither unionist nor, since it is culturally heterogeneous, cannot be said to hold a political veto.

Who are the nones and the neithers?

So nationalism and unionism have choices. They can stay pure and aloof from the hybrids (or neithers as they’re often called by pollsters), or they can get down and dirty and get on with the business of building a better future for all regardless of tribe.

But in doing so there is no need to check out your patriotism. If you’re been stuck at 40% for 30 years the electorate is telling you (and anyone who enjoys conjuring with the imaginary figure of 50% plus one) your math is more than just a wee bit off.

No amount of fury, contempt or bluster can obscure that. Indeed, if you use Eoghan’s nowcast tool (which is simply a projection of how the current polling might affect the relative strengths of the pro and anti Remain UK two things emerge.

One, is the most obvious, which is the current roadblock to a UI is not an identity based vote but fromthose who are opting out of the whole tribal based politics affair…

The other thing is how narrowly based the vote distributions of nationalist strengths are. Despite winning fewer seats, and on a falling trajectory the DUP would win seats in every constituency, whereas Sinn Féin is piling up votes and seats in core areas.

That’s the outworking of the two political cultures (ie the eastern republic v western principality scenario previously laid out here). It may also explain why many republicans genuinely feel that the time for a border poll is much closer than it actually is.

It’s easier to see the yawning gap between nationalist perceptions and reality of the actual bio politics of the place if you examine the demographic changes in two disparate areas like Derry City and Strabane and Ards and North Down council areas.

In the west, there is a minor rise in the figure for Catholics and Protestants and ‘nones’ (4%, up from 2% in 2011). In the eastern council area, the figure for Catholics holds firm, but the proportion of Protestants drop 7% in line with a similar rise in ‘nones’.

The pattern across the east is similar, with Protestants redesigning as ‘nones’ at an accelerating rate. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that these folks are not looking to replace one monocultural form of cultural outlook with another.

Future-focused patriotism needed

Meanwhile, one of the big changes of the last 20 years on the north south scale has been the introduction of an hourly timetable for trains travelling between Grand Central to Dublin Connelly. No big deal you might say except no one did it in my lifetime?

The last 27 years has tricked most of us. Few of the many of the futures laid out in those early post Agreement years came to pass, whether it was unity by 2016, or the inevitable disaster of a SF FM. What few of us foresaw was the rise of the neithers.

Nor did any of us see Brexit coming along to overheat and over cook expectations on both side of the divide. It was not the panacea predicted by its advocates, but nor did the disturbances and inter-communual conflict it created end the Union.

Yesterday’s announcement that Stena Line is pulling out of Rosslare to Cherbourg to refocus on Irish-UK land bridge routes show just how volatile betting on single outcome futures can be. Government’s change and along with them so do countries.

As Mary C Murphy noted Chapter Three of Europe and Northern Ireland’s Future, one of our problems is a mismatch between our introverted politics (unreconciled, if you like) and how our political economy has developed in spite of their passivity.

What remains to be addressed are structural problems (think A5, think Health Reforms, think blocks to domestic housing and business expansion out west and along the North Coast where refusal to reform funding for NI Water is holding back both).

After watching this “game’ for more than 20 years there seems to be a fear of change, whether unionist fear of constitutional change or nationalist fear that if they make Northern Ireland too good a place to live people might not want bigger changes.

At this point Anna Burns’ French teacher character from her multiple award winning novel Milkman comes to mind (Burns won both the Booker Prize for Literature and the Orwell Prize for her powerful story telling and deep political insights).

“‘Change one thing, class, just one thing, and I assure you, everything else will change also’ – and to say that to us, to people who were not only not into metaphors but not into admitting to what was patently there.”

Not admitting to what’s patently there, does that have a ring of familiarity to it? I would extend it to believing things that patently are no longer there, like a unionist majority, or a permissive majority for constitutional change.

To channel Burke, “change is continuity”. What we have is the death of old narratives and the halting birth of a new more inclusive one. As my old Swedish polymath friend John Kellden has put it:

The transition between narratives is catalyzed by denial and confusion. We’re between narratives, which means denial in the early stages is because a desire to preserve last shreds of old imploding monoculture narratives.

What are Northern Irish nationalisms and unionisms but a pair of contending monocultures continually reinforcing the presence of the other whilst simultaneously denying the presence of a liberalising, hybridising centre?

It doesn’t have to stay that way. But it would need the kind of change Gladys Ganiel outlined in Chapter 2 of Evangelism and Conflict in Northern Ireland as far back as 2008…

Embracing the politics of small tasks

From the outset we have swapped a politics of action to a politics of gesture. The very first link from Slugger to the outside world was a fact that Belfast City Council elected a Sinn Féin mayor for the first time in history. That was a real achievement.

But far too much of what followed has been about symbolism than any real world achievement, reconciliation or more importantly, genuine delivery. Each small task completed makes a qualitative difference to the future we can expect.

At the same time, every task uncompleted condemns us to more of the same. For every successful Narrow Water Bridge (which was signed off in the dying days of the SDLP’s tenure at the Department of Infrastructure) there are two or three failed A5s.

This points to a weakness in the arguments of the most direct advocates of a united Ireland. How do you answer the question what would a united Ireland look like if (and I would argue when) it needs to look radically different to what we have now?

Shifting the furniture around won’t make the stranger welcome in any new Ireland (though the refusal to do so shows how unequal to the task many nationalists have become. Proofing the change means putting in footings now, without preconditions.

Most talk of unity is like Minecraft where houses, hills, trees can all float far above the ground zero where most of us have to live and earn our living. No philosophical ladder can bridge such an implausible gap without a considerable amount of graft.

There is no way out of our stalement unless we commit to developing a new north. We can choose define ourselves, whether across two island or just part of one by transcending our past differences and including everyone and everything.

Finally, demographics is not destiny, character is.

“Into the same river no man can step twice; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.”

— Heraclitus 535–475 BCE

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty