Political reconciliation has happened in Northern Ireland: reunificationist parties need to catch up

I recently wrote in Slugger how “the vast majority of Northern Ireland’s voters are reconciled to living in a future that most of them would prefer not to happen.” That article suggested that a PR-STV direct election for First and Deputy First Ministers would force the major parties to reach out to more moderate voters for transfers rather than relying only on voters in their own exclusivist support base.

In this article, I want to explore the implications of NI voter reconciliation for Southern nationalist parties, particularly the Government parties, who claim to desire reunification, but have not yet produced a detailed roadmap to a new Ireland.

Firstly, a recap of recent polling by ARINS on political reconciliation in the North: The 2024 ARINS survey asked people their opinion on either remaining in the United Kingdom or reunifying with the South. Some 95 per cent of Northern Catholics are reconciled to remaining (either ‘not happy, but could live with it’ or ‘happily accept’). The figure for Sinn Féin supporters was 96 per cent. For Protestants, 77 per cent are reconciled to reunification; with figures of 60 per cent for both TUV and DUP voters. Regarding Others, 96 per cent were reconciled to remaining and 92 per cent were reconciled to reunification¹.

A recent report by Social Change Initiative and King’s College London (Values and Attitudes in Northern Ireland 25 Years after the Good Friday Agreement) concluded that there was “limited evidence of deep political polarization in NI”².

What does ‘reconciliation’ mean? The Oxford English Dictionary says it is “the fact of being reconciled”. John Mahaffy, former Trinity Provost, described Athens – after its defeat by Sparta in 405 BCE – as a place where youngsters were “taught above all to live in reconciliation with political foes”³. In Northern Ireland, reconciliation is a word whose meaning is as slippery to grasp as a tomato seed. The UK’s Independent Commission on Reconciliation and Information Recovery doesn’t define reconciliation⁴. Dr. Cillian McGrattan – a lecturer at Ulster University whose research interests include conflict resolution – has suggested that reconciliation “is less an endpoint and more a process”⁵.

An Taoiseach, Mícheál Martin, asserted recently — in the journal Studies — that “real unity requires genuine respect, which in turn requires genuine reconciliation”⁶. Thus, reconciliation is a requirement before ‘real unity’ can happen. His assertion has infuriated northern nationalists, most of whom believe that reconciliation will be completed after reunification. Colum Eastwood, Foyle MP, stated on May 20th that he had been “fairly frustrated at some of the noises coming from Dublin”⁷. This from a former SDLP leader who had been exploring, with Mícheál Martin, a merger between Fianna Fáil and the SDLP only a few years ago. Has An Taoiseach lost the northern nationalist dressing-room?

An Taoiseach’s assertion strays from McGrattan’s characterisation of reconciliation by suggesting that reconciliation is an endpoint to be reached before ‘real unity’ is to be achieved. More questions are raised than answered by Mícheál Martin’s pronouncement.

Is reunification-by-border-poll to happen only after real unity has been reached? Would there be a need for any embedding of reconciliatory aspirations in this scenario as genuine reconciliation would have already been achieved? How would ‘real’ unity be measured? How does it differ from plain old ‘unity’? (Can one point to any country in today’s troubled world that has real unity?) How does ‘genuine reconciliation’ differ from ordinary reconciliation?

Mícheál Martin’s assertion is, firstly, unverifiable. Any referendum will be a secret ballot. How will we know that significant numbers of unionists voted for reunification? (Only the overall result for the 1998 Northern Ireland referendum was published.)

Secondly, Mícheál Martin is privileging unionist voters by implying that its internal vote breakdown for a border poll is more important than how the vote breaks down within nationalist and Other voters. The average non-unionist vote share for the last three elections was 58 per cent. If all non-unionists, and only 10 per cent of unionists, voted for reunification, that would be a 62 per cent vote in favour. Would Mícheál Martin regard such a result as ‘unreal’ unity, given the low (i.e. 10%) unionist percentage in that scenario? Is it possible that such a result would offer, as Michael Collins might have said, the ‘freedom to achieve’ real unity? (Collins’ ‘stepping-stone’ evaluation of the 1921 Treaty seems to mirror McGrattan’s process-not-endpoint characterisation of reconciliation.) What percentage of unionists voting for reunification would constitute genuine reconciliation? One could argue that any voter who votes for reunification is not a unionist, so is Mícheál Martin’s ‘genuine reconciliation’ meaningful? What if only 10 per cent of nationalists voted for remaining in the UK, and remain was victorious: would that be ‘unreal’ remaining?

Thirdly, Mícheál Martin’s assertion contrasts with the Good Friday Agreement which states, in Section 6.1.ii, that the right of self-determination to bring about a united Ireland “must be achieved and exercised with and subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland”. There is no requirement for reconciliation to have happened. (In any case, the ARINS figures discussed above suggest that any reasonable threshold for political reconciliation has been reached.) As the Irish government is not proposing the amendment of this section of the Agreement, presumably it is happy with its wording?

Sinn Féin is failing to convince Northern non-communal voters of its reunification vision. Its continued justification of the IRA’s campaign of violence, and public commemoration of IRA combatants who caused death and suffering to many, is arguably preventing the growth of reunificationist sentiment in the centre-ground.

The unwillingness or inability of Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to move imaginatively on reunification offers an opportunity for the SDLP, Social Democrats and the Labour Party. These three parties are untainted by any association with political violence. A radical reunificationist alliance, perhaps even merger, of these similarly-named parties could unlock the latent idealism of young and liberal voters island-wide, tired of the politics of the houseless South and the rudderless North.

The 2024 ARINS poll also found that 60 per cent of Northerners agreed that it is important to plan for the possibility of unity, almost double the 34 per cent supporting reunification. This suggests significant untapped pro-reunification support exists. Surely it is time for all reunificationist parties to reconcile themselves to the desire of Northerners to see detailed, coherent, pluralist and visionary reunification proposals? They may be pleasantly surprised by the reaction of the non-polarized voting majority, who have learned, in Séamus Mallon’s words, how “to share this place”.

REFERENCES:

¹ https://www.ria.ie/assets/uploads/2025/03/ARINS-IT_NIsummary_2024.pdf, pages/slides 20-23.
² https://www.socialchangeinitiative.com/values-and-attitudes-in-northern-ireland.
³ John Pentland Mahaffy, Social life in Greece: from Homer to Menander, 1874, p.254, here.
⁴ The relevant paragraph from the ICRIR’s Code of Conduct document is:

“The Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) has the principal objective of promoting reconciliation. It will seek to achieve this through recovery of information about deaths and serious injuries for victims, survivors and their families, using its unique powers to obtain evidence without fear or favour wherever it may be held.”

Reconciliation is not defined. And the vast majority of Northern Ireland’s population were neither victim nor perpetrator. It is difficult, then, to see what metric the ICRIR would use to evaluate whether its work has promoted reconciliation. This is problematic, particularly as ‘Reconciliation’ comes before ‘Information Recovery’ in its title. See https://cloud-platform-e218f50a4812967ba1215eaecede923f.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/sites/16/2023/12/ICRIR-Code-of-Conduct.pdf.
⁵ Cillian McGrattan, “Reconciliation and whataboutery in dealing with the past in Northern Ireland” (pp.362-371), in The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace, (eds.) Laura McAtackney and Máirtín Ó Catháin, Routledge, 2024, p.365.
⁶ Mícheál Martin, ‘Harnessing the potential of the Good Friday Agreement: the Shared Island Initiative’, Studies 114 (453) (2025), p15.
⁷ Irish News paywalled article.