Times Change, Winter 1997/98

The attempt by Garret Fitzgerald and Paul Gillespie to analyse the relationship between the Irish and the British reveals, in my view, much evidence of what a psychoanalyst could only call 'denial'. In the first instance, we are told that the Irish Republic's membership of the EU has "completed the project of Irish independence" and led to the dissolution of the irredentist claim on the territory of Northern Ireland. This assertion ignores entirely the ruling of the Irish Supreme Court in 1990 which decided that Articles Two and Three of the Irish Constitution were an 'imperative' to reintegrate the national territory. The case was taken by two Northern Ireland unionists to test whether Article One of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 was a derogation of the Irish Republic's claim "as a legal right" to the entire island. Clearly, this claim has not dissolved and still stands to its full extent in Irish law.

Intriguingly, Fitzgerald and Gillespie entertain the heresy that "full independence for Ireland may not have been inevitable". They claim there was a time when Irish people (sic) would have been content to continue in a close relationship with Britain so long as they had "control over their own domestic affairs". However, the British mishandled Home Rule in 1914 and subsequently converted most Irish people into supporters of complete independence. This is the familiar litany of "it's all the fault of the nasty/incompetent Brits"

.However, this analysis runs counter to their observation that Ireland in fact contained two communities which did not fuse due to their different ethnic origins and religious affiliations. As is self-evident, the major faultlines between these two groups ran through the north-eastern counties of Ireland. Irish Home Rule, therefore, was always likely to generate intractable political conflict because, contrary to Irish nationalist myth, there was not one people in Ireland who might happily subscribe to a Home Rule Irish state.

Rather there were two peoples: the Irish Catholics concentrated in the south and west, and the Ulster Protestants in the north east. Home Rule might have been workable in Ireland if constitutional nationalists had not insisted on it for the whole of the island. According to Fitzgerald and Gillespie Irish nationalism now embraces a "pluralism which accepts unionism as an Irish tradition entitled to recognition on equal footing with nationalism".

If that had been the case in 1914 one is entitled to the counter-factual speculation that the attempted coup d'etat of 1916 would never have taken place, nor would the subsequent destructive and tragic events between the British and the Irish, which have still to read an honourable conclusion.

The most striking aspect of Fitzgerald and Gillespie's essay is surely the section detailing the extraordinary density of the links which subsist between the peoples of these islands. In their words, "The extent of direct human and family ties is probably unprecedented between two independent states". It would also be true to say that the links have increased rather than diminished since the establishment of the Irish Free State. And they have done so, because until very recently the Republic's economy was in such a bad state that enormous numbers of Irish citizens came to work in Britain, where they were treated, in effect, as British citizens and subsequently settled there.

Considerable numbers also came to escape the narrow confines of what was until quite recently a highly Catholicised society. This post-independence emigration added to the already substantial migration of the nineteenth century, prompted by the opportunities created by the industrial revolution and the famine in the west of Ireland.

Fitzgerald and Gillespie profess ignorance on the British view of Ireland. But if they were to consult the detailed survey carried out in 1994 by their compatriot, Professor James O'Connell, at Bradford University, regarding the attitudes of the British towards "Ireland and the Irish in Britain" they would discover, among many other interesting things, that a quarter of Britons now have an Irish relative, while as many as 60 per cent have Irish friends, acquaintances or fellow workers. This is hardly surprising since there are more than twice as many people of southern Irish extraction living in Britain than the 3.6 million in Southern Ireland.

This irreducible fact of itself explains the enormous amount of social intercourse between the peoples of the two islands they cite.

When these direct human contracts are added to the interaction via TV, the press, literature, the arts, all underpinned by our speaking a common language, Fitzgerald and Gillespie rightly observe of the Irish, that Britain and the British are a "place and a people with which most of them are familiar, even intimate". And as Professor O'Connell's study revealed those feelings are fully reciprocated on the British side, even though naturally their experience is more of the Irish in Britain than in Ireland.

Yet the question they fail to ask is, why given the depth and frequency of these contacts have the Irish and the British yet to normalise their political relationships? But rather than address this paradox, Fitzgerald and Gillespie then divert into the confident assertion that Britain is facing a full-blown "crisis of identity" - including questions of borders, shared myths of origins, and common culture, and a putative rise in English nationalism. This rather suggests that a vibrant new Irish Republic has to deal with a doddery old neighbour on the verge of breakdown.

There are undoubtedly tensions within the British state, tensions which the last 18 years of Tory rule with its obsessions with Europe and which had its centre of gravity in southern England undoubtedly exacerbated (e.g. piloting the poll tax in Scotland). But it is ridiculous to imply, particularly after the landslide election of a Labour government pledged to devolution, that the British state is on the verge of disintegration while there are no internal tensions in the Republic. A leading investigative journalist has yet to be shot in Britain while investigating the burgeoning underworld of its capital's drug dealers.

If Fitzgerald and Gillespie really want to understand British objections to the "European federal project", then more conventional reasons than imminent breakdown and rampant English nationalism seem better suited. As they implicitly recognise, the European project easily evokes ancient British fears about "take over from the Continent". Insofar as it entails a joint Franco-German hegemony, which is (or was) the driving force behind the single currency, it can conjure up the prospect of a double nightmare: Louis XIV's and revolutionary France and Kaiser Wilhelm's and Adolf Hitler's Germany all rolled into one. They also recognise that this prospect of "invasion" is one which has always been an Irish Catholic / Republican temptation to call on. Yet they seem unable to see that by the insertion into the Joint Framework Document of an insistence on a North-South authority which might formulate policy for the whole of Ireland "in respect of the challenges and opportunities of the EU", the Irish Republic might give the appearance of using European institutions to further the very irredentist claim which they insist Irish nationalism has now given up. Indeed, a similar threatening use of "Europe" is implied at the end of the essay where it said that the continuance of improved London-Dublin relations would be undermined if the British don't fully sign up to Europe.

But surely Fitzgerald and Gillespie must realise that if a majority of the 58 million Britons decide in a democratic referendum that they do not want to become further embroiled in Europe then that is a reality with which the Irish Republic is going to have to live. Consent, a principle they admirably insist on for Northern Ireland's possible integration with the Republic, applies equally to the process of further European integration.

Fitzgerald and Gillespie correctly recognise that if the Republic does sign up to the single currency and the UK does not, this is likely to have serious repercussions on Irish-British relationships. far from dissolving the border in Ireland it will solidify it. Their approach to this dilemma is to assume that Britain's interests will eventually "place it at the heart of Europe", and to recommend that the Irish Republic joins EMU in the first wave anyway. But they might be advised to be more aware that Euroscepticism is on the increase, and has been given a considerable boost by the recent election of a socialist government in France. And Will Hutton, the editor of the Observer and an economist and political thinker close to the heart of the Blair modernising project, has recently pronounced against Europe if it "becomes nothing more than a babel of selfish, regional nationalisms". He sees great dangers in Brussels encouraging an integrating federalism which gives greater independence to sub-national units like Catalonia, Wallonia and the Basque country - a point on which new irredentists like Umberto Bossi of the Northern League in Italy are making great play. Rather than bringing Europeans closer together, this is likely to generate conflict in a Europe "united" by a single currency. For as Hutton argues, why should "Europeans who cannot stand their neighbours in their existing states make compromises for more distant cousins?".

That observation indicates a much less positive reading of the effect of the "European dimension" on Irish-British relationships. I believe that the Irish Republic's "independence in Europe" has often served to mask the much more important reality which Fitzgerald and Gillespie graphically identify: namely, these massive, ongoing and increasing links between the two islands. If the full weight were given to these linkages the conflict in Northern Ireland would soon appear as the outrageous and costly (in lives, money and infrastructure damage) anachronism it really is. The British political class goes along with this illusion partly out of an exaggerated sense of historical guilt (cunningly played on by Irish republicans) and partly because it too has been keen to foster an illusory sense of British separateness from Southern Ireland to bolster its own internal legitimacy - a recalcitrant Other without always helps in such matters (though there are encouraging signs from Tony Blair's recent speech in Ulster and his comment on the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine, that he is prepared to acknowledge but then put aside the guilty past and engage in some much-needed straight talking about the future).

However, the peoples of these islands show in their everyday intercourse that they are much more like each other than either Government usually likes to admit; that over the centuries they have become, whether their politicians and bureaucrats like it or not, increasingly mingled, both ethnically and culturally.

At the end of their essay, Fitzgerald and Gillespie hold out the possibility that "under an EU roof there is the promise of multiple identities, parity of esteem between nationalities and the creation of a new 'constitutional patriotism' in the North".

Building the EU roof is looking increasingly difficult, but why should not these conditions be fulfilled on an inter-British-Irish basis? The UK is already the most heterogeneous society in Europe, now including over three million people of Commonwealth origin, and, as already mentioned, some eight million from Ireland. There has long been a Commission for Racial Equality advocating "parity of esteem" and the Blair government is now talking about the possibility of an all-embracing Human Rights Commission with one commissioner specifically reserved for Northern Ireland. It has vast experience of "multiple identities".

There is no reason in principle why the peoples of these islands should not now forge their own new "constitutional settlement" where their common status as citizens of these mongrel islands is as important as whatever national origins they might have.

Indeed, the elements of this new settlement lie around us if only we could see them. Ironically, they have been put there in large part by Fitzgerald himself. For it was he and Thatcher who inaugurated the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council and the non-governmental British-Irish Encounter Group as a result of the Anglo-Irish Joint Studies Report of 1981.Unfortunately the Council has become completely overshadowed by the standing Anglo-Irish Conference, which has the much narrower remit of monitoring Northern Ireland and relations between the two parts of Ireland, and meets much more frequently. In addition, it was established over the heads of the Ulster unionists by the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and thus hated by them. The Joint Studies also made provision for a British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body which duly got under way in 1990, which provides opportunities for up to 90 parliamentarians to meet twice a year to discuss matters of common concern.If we could breathe new life into the Intergovernmental Council (perhaps learning from the Council of the Nordic countries along the way), beef up the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body and the non-governmental Encounter Group (both of which are doing useful work) thereby placing the standing Conference in a wider and less contentious context, who 'owned' Northern Ireland would surely quite soon come to be seen as an anachronistic question. This should facilitate the long-needed amendment (which requires a referendum) of Articles Two and Three of the 1937 Constitution.For the overriding truth is that the great majority of the peoples of these islands are no longer in Fitzgerald's and Gillespie's words, "differentiated to a marked degree".Surely the time has come for the British and Irish political class to grasp this self-evident fact and move decisively on this issue (though it has to be recognised that the narrow outcome of the Irish general election may not help decisiveness). But if they can't, the growing forces of civil society in both islands must; and then call down the curtain on the small minority of unionist and nationalist extremists, the proto-fascists hell-bent on communal mayhem, who have caused so much needless death, injury, misery and destruction over the last 28 years.The overwhelming democratic majority have waited quite long enough.