Unfinished business, to use a key phrase from Proinsias De Rossa's recent article, has long been the great obstacle to any settlement in Northern Ireland. The business which remains unfinished is, as he indicates, the continuing demand for the unification of Ireland.
Mr De Rossa's approach is to seek a solution which would leave Northern Ireland's constitutional position within the UK secure, and which would enable nationalists to accept such a settlement by a series of measures, including new political structures in Northern Ireland, North-South links, constitutional changes in the UK, and a new east-west UK-Ireland inter-governmental body.
In such circumstances, Northern nationalists could reconcile their Irish nationalism with UK citizenship. This is an interesting variation on the Frameworks proposals already on the table, with two significant differences. The first is the emphasis on eliminating "unfinished business" and the second is a stronger and qualitatively different east-west element.
Both the Frameworks and the Downing Street Declaration explicitly build in "unfinished business", as does the Anglo-Irish Agreement, in their references to the possibility of Irish unification and their undertakings to facilitate it in certain circumstances. Does Mr De Rossa's variation offer a real opportunity for a democratic settlement in the North?
The "unfinished business" is most crucially in Bunreacht na hEireann. There may be little desire among the people of the Republic to absorb Northern Ireland but there is equally little desire among the same people, it would seem, to delete the constitutional claim.
Moreover, the Republic is linked in the present talks with Northern nationalists who protest they do retain a strong desire for a united Ireland and a significant number of whom have been prepared to kill to achieve it. Most suggested amendments to Articles 2 and 3 still leave room for "unfinished business" by retaining the aspiration to unity.
At the heart of this problem (and also of Articles 2 and 3) as Mr De Rossa indicates is the mistaken belief that nations and states must coincide, and that Irish nationalist aspirations can be satisfied only within an Irish State. His way forward is to argue that diverse "national allegiances" (his phrase) must be "included on a basis of equality" within the State, that is Northern Ireland, as a way of reducing these allegiances as "determinants of political outcomes". This is the parity of esteem at the centre of the Frameworks.
But just to talk of "national allegiances" is to confuse the issue. The word allegiance means the obligation of a subject to his or her monarch or government: it is a term related to a political or contractual link, not to a cultural identity. The whole definition of Irish nationalism in the 20th century has progressively locked together the nation and the State. The Preamble to the Bunreacht declares that it is "we, the people of Eire" who create the Irish State and the Constitution. Article 1 confirms this:
The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible and sovereign right to choose its own form of government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions.
It is, therefore, extremely difficult in the Irish context to detach the concept of the national from that of the State, and even more difficult to talk of "national allegiance" as meaning anything other than allegiance to the Irish Republic.
Clause 21 of "A New Framework for Agreement" states that any change in Articles 2 and 3 will maintain "the existing birthright of everyone born in either jurisdiction in Ireland to be part, as of right, of the Irish nation".
Thus, Northern nationalists are guaranteed their place within the Irish nation, with its "inalienable, indefeasible and sovereign right to choose its own form of government", but are also expected to accept that they cannot be part of the State which that nation created by exercising that right. It is impossible to see how, giving differing national allegiances, equality and parity of esteem within Northern Ireland does anything other than leave unfinished the business of nationalism.
An Irish identity divorced from political nationalism should find accommodation progressively easier within an evolving multi-cultural UK. Devolution may help by emphasising diversity. But to include, as Mr De Rossa does, the abolition of the Oath of Allegiance and the removal of the bar on a Catholic ascending the throne as key factors in a settlement in Northern Ireland is somewhat bizarre.
Must the Oath of Allegiance go? Under it, all MPs must swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth. Yet Queen Elizabeth is queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Allegiance to her is simply a traditional formula for declaring allegiance to the state. Are Northern nationalists going to accept a settlement within the UK state but at the same time refuse to affirm allegiance to that state?
Mr De Rossa's radical idea of a UK-Irish Republic inter-governmental body with executive (or managerial) powers is a departure from any nationalist agenda and might prove a catalyst for progress in Northern Ireland. Such a proposal would confront the citizens of the Republic with the same fears and challenges that have faced unionists over a similar North-South body. They would be asked to share executive authority over key policy areas with the traditional enemy and with a partner much more strongly positioned.
Mr De Rossa says this would no more signal the reintegration of the Republic into the UK than the North-South body would be a Trojan horse for joint sovereignty. Perhaps not, but would the Irish people really accept such a dramatic sharing of authority over Irish affairs with the British? If the honest answer is no, even when the British have no declared intention of repossessing the Republic, then how much less likely are unionists to accept a similar North-South arrangement with an entity which is still laying claim to Northern Ireland?
Constitutional change in the UK will help but the real constitutional surgery is needed in Dublin. Only very deep cuts will remove all "unfinished business" from the Bunreacht and, as Mr De Rossa says, there can be no room for "unfinished business" if we are to have a settlement. The fatal weakness of the Frameworks is that they are replete with the rhetoric of "unfinished business" which is why nationalism likes them and unionism abhors them, and which is also why they are unlikely to work.
Dr Dennis Kennedy is a member of the Belfast-based Cadogan Group
