One sign of serious preparation for a united Ireland would be the production of a credible economic analysis. That moment did not arrive during last weekend’s Ireland’s Future conference. A publication accompanying the event, titled Shaping a New and United Ireland, wished nearly half the North’s subvention away by claiming the UK would continue paying state pensions after unification.
The basis given for this claim was the 2019 Convention on Social Security, by which the UK and Ireland pay benefits to each other’s citizens when they move to each other’s countries – a scenario quite unrelated to one part of a country moving to another, taking its tax base with it. The UK and Ireland also have a 2019 Memorandum of Understanding on reciprocal healthcare. Nobody is pretending the UK would continue funding the North’s hospitals after unification.
What is telling about the pensions claim is that it is not only absurd but unnecessary. A united Ireland could comfortably afford the £2 billion annual cost (the £3.2 billion figure in the Ireland’s Future document appears to mistakenly include public service pensions.)
Last week, Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe put €6 billion in the National Reserve Fund over the next two years just to avoid becoming complacent about corporation tax receipts.
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But examining even manageable problems is sacrilegious to a vision of unity still at the fantasy stage – a paradise to be reached without pain. The Republic will simply acquire an extension, the unexplained cost of which it is impertinent to query.
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Border poll
Of course, there are hard-headed reasons not to get into specifics long before any foreseeable Border poll. Concrete proposals provide opponents of unification with points to argue against, while dividing supporters over the details. Unionists should at least acknowledge when a genuine debate has occurred and last weekend’s conference did feature a tentative conversation on the outline of a united Ireland. Fianna Fáil TD Jim O’Callaghan proposed Stormont remain under a federal or bicameral arrangement, along with the British-Irish institutions of the Belfast Agreement. Tánaiste Leo Varadkar suggested the same. The conference document also mentioned survival of Stormont and the North-South and east-west institutions, although only as a description of the Belfast Agreement, which portrays unification as a mere transfer of sovereignty over Northern Ireland. The agreement could say nothing more because it was not a negotiation on a united Ireland and the conference document said nothing more to avoid getting into specifics. But it is certain this is not what Ireland’s Future wants – it is an essentially post-devolution movement, formed after Sinn Féin collapsed Stormont in 2017.
On this point, Ireland’s Future is correct. Northern Ireland could not endure as a polity, which is what Stormont’s survival would mean, should nationalism win a border poll.
It would be irrational under the two-communities model of the agreement for unionism to become the smaller community and still trap a nationalist majority behind a border.
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The emerging three-communities model of unionist, nationalist and other introduces a complication. When a fifth of the population have a Northern Ireland-only identity, it becomes theoretically possible for a vote against the union to not be a vote against partition. However, there would be no way to gauge this under the binary poll required by the agreement and, in any case, it would be an unworkable outcome. Nationalists might withdraw from Stormont, understandably, and that would be the end of it.
Equality laws
The logical continuance of the Belfast Agreement into a united Ireland would be to adopt some of its powersharing protections in Dublin, such as weighted voting in the Dáil or mandatory offers of Cabinet seats, preferably without the vetoes that have caused deadlock at Stormont.
A typical response to these suggestions is they are unneeded as there would be rights and equality for all. Yet both states on this island have had the same rights and equality laws, practically verbatim, since the agreement. As those laws derive from international standards, they will hardly be much expanded. The conviction among certain nationalists that minority protections are no longer required once those who identifty as Irish are in the majority reveals modes of thinking that demonstrate, ironically, why those protections would remain essential, certainly for a transitional period.
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O’Callaghan proposed reserving Cabinet seats for unionists in a speech in March last year. He also acknowledged the creation of Northern Ireland had been “not irrational”. This is a far better approach to recognising unionist and Northern Irish identities than trying to keep the region extant in some form without majority consent. It could be agreed that Northern Ireland legitimately came into existence, then legitimately went out of existence.
The alternative appears to be portraying Ulster unionism as an inexcusable outrage from start to finish. Any future based on this telling of the past would be a guaranteed fiasco.