OPINION:CO-OPERATION BETWEEN Ireland and Northern Ireland, one of the cornerstones of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, is distinctly out of fashion these days.
Since the international financial crisis took hold in 2008 and the final piece in the Northern jigsaw was put in place in 2010 with the return of justice and policing powers to Stormont, it is clear that Government, Civil Service, business and media in Dublin see the North as far lower down their agendas than in previous years.
All this is understandable. Ministers are taken up with implementing the heavy cutbacks imposed by the “troika” with their implications for vital areas such as health, education and social welfare.
A few Ministers such as the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and the Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn would like to do more for North-South co-operation, but they simply don’t have the time or the capacity in present difficult circumstances.
This turning away from the North and North-South co-operation can be seen in every sector: the withdrawal of the Government's single largest financial commitment to the North – the promised €470 million in funding for the Monaghan-Derry road; the transfer of civil servants dealing with North-South co-operation to other areas; the effective ending of the joint council between the two business confederations, IBEC and CBI, with the winding-up of its secretariat; the decline in the number of undergraduates crossing the Border to study in the other jurisdiction (in Trinity College Dublin, the most popular Irish university for Northerners, the number of Northern students fell by 23 per cent between 2005 and 2010); and even the reduction of The Irish Timesreporting staff in Belfast from two to one.
Surprisingly, Sinn Féin also do not seem that interested in the painstaking work of trying to bring the two jurisdictions closer together. Observers say their Ministers do little to speed up the snail’s pace agenda set by the DUP at North-South ministerial council meetings. Maybe they are frustrated with the very limited amount of co-operation that can be agreed at such meetings, or maybe they do not want to give the Government a cross-Border success story it can then claim as its own.
Sinn Féin’s failure to take on the influential enterprise, trade and investment portfolio in the new Northern Ireland Executive – with its potentially important North-South dimension – spoke volumes for their reluctance to face up to the difficult decisions confronting policymakers in Ireland, North and South, in the coming years. They prefer to remain a left-wing protest party, snapping at Fianna Fáil’s heels in Dublin and hiding behind the DUP’s leadership of the powersharing executive in Belfast.
On the positive side, there is now a whole new infrastructure of North-South bodies and co-operative networks that did not exist 15-20 years ago.
The North-South Ministerial Council and the seven North-South bodies and companies continue their necessary work. Beside and beyond government there are new bodies in education (Centre for Cross Border Studies, Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South); health (Cooperation and Working Together, Institute of Public Health in Ireland); and planning (International Centre for Local and Regional Development).
Cooperation Ireland and the Corrymeela and Glencree Communities continue to work for peace and mutual understanding despite an ever harsher funding climate.
We have the European Union’s Peace and cross-Border INTERREG programmes to thank for much of the funding that has sustained such initiatives over the past 15 years, although it too has decreased in recent years.
We must never forget that the practical, often humdrum work of these bodies and networks is now part of a North-South architecture which was constructed by far-sighted politicians and civil servants over long months and years of negotiations in the mid-1990s. It was based on the belief that North-South institutions – alongside internal Northern Ireland and east-west institutions – were crucial to begin the slow process of breaking down fear and suspicion and building understanding between the two Northern communities and between the two parts of the island. This is the concern that many of us have as we see attention in influential circles in Dublin turning away from Northern Ireland: that both politicians and people in the South will sit back in the belief that the “Northern question” has been resolved. The truth is more uncomfortable.
It is that the DUP and Sinn Féin remain tribal parties who are involved in an uneasy marriage of convenience.
There is little appetite in either party for engaging in the hard, long drawn out task of constructing a non-sectarian society to overcome the North's continuing divisions: the so-called "shared future" concept, which was jettisoned in a deeply flawed Northern Ireland Executive programme called Cohesion, Sharing and Integration in 2010.This dropped the direct rule goal of "reconciliation" in favour of "mutual accommodation" between "cultures and communities." The result is that there is no agreed framework to address the North's enduring central problem of sectarianism.
The facts are stark. Some 90 per cent of social housing is still segregated. Over 93 per cent of children are in separate schools. The number of “peace walls” in Belfast has grown from 22 in 1998 to either 48 or 88, depending on how one defines a “peace wall”.
In this situation the peace on the ground has to be fragile – although the political institutions are clearly secure – and there must be a continuing role for the British and Irish governments in working together to oversee and contain the communalist instincts of the two main parties.
Here is one final idea for London and Dublin. It appears that the proposal for a low corporation tax for Northern Ireland, comparable to the 12.5 per cent rate in the Republic, is probably off the table. So what about a big push instead for improving public services in both jurisdictions through a programme of North-South “value for money” co-operation in areas such as health, higher education and environmental services?
My sources tell me that the UK treasury would not be averse to such a proposal.
Andy Pollak, a former
Irish Times
journalist, is director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh