How much have ignorance and insensitivity in the Republic contributed to making Northern Ireland a cold place for unionists? A lot, suggests John O'Farrell
An absence from the series on unionist alienation published in The Irish Times this week was what used to be called the Irish dimension. The role of the Dublin government and southern attitudes generally in lowering the temperature of unionist hearts was briefly mentioned by Jeffrey Donaldson, citing the comment by Brian Cowen about "hollowing out British identity".
Such comments, and the sight of a convoy of death-black Mercedes approaching the first North-South Ministerial Council meeting in Armagh like a fleet of celebrity bailiffs, confirmed the fears of anti-agreement unionists, such as Jeffrey Donaldson, that the Belfast Agreement was a vehicle for "trundling unionists into a united Ireland".
Another comment by a unionist this week, the pro-agreement Chris McGimpsey, that "republicans lost the battle in Northern Ireland, they are just too cute to admit it", highlights one of the major problems which politicians such Mr McGimpsey have in selling the agreement to increasingly sceptical unionists.
There is a way in which the south's political establishment can help beleaguered pro-agreement unionists. It can admit what many at the highest echelons of political life will freely admit to after a couple of drinks and an assurance that such comments remain firmly off the record: no serious player in southern politics expects a united Ireland in their lifetime or that of their children.
It may be merely an aspiration, like vowing to lead a sinless life, but it is fundamentally dishonest.
A fun question to ask veteran politicians or civil servants is if, in its 80 years, the Dublin government has ever appointed anybody to undertake a feasibility study into the impact of a united Ireland. How much would it cost? How would the infrastructures of transport, finance, security, electricity, education, taxation and public administration unite? How much power would Dublin concede to representatives of the six new counties?
Dublin has never planned for a unitary state because it knew it would never happen. Ergo symbolic fig leaves such as anti-partition campaigns and Articles 2 and 3.
About five years ago in Queen's University Belfast, Garret FitzGerald left an audience of both unionist and nationalist students slack-jawed when he told them "never to underestimate the level of partitionism among the Irish civil service".
He was talking in relation to the hostility he encountered when, in 1973, he helped to negotiate a Council of Ireland at Sunningdale.
The attitude of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition cabinet at the time was revealed by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the docu-hagiography broadcast last Sunday on RTÉ. He told how he asked all his ministerial colleagues just how much power they were willing to share in the doomed Council of Ireland. Back came the answer: None.
The successor to Sunningdale, the Belfast Agreement has through its implementation in the Republic shown that such attitudes have not changed.
More than one unionist has commented on double standards over the release of prisoners, seen as essential in the North for such worthies as the two gentlemen who beat to death and burnt a 16 year-old child, James Morgan, in 1997, but unthinkable in the south for the five Provos serving long sentences for the "manslaughter" of Det Garda Jerry McCabe in 1996.
If unionists knew (or cared) more about the south, they could also cite the foot-dragging and alleged interference in the appointment of the Human Rights Commission, the reluctance to consider coalition government with Sinn Féin and the accountability of the Garda.
In the south, a court ruling prevented elected politicians examining the actions of armed police using lethal force on a man of questionable sanity. In the North, a quango, the Office of the Police Ombudsman, can (with enough determination) get full access to police files and intelligence information on a major terrorist atrocity and issue a report castigating the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Interestingly, Nuala O'Loan has made the point that she has no remit in the Republic, the jurisdiction in which most of the suspects of the Omagh bombing reside. What might she find if she looked in the files of Special Branch in Monaghan, Dundalk or Dublin? Nothing untoward, we must assume, and assume we must because Ms O'Loan will never see those files.
If, as some believe, many of those who voted against the Nice Treaty did so to block the entry to the EU of poorer Europeans to the east, how would they react to the admission to the Republic of the poorer, fratricidal demons of the North?
Partitionism extends across the classes and professions of the Republic as the non-issue of the North in elections (with the possible exception of 1981) demonstrates. Even Sinn Féin in the south is preparing to fight the next election on local issues - crime, drugs, housing, the environment and a parochial take on the Nice Treaty.
THE past decade has demonstrated the different relations each part of the island has with the world outside. A recent globalisation survey in the prestigious US journal Foreign Policy put the Republic top of the class, based on pleasing the creators of "an index that employs indicators spanning information technology, finance, trade, politics, travel and personal communication to evaluate levels of global integration in dozens of advanced economies". The previous title-holder was Singapore.
In sad contrast, the North's main attractiveness as a foreign location is for 24-hour news channels, as the past week has demonstrated.
The sweet smell of success felt by the south over the past decade has allowed a counter-revision in the battle for ideas, symbols and memory. One unionist who is no stranger to the salons of Dublin expressed concerns at the "gesture politics" of the present government, such as "Bertie Ahern attacking revisionism at Bodenstown" and the reinterment of Kevin Barry and nine executed IRA men.
Another pro-agreement unionist expressed disappointment that last October's State funeral could have been the opportunity for the State to announce that the ideological war was over and that constitutionally at least, there is no more unfinished business.
All of which indicates the uncomfortable conclusion that the historic referendum of 1998 had not two voting blocs (Northerners and southerners), but three.
It is feasible that Northern nationalists voted for the agreement in the belief that it was a stepping stone to equality and eventual reunification.Unionists who voted Yes understood that this was the "final settlement". Based on anecdotal evidence and conversations with family and friends in Dublin, many southerners voted in the hope that "the North" would calm down and stop being an embarrassment to the rest of the island.
Anti-agreement unionism depends upon a truculent Republic as much as it relies on coded sectarianism and the mistrust of "perfidious Albion".
+The declining spirits of the "boosters" within unionism could only be lifted by an act of honest brokerage from Dublin, one which consigns the dream of Tone, Pearse and Kevin Barry to a plot in Glasnevin. One which admits, for the first time, unionists into the Republic.
John O'Farrell is editor of Fortnight magazine published in Belfast