Sir, – Sam Quirke (Letters, January 24th) wonders why, if a majority in Northern Ireland votes for a united Ireland, that a new flag would be needed, since we already have one. This highlights an important point if a “united Ireland” is to have any chance of success. For it to work, democracy requires something calls “losers’ consent”. It enables peaceful transitions of power. This is especially significant when fundamental constitutional change is in prospect. The construction of a united Ireland anyway half-acceptable to what will then be erstwhile unionists – consisting of 10 per cent to 20 per cent of the population – will have to take this into account. A simple majoritarian approach – winner takes all, and to hell with anyone else – will not suffice. A resentful rump of a peoplehood is unlikely to be in a mood to cooperate enthusiastically with those whom they believe have deprived them of their birthright. The only hope (and I recognise that it might be a slim one) is to demonstrate that the new polity is not just the old republic, but a different construction altogether. This will require the absorption of elements of unionist/Protestant political culture into the new entity. We will need to be generous, since it makes sense to be.
Actually, there is a template. The ex-unionists and Protestants in the Irish Free State were devastated when their connectivity with Britain was severed after 1922. However, the constitutional and socio-cultural settlement then reached permitted them to come to terms with change. Markers such as the king as head of state, the continued circulation of British coinage, the relative restraint of street renaming, the ability to work and live in the British Empire – these provided something of a continuity of identity until a new generation could, more or less, become comfortable with Irishness rather than Britishness. Its serendipitous genius was, of course, that each side – nationalist, unionist, Catholic, Protestant – could “see” the bit of the constitutional construction they found acceptable, while avoiding the other. With some hiccups, it broadly worked. It could work again, this idea of “acceptable invisibility”. It helped, too, that there was, of course, an “inevitability of gradualness” as the State moved to its final independence in 1948. But the critical element was “gradualness”.
The obstacles cannot be underestimated. The most dangerous delusion of all will be to assume, as many nationalists in the early 20th century did to their cost, that unionists and Protestants will just fall, like ripe fruit, into Cathleen Ni Houlihan’s capacious apron, one that needs no redesign. – Yours, etc,
IAN d’ALTON,
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Naas,
Co Kildare.
Sir, – Sam Quirke wonders if he is the only one questioning why a new flag will be needed if a majority in the six counties votes to join the Republic (Letters, January 25th).
Would such a vote not necessitate the removal of St Patrick’s Saltire from the current British flag? Now there would be a “new” flag, albeit a reversion to the earlier 1606 union flag. – Yours, etc,
THEO RYAN,
Friar’s Hill,
Co Wicklow.