Time for the North to consider a federal deal with Dublin?

‘Out! Out! Out!” Margaret Thatcher’s summary dismissal of the New Ireland Forum’s options for a unitary, federal/confederal or jointly administered Ireland at a press conference on November 20th, 1984, is vividly recalled in analysis of the State papers released from that year. Their release coincides with yet another agreement on Northern Ireland power-sharing.

Thirty years on it is instructive to review the forum’s work and the outcomes of subsequent British-Irish negotiations. While some Irish people North and South may be so fed with up the North that they ignore it, do not want to debate it or think it has been solved, it will not go away for two main reasons.

Sinn Féin is becoming a stronger electoral force in the South, making its call for a Border poll on unity more politically relevant, whether voters like it or not. The UK’s own constitutional future is less and less assured because Scotland’s independence question is not resolved and would be reopened if the UK voted to withdraw from the EU. The UK itself would probably not survive such a change given the continuing surge of support for the Scottish National Party and its demand to have a sovereign say on EU membership.

General election

The forthcoming UK political timetable pushes these issues on to the Irish political agenda too, as the Conservative Party agonises over the European issue and immigration and Labour struggles to recover its vote in Scotland from the SNP.

The general election in May is set fair to end in close deadlock, giving Northern Ireland unionist MPs a potential bargaining role – and conceivably Sinn Féin ones if they opt to take their seats.

This east-west dynamic was clearly visible in the recent negotiations. Sinn Féin agreed to budget cuts arising from the Conservative project to downsize the welfare state in return for compensatory funds to finance redundancies.

Martin McGuinness’s claim that the North is, as a conflict zone, different from Scotland, England and Wales proved unconvincing. Such pressures from a changing UK are bound to increase, but they will have unanticipated effects on North-South ones here as well.

That is because Ireland as a whole has much to lose if the UK withdraws from the EU. Despite the transformed Dublin-London relations, the pressures driving Conservative politics on Europe take little account of Ireland’s interests. They are a product of post-imperial English nationalism and reflect generational and cultural conflict over the UK’s future in Europe and the world.

The Northern parties have been ill-prepared for the political and economic shocks potentially heading their way, although the Stormont House Agreement raises their awareness of the UK’s internal shifts. The external ones have been little debated.

Although the European setting provided an indispensable context for British-Irish and nationalist-unionist reconciliation, it would be severely disrupted by a UK exit from the EU. Would the North not be better off in a federal deal with a Dublin in the EU than with a London out of it?

Raising this question in these pages on November 13th last, Dennis Kennedy sketched out some of the possible implications and negotiating points involved in such a bargain. The lack of public response to his article bears out the picture of indifference or complacency already suggested, but it is worth pursuing in more depth.

Would such pressures indeed conspire to put a united Ireland back on the political agenda sooner than its elites or citizens expect or desire? If that does happen what shape might it take?

The New Ireland Forum’s preferred option was “a unitary state, achieved by agreement and consent, embracing the whole island of Ireland and providing irrevocable guarantees for the protection and preservation of both the unionist and nationalist identities”, adding that the parties to the forum “also remain open to discuss other views which may contribute to political development”.

Federal Ireland

These were identified as a federal/confederal model or a joint authority one, but were not developed in detail.

Much of the joint authority one has been achieved by the Belfast Agreement, which constitutionally entrenches an inter-state treaty in what has elements of a confederal deal on consent between Ireland and the UK.

Fianna Fáil then and Sinn Féin now reject a federal Ireland because it would entrench unionist power in the North, but how could the habit and reality of Northern devolution be denied? And would not a federal deal radically reform – and improve – existing state structures? These questions should be revisited. pegillespie@gmail.com