https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/sam-mcbride/almost-eight-years-after-brexit-vote-were-still-not-even-in-foothills-of-real-debate-about-a-united-ireland/a1043774950.html
Decades from now, historians might look back and wonder at how little Irish unity campaigners made of their unprecedented opportunity in the years after 2016. It is now approaching eight years since Brexit, yet even the basics of a united Ireland proposition are missing.
That is not to say that nothing has been achieved since 2016 by those seeking the removal of the Border. But the more frequent and more serious debate on this topic is largely due to the eye-watering failures of unionism and the bedlam wrought by farcical figures such as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
The largest and best-resourced pro-unity campaign group is Ireland’s Future. A largely northern-based outfit, many of its leadership are close to Sinn Féin, but it says it is “not affiliated to any political party”.
Its greatest success has been getting celebrities and a handful of unionists to participate in campaign events — even if those people are mostly still undecided.
Last week it published a document calling for a Border poll in 2030. It’s 17 pages of text call for others to do more.
Andrée Murphy, an Andersonstown News columnist and senior figure in Ireland’s Future, said: “The time for talking about planning is over; the time for planning is here.” Yet we’ve been hearing similar sentiments for years.
It’s not that there is an absence of detailed thinking on the topic. Professors Brendan O’Leary and Padraig O’Malley are among those who have analysed how unity might work and, in doing so, have set out the scale of the challenge.
As Prof O’Leary says in his book Making Sense of a United Ireland: “Unifying Ireland in referendums must be done carefully to avoid civil war, let alone state collapse. Preparation is key.”
Yet almost no pro-unity politician will endorse any of the possible models. Should there be a unitary state? What about keeping Northern Ireland as a devolved entity? What about replicating Stormont power-sharing in the Dáil?
Even before thinking of trickier symbolic issues such as the flag and anthem, who in Sinn Féin (which like Ireland’s Future wants a Border poll in just over five years) or Fianna Fáil or any other pro-unity party could answer those questions? Almost inevitably, they say these require future discussion.
Instead, Sinn Féin has concentrated on winning elections. The SDLP has concentrated on losing elections. The southern parties have focused on policy challenges from Brexit to climate change.
But even amid the lack of detail, the Ireland’s Future document contains enough to allude to the difficulties ahead.
The booklet says it wants to avoid the Brexit disaster, yet it inadvertently opens up the possibility of repeating that debacle.
Aware of the enormity of planning an entirely new country in just over five years, it tacitly admits this can’t all be done before 2030 so it may be necessary to have mechanisms which resolve some issues after a vote for unity, to avoid “endless wrangling over competing visions”.
This isn’t entirely unreasonable. Not every element of creating a new country can be foreseen; some flexibility is needed. But if before the debate has even begun certain elements are accepted as too difficult to resolve, then more and more could be bundled into that category.
After all, that’s what every Irish party has been doing for years. This could just be a rebranding of decision avoidance.
Voting for a proposition and then later deciding what that vote was for is Brexit reincarnated. If voters see that for what it is, it will make unionism’s task far easier.
The second problem in the document is a proposal for citizens’ assemblies to help shape the new state. This is fraught with risk.
These deliberative forums are a glorified jury in which experts present evidence before the members vote.
It’s tempting to think 100-odd random people can solve the previously insoluble. But a bit like get-rich-quick schemes, if it seems too good to be true, it generally is.
The model helped Ireland rapidly legalise abortion and gay marriage. But in truth, society was liberalising so suddenly that these changes were likely to come, even if cautious politicians would have moved slower.
There could be a role for this form of discussion in planning Irish unity, but only if accompanied with sirens and warning lights as to potential pitfalls.
Ireland’s Future set out no appreciation of those perils.
There are genuine objections to the concept and spurious objections, but both matter. The greatest threat to peaceful unity is a belief by unionists that the process has been rigged. In this regard, citizens’ assemblies are uniquely vulnerable to claims of bias.
But there are genuine difficulties. Even in Ireland’s experience, many were excluded — those who couldn’t afford to spend weeks deliberating unpaid, mothers who couldn’t afford childcare, and so on.
Immediately, that means this body is nowhere near as representative as suggested.
Selection is open to deliberate bias, unconscious bias, and accusations of non-existent bias. Although supposedly random, out of a population of five million the recruiters of Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies managed in 2013 to select a husband and wife and two neighbours.
As Fionnán Sheahan wrote at the time: “The odds of being randomly picked for the convention are 50,000 to one. But odds of a couple both being randomly picked are 2.5 billion to one.”
In 2018, it emerged that seven members of the citizens’ assembly had been removed when found to have been picked because they knew a recruiter.
If that was to happen here, it would be disastrous for the credibility of the project. Most unionists would likely reject places if asked, making random selection impossible. Ireland’s Future alludes to this, saying that “selecting at random from the electoral register like previous citizens’ assemblies would not work” and so it “might require an innovative or unique approach”.
Yet even the lobbyists for how to make this work have nothing clearer than that about how one of their central ideas might be established — and, in familiar fashion, leave it for future discussion.
Far from being on the final ascent towards Irish unity, we are still looking up at the foothills of serious discussion on the issue.
This article first appeared in the Sunday Independent, which is published in the Republic of Ireland
by Ah_here_like