A LOT of very important people, who should know better, appear not to understand the Good Friday Agreement.
This was the settlement in 1998 by which the political management of Northern Ireland would be handled after ceasefires by the major paramilitary organisations which had killed thousands of people in the previous thirty years.
Those groups were provided with a route into political power and the fulfilment of their aspirations by political means. So the IRA’s political ally, Sinn Féin, now shares power with the Democratic Unionist Party. The loyalist armed groups never managed to grow politically but continue to recruit and operate as criminal gangs.
Within the Good Friday Agreement there is a provision for a future referendum on whether Northern Ireland should leave the United Kingdom and join the Irish Republic, creating a single jurisdiction for the whole island of Ireland.
So republicans gain nothing by killing and bombing to advance their cause since a united Ireland is there for the taking when enough people want it. That’s the crucial bit that a lot of people don’t seem to understand.
On his first trip to Northern Ireland as prime minister, Andy Burnham was asked if he thought there would likely be such a referendum soon. He replied that it was ‘off the table’. His argument was that we had already seen how divisive and disruptive the referendum on Britain leaving the EU had been ten years ago, so we didn’t want to repeat this.
Wrong answer.
What he should have said is: The Good Friday Agreement obliges us to call a referendum when it appears likely that a majority will vote for a united Ireland. That majority does not yet exist.
Making the rationale for not having a referendum the need to maintain stability seemed to imply that even if a majority did exist, he would not permit such a referendum to go ahead.
He would actually have no choice.
Sinn Féin expressed annoyance with Burnham’s ‘off the table’ remark, insisting that the Good Friday Agreement does provide for a referendum.
The party seemed not to understand that it does not provide for one until that likely majority is in place. Unless, perhaps, they think it is in place, or that it would be attainable through campaigning.
But if so, they should issue a legal challenge, seeking a judicial review of Burnham’s rejection.
Then former prime minister Gordon Brown was asked by the Guardian newspaper if he thought there would be a united Ireland some day.
Brown is Scottish and had opposed the idea of independence from the UK for Scotland when it was put to a referendum there in 2014. So he is a unionist as far as Scotland is concerned, but he said that he believed that Ireland would be united one day but that it would require agreement.
Wrong again. It doesn’t require agreement. It requires a majority of 50% plus one vote. That’s what the Good Friday Agreement says and his government, the Irish government and the main political parties all agreed to that.
Since the Brexit referendum produced enormous division in the country through a narrow majority, all political wisdom now says that narrow majorities on major constitutional questions are to be avoided. But how is this one to be avoided?
Brown is a wise man, perhaps the most sagely politician Britain has had in a leadership role in a long time, but if he believes that a united Ireland can only be achieved through the assent of people who plainly don’t want it, then he should suggest how they are to have their minds changed.
If he and Burnham believe, as they appear to, that a narrow majority vote is to be avoided, then they should be planning for how they avert that prospect. For that, they would have to renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement.
In the Irish Republic there is also unease about the danger of a narrow majority vote for unity. They would inherit a lot of disgruntled citizens into their expanded new state. Managing protest and resistance would be their responsibility.
So they might quite like the British to renege on the agreed conditions for a referendum and push the decision back further.
They realise now how vulnerable they are to that referendum being called by a British secretary of state in Northern Ireland without them having a formal say in the nature and timing of that referendum. But they agreed to that too.
The Taoiseach Micheál Martin has established a Shared Island fund to facilitate reconciliation across the island in the long-term hope of creating good relationships and easing the transition towards unity, but this again is based on the idea that amity and agreement are attainable and that Ireland can be united some day without disruption, without a huge part of the Northern Irish population being unhappy with it and perhaps violently opposed to it.
The problem is the formula that says a 50% plus one vote majority settles the matter and that the referendum must happen when that is in sight.
That can’t be changed without giving a minority a veto on unity, which is unthinkable.
The prospect of deep division is so appalling, however, that even Brown and Burnham seem unable to face it squarely.
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See More: Border Poll, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Unity
