THERE is now a lot more discussion in Ireland around the question of Irish unity.
The country was partitioned in 1921 after a war for independence from Britain. Ireland had been part of the United Kingdom for 120 years.
Theoretically it was not a colony, any more than Wales or indeed Yorkshire was. But Ireland had never fitted as neatly into the UK as its other component parts did.
It was mostly Catholic while Britain was Protestant and even had a Protestant established church, the Church of England. Indeed, however secular or atheistic modern Britain is, it is still formally a Protestant country with a faith which its king is sworn to defend.
And Ireland had a history of wars to assert its legitimate right to declare itself a separate nation.
That tradition is a little overstated.
For example, when Daniel O’Connell in the first half of the 19th century campaigned for the vote for Catholics and then for the repeal of the Union, he spoke of retaining ‘the golden link of the Crown’. Of course he had to take care not to be accused of treason so perhaps could not have risked voicing the subversive idea that Ireland might be a republic.
Others had done so in 1798, inspired by France and the States, and their revolution had been crushed, its leaders hanged.
But Ireland did not break with Britain to create a radically different kind of society. Having been part of the Union for so long, it had the traditions of parliamentary democracy and the party system well established and it recreated that system in Ireland.
The brief war for independence from 1919, largely inspired by a futile and bloody Easter Rising of 1916 led to something well short of a military victory. Britain offered a calamitous escalation or a compromise. Most of the country could be a free state, still loyal to the Crown and the North East could remain British but, like the free state, have its own devolved parliament.
Many hoped at the time that these two statelets might one day merge, but they haven’t.
The Free State evolved into an independent republic and Northern Ireland stayed British.
But Northern Ireland was an unviable Protestant state with a restless and ultimately unsettled Catholic minority. So another compromise was found in 1998, a kind of partition within Northern Ireland, though a fluid one. The Protestant and Catholic communities would divide government departments proportionally between their representative parties and try not to annoy each other.
The arrangement is rarely described in that way but that’s what it amounts to. It is more commonly called power sharing and celebrated as the fruits of a peace process but it is essentially a platform for ongoing contention.
One argument for a united Ireland at this stage might be that the larger polity might provide better government: Get the historic division between British and Irish identifying, Protestant and Catholic communities settled. With a clear victory for Irish nationalism we can all move on.
The trouble with that is that pro British unionists would take a defeat sorely.
So most of those who now argue for a united Ireland talk of the need for a new Ireland or a shared Ireland, a reconciled Ireland. They want the two parts to merge but recognise that they are not ready to do this amicably or even peacefully.
And, frankly, reconciliation is not needed before unity can be established. All that is needed is a referendum that delivers 50% plus one vote support.
Of course, there would also have to be a referendum in the Irish Republic and where the disaffection of the loser might count would be there. Would people be less inclined to vote for a united Ireland if they feared they would be importing a truculent unionist minority with half a century’s experience of militant, often violent protest?
Several things have driven the intensification of the debate about Irish unity.
One was the campaigning of an organisation called Ireland’s Future, which staged high profile debates around the country.
Another was the emergence of the former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of Fine Gael as an ardent promoter of the idea.
The main political party arguing for unity has been Sinn Féin. For decades that party represented the interests of the IRA, who brought renewed violence to the unity argument from 1970 until the peace deal of 1998 that established power sharing.
Since Sinn Féin is a contender to be the government party in the Republic, other parties, competing with it have begun to express their desire for a united Ireland so that Sinn Féin doesn’t get to hog the issue.
And more recently, those left wing parties supported Catherine Connolly to be the new Irish president and saw Sinn Féin join their campaign.
So we now have a president in the Republic who owes it to the biggest party behind her election, to argue its case for Irish unity.
I’m cynical. I think that the new president and the left wing parties are taking up the cause of Irish unity because it has token value and only token value. It is not going to happen for some time yet so they can pledge their commitment to it without any fear - yet - that their demand will be realised. If it was, the whole political character of the country would be transformed.
Malachi O’Doherty’s novel on the Northern Irish Troubles, Terry Brankin Has A Gun, is published by Merrion
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