In 1988, with Ireland in the doldrums economically, socially and politically, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary called The Road to God Knows Where. Visually poetic and angrily polemical, it painted a picture of a country that had failed its own young people.
Its director, Alan Gilsenan, has gone on to have a prolific career at the intersections of documentary, drama and experimental cinema, exploring everything from Ireland’s mental-health system to its long-gone literary bohemia. But you can see the same inquiring intelligence and recognisable aesthetic in his latest state-of-the-nation essay, The Irish Question, as in that first film 37 years ago.
Sitting in the Irish Times podcast studio with John Walsh, the new film’s writer and co-producer, Gilsenan cautiously acknowledges some parallels.
“I’d never made a documentary before, didn’t really know what it was. And so really I went on a journey just talking to people and getting a feel for the country,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was doing, and still don’t. But I suppose, in a different way, The Irish Question is also kind of a state of the nation – maybe state of two nations.”
Mingling archive footage with a broad range of voices from northnorth and south of the Border, as well as farther afield, Gilesenan’s film seeks to take the social and political temperature of Ireland in the wake of Brexit and at a time when the question of Irish reunification appears higher up the agenda than ever before (although how high that really is remains open to question).
Among those interviewed are big political beasts: Bill Clinton, John Major, Mary Lou McDonald and Leo Varadkar, who was taoiseach when the film was being made. But it’s the other voices – writers, activists, victims of violence – who often offer the more acute perspectives. It’s both a historical primer on how we got here and a speculation about where we’re going.
The Irish Question emerged from a conversation between Gilsenan and Walsh after the UK voted, in 2016, to leave the EU. “John said very simply that Britain had just stumbled into Brexit, and had voted seemingly on a kind of emotional nationalist whim, and hadn’t really thought about the facts, about the future, the reality of Brexit as we know it now,” Gilsenan says. “He said there was a strong possibility that we could do that here, with a Border poll that we might all vote on emotionally and not really have thought about the consequences.”
Gilsenan realised he didn’t have an answer to the question of what a new Ireland might look like. “I was one of these people who’d have an emotional attachment to a united Ireland but wouldn’t really have thought about it. So I would have had a kind of dreamy, artsy-fartsy notion that it’d be great. I suppose the process of making the film was opening up those questions, the Irish question, asking ourselves.”
Did Brexit make a Border poll inevitable?
There is a certain irony, intentional or otherwise, to the film’s title. The phrase “the Irish question” was coined in the late 19th century for the string of constitutional crises at Westminster, triggered by the Home Rule movement, that exposed some of the deep faultlines in British parliamentary politics.
Similarly, today’s changed atmosphere has its origins in events on the other side of the Irish Sea, according to Walsh.
“I don’t think we’d be here today if it wasn’t for Brexit,” he says. “A number of contributors to the film say they can’t remember any time, up to the Brexit referendum, when a united Ireland was seriously on the agenda.”
Ireland, Walsh points out, was barely mentioned before the actual vote. “Brexit really was about English nationalism. And one of the big casualties would be Ireland and the peace process.”
The result, he says, was the most serious loosening since its establishment of Northern Ireland’s position within the UK.
“When Martin McGuinness came out quickly after the referendum and said, of course, what this means is we’re going to have a Border poll, that was the first time I can ever remember thinking, this is it, this is the starting pistol,” Walsh says.
So can we say that Brexit was the greatest gift Irish republicanism ever received from English nationalism?
Gilsenan agrees up to a point but adds that what struck him most while making The Irish Question was that the possibility of a united Ireland would ultimately come from Britain rather than from Ireland. “Gavin Esler talks in the film about the end of the United Kingdom,” he says, referring to the former BBC broadcaster.
Gilsenan cites two other larger global factors: migration and climate change. “Sometimes, if you make documentaries, it’s good just to walk and listen and look. It seemed to me that Northern Ireland was changing quicker than I had imagined, beneath the political radar.”
What does that mean for the hundreds of thousands of people who define themselves as British and unionist?
“The one thing Brexit did was put unionism in the spotlight,” Walsh says. “Since the creation of the Northern Ireland state there’s always been that paranoia within unionism that they’re about to be abandoned. But you’ve always had governments in London, whether Conservative or Labour, that had a deep commitment, an emotional commitment, to Northern Ireland. After Brexit that changed.”
It would be hard to disagree with Mike Nesbitt, the Ulster Unionist Party leader, who says in the film that unionists have not been very good in the past at making a positive case for remaining in the UK.
Despite a quarter-century of peace and, for some, prosperity, there is still, Gilsenan acknowledges, an undercurrent of darkness in Northern Ireland, something the film conveys very well. “When we set out to make the film, we were very much focused, both of us, on exploring futures,” he says.
“But it became very apparent, as with everything else in Northern Ireland, that you can’t deal with the future unless you face the past.”
The Irish Question devotes quite a lot of time to the negotiations that led to the Belfast Agreement. I admit that in recent years I’ve grown tired of the endless laps of honour performed by the architects of that agreement, which is looking more than a little shopworn. Surely it’s time to move on.
“You can’t overestimate what the Belfast Agreement achieved,” Gilsenan says. “But it was a kind of holding position. I think the intention always was, okay, we take a breath and now we move on. And to a degree I think you’re right: we haven’t moved on.” Still, the wider world may be in turmoil, but the UK and Ireland are both now led by stable, slightly boring governments. That may be no bad thing, although it might not be the catalyst for change that some hope for. “But you do need time,” Walsh says. “I think it’s really, really important.”
With nativist resentment and xenophobia on the rise everywhere, it would be naive to think there’s no danger of a resurgence of the tribal violence that scarred Ireland for 30 years. We are talking a few days after the German federal election, which Walsh says offers important lessons on what not to do.
“If you look at the performance of the AfD, it’s concentrated heavily in the former East Germany,” he says. Among those interviewed in the film is Markus Meckel, the German Democratic Republic’s final foreign minister, who points to the mistakes made in the reunification of Germany.
“It was, literally, you bolted East Germany on to West Germany,” Walsh says. “There was no conversation around having a new constitution, what did it mean to be German, what were the practical implications of tearing down a wall that had existed for decades.”
Opinion polls suggest plenty of people in the Republic presume that a German-style assimilation should take place here, too. “I think there’s an arrogant complacency about Irish nationalism,” Gilsenan says. “There’s a kind of smugness about it at the moment. A sense that, well, we’re winning this philosophical war.”
So when can we expect this poll to happen? Until recently Sinn Féin was predicting a vote by the end of the decade. That appears highly unlikely now.
“If I were to guess, I would say in a five- to 10-year time frame,” Walsh says. “But, in a way, I think the timing of a Border poll is putting the cart before the horse. I understand the Government’s reluctance – and certainly Micheál Martin is very much of this view – that if you start talking about a united Ireland it creates this kind of uncertainty. And that’s really bad for Northern Ireland.”
The Irish Question was independently financed, with no Irish broadcaster support. For Gilsenan, there’s value in simply delving into these ideas. “One of the interesting things about making the film is, when I look at television, there doesn’t seem to be any interest in exploring ideas. Any sort of intellectual thought or speculation seems like a very poor currency,” he says.
“I think most factual programming on television is kind of glorified entertainment. Whereas what’s been stimulating in making this – and I hope maybe for people watching it, in some small way – is that we are actually asking questions and we are talking to each other about it.”
[ Strong desire for continued British-Irish links after unity, survey showsOpens in new window ]
The Irish Question screens at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin, on Friday, March 14th; you can listen to Hugh Linehan’s full conversation with Alan Gilsenan and John Walsh on Inside Politics, at irishtimes.com/podcasts and on all major platforms
