Catherine Connolly’s election as incoming president has brought the prospect of a united Ireland closer, but the left alliance that backed her will not be the government that makes it happen.
The catalyst will be the new leader of Fianna Fáil at the next general election, a succession Connolly’s emphatic victory has set in train. Her triumph has been accurately described as “seismic”, for it has shifted the tectonic plates under this island.
Almost everybody agrees Micheál Martin’s heir apparent is Jim O’Callaghan.
The latter’s declaration last year that he was open to entering government with Sinn Féin was a stark counterpoint to Martin’s consistent refusal to contemplate coalition with the political wing of the defunct Provisional IRA.
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Equally significant is O’Callaghan’s repeated espousal of reunification compared with Martin’s insistence on a precondition of reconciliation. Many Fianna Fáil members and voters complain that, under the current leader, the party has surrendered its republican heritage to Sinn Féin and that even Fine Gael’s blueshirts look greener.
The Minister for Justice is unafraid to say he wants this island to become a single sovereign state. “Fianna Fáil is a republican party founded by Éamon de Valera in 1926, the primary aim of which is to secure the unity and independence of Ireland as a republic,” he said in March 2021 in a speech at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge where he obtained his postgraduate law degree.
His party’s ambition, he said, was “to see our country and its peoples peaceful, prosperous and united”. He went on to list seven principles of equality for knitting the island back together, on the assumption that “at some stage over the coming decade a future Secretary of State for Northern Ireland will make the political judgment provided for in the Northern Ireland Act 1998” to call a poll on the constitutional status.
Martin, who has visceral disdain for Sinn Féin, has said he joined Fianna Fáil because of the Troubles, but that his simplistic “Brits out” view was changed utterly when he visited the North and met people from both communities while he was a history student at University College Cork.
[ Jim O’Callaghan will bide his time, but the great game is onOpens in new window ]
O’Callaghan’s insights are likely to be bolstered by regular visits to Belfast where his sister, Margaret, lives with her family and she is a professor of history and politics at Queens University.
The Taoiseach refuses to play the fantasy politics game of “will I see a united Ireland in my lifetime?” but, by O’Callaghan’s reckoning, it may happen when, the auguries suggest, he could be the Fianna Fáil leader in government.
The first item on the agenda for Martin’s successor will be to reframe Fianna Fáil’s identity as an entity separate and distinct from Fine Gael. After a decade of co-operation – the 2016 confidence and supply arrangement followed by two consecutive coalition governments – the former war enemies have become indistinguishable in the eyes of many voters. This year’s corporate-focused budget has compounded the impression.
Severing that cord will be an immediate imperative for a new leader. As a Dublin-based TD, O’Callaghan has watched Fianna Fáil’s support in the capital being gobbled up by Sinn Féin, even in more privileged constituencies like his own Dublin Bay South.
Going into government with Mary Lou McDonald would be perceived by many, especially younger voters, as post-history pragmatism some 30 years after the Belfast Agreement was signed. It would be deviously savvy, too. As Fianna Fáil has learned to its cost, governing with a party further to the right than your own has electoral consequences.
The presidential election has undermined Martin’s leadership because of his blunder in choosing Jim Gavin as the party’s candidate. Yet, worryingly, it has proven Martin right, too. Sectarian abuse directed at Fine Gael’s Presbyterian candidate, Heather Humphreys, has exposed continuing divisions requiring an investment in reconciliation.
Should Ireland’s unification come about under the aegis of Fianna Fáil in government, it will be thanks in large part to Martin’s legacy. By establishing the Shared Island unit as a priority of the last government and locating it in the Department of the Taoiseach to secure its funding, he has been subtly stitching unravelled parts of this island back together again.
The current Programme for Government allocates €1 billion to the capital fund for North-South projects. Some of the most notable are the construction of the Narrow Water Bridge connecting the Cooley Peninsula to the Mourne Mountains, the cross-Border Ulster Canal, hourly trains between Dublin and Belfast and the preparation of an application for Unesco world heritage status for the astrological observatories in Birr, Dunsink and Armagh.
The fund’s support for artistic, cultural, educational, tourism and infrastructural initiatives has, literally, been bringing people together. After all, a referendum in the Republic approving unification will be ineffective if the corresponding poll in the North rejects it.
Martin, with typical circumspection, has rubbished suggestions that the Shared Island initiative is a Trojan horse for Irish unity but its effectiveness in deepening cross-Border collaboration is undeniable.
There is, however, growing impatience. A poll last February by ARINS (a joint project of the Royal Irish Academy and the University of Notre Dame) and The Irish Times showed 66 per cent of respondents in the Republic would vote for a united Ireland in a referendum. But former taoiseach Leo Varadkar has claimed Martin’s unwillingness to plan for unification is creating an “artificial barrier” to a referendum.
The stalemate begs the question: when does the job of laying the ground work for unity give way to planning for it? Like eternity, the need for reconciliation has no end-by date.
[ What would a united Ireland actually involve?Opens in new window ]
O’Callaghan has been doing his own planning. As he told his Cambridge audience: “Resolving the problems caused by the partition of Ireland and aspiring to the cherished aim of reunification are legitimate political issues that should be decided by discussion, debate and democracy.”
As a first-time Minister, he is in no hurry to assume the leadership of Fianna Fáil. Allowing Martin to see out his term as Taoiseach until November 16th, 2027, as agreed with Fine Gael, will allow him more Cabinet experience. One hundred years after former gunman Dev led Fianna Fáil into Dáil Éireann would be a symbolic juncture to begin planning for an all-island Ireland.
