There will be much focus early next year on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Derry. This event was striking not just for the brutality on display and the deaths it caused, but because of the reach of the emotion and the cross-Border anger it generated. In its immediate aftermath, the SDLP’s John Hume asserted that those in the Bogside “feel now that it’s a united Ireland or nothing”.
Many in the Republic seemed to feel likewise as strikes, protests (one culminating in the burning of the British embassy) and condemnatory resolutions abounded. Hibernia magazine maintained in early February 1972 that “the reunification of Ireland has emerged indisputably as the central issue at stake. That, above all, is what the conflict is now all about. The intensity of the reaction and counter-reaction has swept away all lesser considerations.”
Yet that same magazine, just six months earlier, had bemoaned that “an outside observer could be excused from assuming that the South just couldn’t care less what happens north of the Border”.
A few weeks after Bloody Sunday, the Derry-born historian Leland Lyons wrote to Fine Gael’s Garret FitzGerald; after the shootings, he had got the impression of “something approaching a post-1916 mood, but I can’t tell whether or not it has begun to subside”.
It did quickly subside, as fear of the Troubles "spilling over" the Border intensified, and never since has there been, in the words of Eamonn McCann, "a sense in the South of oneness with the North"; indeed, McCann argued that it was an event that even helped reconcile the Republic to partition. But that did not mean that abstract attachment in the Republic to the idea of a united Ireland disappeared. In 1977, Magill magazine published the results of a national poll on attitudes to a united Ireland that suggested 63 per cent in the Republic were in favour. It is a reminder that, despite all the violence, political upheaval and new beginnings, there has been a consistency in polls; the recent Irish Times poll found 62 per cent would vote in favour of unity in a referendum. But the other striking figure is that 79 per cent would reject higher taxes as a price for unity, while more than 70 per cent would be opposed to a new flag or anthem.
Mental partition
Is this a self-interested shallowness, an indication of an emboldened nationalism or a reminder of the deep-rootedness of mental partition? It is likely to be a mixture of both. While these polls invite reflection on the extent of the appetite for concessions to a unionist minority in a united Ireland, they should also prompt consideration of how those in the Republic feel about Northern nationalists.
Seventy-nine per cent would reject higher taxes as a price for unity, while more than 70 per cent would be opposed to a new flag or anthem
Even a century ago, as the debates on the Anglo-Irish Treaty began in Dublin, there was little appetite to talk about Ulster even though anxious republicans like Derry’s Joseph O’Doherty, active in the IRA and also Sinn Féin TD for North Donegal, had warned the Sinn Féin executive not to allow Ulster nationalist concerns to be discarded or “our grievance will be against Ireland generally for her desertion of her highlanders”. Over 30 years later, in 1954, independent senator Roger McHugh noted an aversion to the idea of northern nationalists getting a hearing in the Dáil, suggesting taoiseach Éamon de Valera’s “cranky query as to what was the point of people coming in here to discuss partition ... tends to produce the impression of vested political interests on this side of the Border who do not want any interference with the status quo”.
Aspirational vs feasible
In keeping with this theme, an amusing memorandum by British ambassador Andrew Gilchrist in the early 1970s averred that taoiseach Jack Lynch, when asked what he would do if Northern Ireland was handed to him on a plate, replied “I would faint”.
The hard mental borders between southern and northern keepers of the flame of Irish unity remain significant
A reasonable response to the sentiments revealed in recent polls is to assert that the attachment to unity will remain theoretical in the absence of any meaningful dialogue about it or inclusive forum to discuss all the constitutional, social, cultural and economic questions it raises. Such deep engagement does not appear to be on the horizon outside of academia or northern nationalism where Brexit has understandably encouraged a feeling that unity has moved beyond being aspirational to being more feasible. But even allowing for that, polling in Northern Ireland suggests that the condition for the secretary of state for Northern Ireland to initiate a peoples’ vote on it – indication of a majority in favour – is not at all evident.
A century on from the creation of Northern Ireland, there is talk of Border polls, constitutional crisis, threats to identity and territorial integrity and Sinn Féin’s high standing in the polls. But the hard mental borders between southern and northern keepers of the flame of Irish unity remain significant and do not suggest it is seen as “the central issue at stake”.