Every few months a survey gauges support for a Border poll, or a united Ireland, with different questions, and different results. Sometimes, the answers shift with mood. Sometimes, the answers are fixed in stone.
Deeply felt ideology governs many people’s support for either a united Ireland or Northern Ireland’s union with Britain. It will always do so. Former SDLP leader Colum Eastwoodwould support unity even if he had to eat grass. Others feel equally strongly in the other direction.
Numbers, however, rarely develop our understanding of the intentions behind them, or encourage us to question our own attitudes to the question being asked. Nor do they assist reconciliation. Indeed, they obstruct it.
“Statistics means never having to say you’re wrong,” as Nobel Prize for Chemistry winner, Manfred Eigen once put it. Poll results can harden the boundaries that exist, or strengthen the perceived rightness of one cause and the wrongness of another.
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Reconciliation depends on the opposite. It requires the softening of boundaries and positions through dialogue. Not for relinquishing what one believes in, but for understanding the beliefs of others.
A reconciliatory approach to a united Ireland or the union is not a matter of agreement, but of accommodation. Is it not possible for unionists and loyalists to work for a better union while deepening relations with the south?
Is it not possible for nationalists and republicans to work for a united Ireland while deepening relations within the North? In both cases it is. Surveys turn everything into a binary choice, solidifying Northern Ireland’s politics.
And they encourage the politics of humiliation: if it’s bad for them, it must be good for us.
The basis for social and political change has to be argued through stories and values and allow for judgments to be thought through
Surveys do little to challenge that tendency. Indeed, they deter critical reflection on the limitations and disadvantages of how results are used.
Signs of irritation from those polled at the questions they are constantly asked would help, but the focus of those questions always remains on how near or far a united Ireland is, or whether the United Kingdom is disintegrating, or not.
Each position provokes a counter reaction, with perceived threats prompting reactions. Surveys vindicate such action. The divisive nature of politics in Northern Ireland is less a movement between “us and them” and more an effort to shore up the dividing lines that separate.
One problem with relying on such a means to read the world, as the author Thi Nguyen argued recently when looking at the modern day obsession with metrics, is that “what’s easily measurable is rarely the same as what’s really valuable”.
Pollsters, by the nature of what they have to do, must ignore, or not even consider such influences in order to fit the answers they receive on the street, over the telephone, or online, into a predetermined model of “yes, or no”.
Little attention is given to how useful or problematic that model is, or what purposes are served or hindered by it. Importantly, numbers and data have become substitutes for developed arguments, obscuring much needed nuance.
What vision is being articulated about a united Ireland or a closer union and what benefit is being expressed to meet challenges of the future? What does the future look like for economic growth, or health services, or the environment?
The basis for social and political change has to be argued through stories and values and allow for judgments to be thought through on the basis of such exchanges. Numbers encourage short-term action but have little to say about long-term action.
Within that picture there also needs to be an understanding of how to adapt and respond to crises and unintended consequences. This requires being able to meet problems pragmatically and creatively.
Numbers and statistics not only have little to say on that, they do nothing to bring about agreement. Being generous, they can at best suggest the need for a course of action but they do not reveal how opinions were formed, or offer alternatives.
The emphasis on right or wrong, or better or worse, is precisely the kind of approach that undermines a productive relationship between the two parts of the island of Ireland, undermining the good work being done by many across the divide that exists.
But more needs to be done, imaginatively, with a dialogue that is not just about national identity or territorial attachments, but about the social and political problems that exist between the two parts of the island, and within each part.
Mark Twain once said that “there are lies, damned lies and statistics”, though the French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard may offer a better reflection when he said “like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfilment”.
Reactions to polling numbers are often based on fears and insecurities about things getting worse – a fear which in humans has always created greater traction than things getting better, but without providing a foundation for stability, or understanding.
Numbers measuring opinion on whether a united Ireland is getting closer or further away prompt emotional reactions – that is why they are so regularly in the news – but they dramatise unease, disillusionment and exasperation.
Rather than endlessly produce polls on unity, it would be better to focus on the efforts required to bring people’s opinions on the future into closer harmony, rather than abrupt polling figures that serve divisive territorial and ideological ends.
Both parts of the island must get out of long occupied silos, think beyond the numbers and reflect creatively on what those numbers are unable to deliver – relationships that depend on conversation and respect, not on sharp headlines.
Graham Spencer is Emeritus Professor of Social and Political Conflict at the University of Portsmouth
