There was a British government-sponsored TV ad in the 1990s which people my age often remember, with amusement but also nostalgia. Two boys get to know each other, playing football and generally messing about. It emerges – as if it wasn’t obvious already – that they are from different sides of the North’s divide when, respectively, a GAA medal and an Orange Order badge fall out of their pockets. A Van Morrison song plays amiably in the background and the whole thing concludes with him saying, in his unmistakable drawl: “Wouldn’t it be great if it was like all the time?”
It speaks to a yearning for the sense – widespread in the 1990s – of hope for an emerging peace and potential reconciliation to follow. Both hopes were fulfilled; sadly the latter much less so than the former. Nostalgia is a fact of life, but it has become too much a fact of politics. And not just in Trump’s America or Brexit Britain. In parts of establishment Ireland, there is a marked tendency to hark back to the 1990s when the question of this island’s constitutional future is raised.
Put more directly, there is a tendency by Irish ministers to deflect any and all questions about planning for constitutional change with a general, sometimes impatient entreaty to get more out of the Belfast Agreement institutions as created in 1998. This desire is noble and right: every day as leader of the official opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly, my party and I are trying to force improvements in the North’s challenged political institutions.
The fact that it is hard to predict how Farage would act in office is its own argument for proper planning for all scenarios
But after last week’s election results in Britain, continuing to avoid serious engagement with how change in England, Scotland and Wales could precipitate change on the island of Ireland starts to look like negligence rather than just nostalgia. Political reporting runs on hyperbole, but it is no exaggeration to say the results have fundamentally altered the political shape of Britain.
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The Irish Government has been rightly keen to emphasise the repointing of an Anglo-Irish relationship weakened by the Brexit years. There have been cordial summits and joint press conferences that really have seemed like a 1990s revival. But the election results indicate that the Brexit years haven’t really passed at all. Britain, particularly England, is still defined by profound divisions and anger to which no government appears able to adequately respond. Certainly not Keir Starmer’s.
Starmer may be replaced as leader by despairing Labour MPs, but if he is not, the next most likely prime minister is certain to have a radically different approach to Northern Ireland and British-Irish relations. That is of course Nigel Farage, a man who cares so deeply about sensitive questions in Northern Ireland that he performed an “Up the Ra” salutation in a Cameo video for a small fee. His party’s Brexit spokesperson, Danny Kruger, told the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice conference that the party would complete the so-called “unfinished business” of Brexit by reopening EU-UK agreement on the Irish Border. They take a predictably trenchant line on protecting British veterans from accountability over unlawful Troubles killings.
All this is merely to list the various profound policy challenges a Reform-led government would present for the North and British-Irish relations. But there is a deeper question: at what point are citizens in the North entitled to say they do not want to live in a country run by Farage? That question goes far beyond the constituency traditionally defined as nationalist, and includes many people – and many in my constituency from unionist backgrounds – who are horrified at the prospect of a UK run by and for the coterie of charlatans and spivs that surround Farage.
These are the kinds of people whose Irish passport forms I sign regularly. Whatever view they have on our constitutional future – and there is a fascinating spectrum of views far beyond the traditional binary – many have been encouraged to think of the Irish State in new ways in recent years. They haven’t just applied for passports to avoid queues on their summer holidays, they have seen the investments of the Shared Island Fund as an alternative to the sclerosis at Stormont. And seen the relative sanity of politics in Dublin, notwithstanding all its challenges, as an alternative to the sometimes literal insanity of the last decade in British politics.
Rather than seeing it as an aggressive destabilisation of the North, people like this – many of them now Irish citizens – might want and expect a responsible Irish Government to be planning for change on this island that may be forced by events on the one next door.
Sam McBride and Fintan O’Toole’s landmark book, For and Against a United Ireland, posits potential scenarios in which a Farage-led government chooses for reasons of its own to force the question of a Border poll. The fact that it is hard to predict how Farage would act in office is its own argument for proper planning for all scenarios. And even if Reform is not put in government, the elections have underlined that the UK is a fundamentally more unstable and unpredictable entity than it was in 1998, even if we would wish it otherwise. And it is much poorer, with Brexit costing at least £100 billion a year in lost economic activity – a gap which is exacerbating pressure on public services, including north of the Border.
While it is misguided and even irresponsible to arbitrarily name dates for a referendum – something Sinn Féin has made a habit of – it is its own form of irresponsibility to act as if we can forever delay practical preparation.
My sister in law, a highly effective campaigning lawyer, enjoys keeping old episodes of Friends on in the background at home. Some nice, harmless ’90s nostalgia does no harm – but nostalgia cannot be a substitute for facing the world as it is, or taking responsibility for the future we want.
Matthew O’Toole MLA is leader of the Opposition in the NI Assembly
