Mick Clifford: Sinn Féin's rush for a border poll will do nothing for peace on this island
Mary Lou McDonald wants a border poll to happen in the next five years. Photo: Leah Farrell/© RollingNews.ie
When the island of Ireland is united as one political entity it will be a seismic and historic event. That’s when, rather than if, because it will happen. When exactly may or may not be in your lifetime if you’re on the wrong side of, well, let’s say, 60.
Some people want this constitutional change to happen tomorrow. They don’t know what would happen on the day after, nor have they any blueprint for the whole panoply of change and structure that would be required.
They appear to envisage the united entity as being more or less officially Gaelic with a few bits and bobs thrown in for the unionists. All that matters is that we are a nation once again.
Mary Lou McDonald wants it to happen in the next five years. She and her party are calling for a border poll by 2030. The mad rush she and Sinn Féin appear to be in has also prompted her to blame others for holding up this reclamation of the fourth green field.
At an event in Dublin last Saturday she repeated that the referendums would be before the end of this decade. “And the day is coming when people will have their say,” she said, sounding like she believes somebody is preventing the people having their say right now.
On Sunday, she was in Liverpool at the Labour party conference.
“British prime ministers raising obstacles to unity referendums flies in the face of the spirit of progress that made history in 1998,” she told a gathering. So successive British prime ministers have been blocking the people having their say?
The following day, Micheál Martin said there wouldn’t be a border poll before 2030, which was a surprisingly definitive declaration but he’s almost certainly correct. In response to that, McDonald declared that we’re moving “inch by inch” to a united Ireland.
“The only person pretending that is not the case is the person whose job it is to lead and prepare for the constitutional change that is coming,” she said. So Micheál Martin is the one holding up the march to a United Ireland?
Now, according to McDonald, we have unknown persons, British prime ministers and the Taoiseach all lined up to prevent the march of a nation which is being led from the front by Sinn Féin.
The reality is that the only people holding up the prospect of a united Ireland are the people of the six counties, the North, Northern Ireland, whatever you want to call it. That reality is just too unpalatable for those in a mad rush.
There is a sense of Alice in Wonderland in some quarters about the pace this island is moving at towards unity. For instance, look at the extensive poll conducted by ARINS project, overseen by the Royal Irish Academy and the University of Notre Dame in the US, along with .
In the last three years the intention to vote for unity in the North has gone from 27% to 34%. Notably, the intention to vote to stay in the UK has dropped by only two points, from 50% to 48%. No border poll would come within an ass’s roar of winning on those figures, and, by projection, would be highly unlikely to pass muster in the next five years.
Yet, the approach from Sinn Féin and others appears to be to keep talking about the possibility and you might end up talking all the way to a poll. The party has absolutely no blueprint of what a unitary state would look like.
It has made no effort to come up with anything that might be anyway palatable for unionists. In fact, the party has all the appearance of one which has given up the notion of softening the divide between the traditions and is instead relying exclusively on numbers.
That is precisely what the unionists did in designing the parameters of the six-county state a century ago.
They estimated what precisely would be most advantageous in terms of numbers, taking into account viability, and ensured that to the greatest extent the outcome mapped out their Protestant state for a Protestant people.
And now the Shinners want to do the same thing except with the shoe on the other foot, herding unionists into the unitary state when 50% plus one in the North deem it preferable.
Even though Sinn Féin keeps banging the drum they refuse to walk the walk. At last Saturday’s event in Dublin, the gathering was presented with the party’s preferred candidate in the presidential election, Catherine Connolly.
“She will be a President who understands the immense opportunity of Irish unity, who speaks with hope and confidence that we can achieve a United Ireland,” McDonald told the faithful in DCU. No doubt she will.
But for a party that is pushing against all logic for a referendum in the term of the next president, why didn’t they put their own candidate forward who might advocate with conviction? If they genuinely believe that their main political project can be achieved by 2030, surely it would be an historic achievement to be in situ as the head of state.
There is a serious consideration that feeds into the Shinners' mad rush for a poll, irrespective of the environment or conditions in which it might take place. The party was founded in 1970 to give political cover to a campaign of killing for a united Ireland by the Provisional IRA.
It is now wedded to exclusively peaceful means to meet its objective, but views its work as a different phase of the campaign that was initiated by the Provos. The actuality of a unitary state is all that matters, not any coming together that might ease the passage into a single entity.
Those who directed and organised the killing are now living though their winter years. They want to see retrospective vindication for why they sent out men and women to kill and die, to bomb and degrade.
They are also anxious to dispel the reasonable proposition that the Provo killing lengthened rather than shortened the distance to a united Ireland. That’s the kind of baggage that Sinn Féin carries as it lectures far and wide that others are blocking their attempts to do what they bogusly cast as the will of the people.
Horrible mistakes were made throughout the history of strife on this island. At various points during the late 20th century democratic governments forfeited their moral authority. Human life was cheapened, primarily but by no means exclusively, by those who believed they had a right to kill for their politics.
For those reasons, if none other, it is vital there are no more catastrophic mistakes. Change is coming and it could be hugely beneficial to the island as a whole. But the stampede towards a border poll, informed to some extent in order to justify the past, will do nothing to build a new and peaceful Ireland for all citizens.
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