Beware Irish border polls: why wake a sleeping genocidal maniac?
There’s an ironic symmetry between the ‘sure it will be fine’ attitude seen on Irish panel shows discussing a united Ireland, with naive Brexiteers before that referendum. The banality and matter of fact calls to rip down Chesterton’s Fence , let’s just remove the six counties from the body politic of the UK for the first time in 200 years, sure it will be fine! Belfast ruled from Dublin rather than London for the first time since the formation of Italy ! Antrim not sending an MP to Westminster for the first time since before Jefferson was president of the USA!
I’m a ‘child of the troubles’, born during the Ulster Workers Strike in the mid 70s, my dad had to dodge paramilitary checkpoints to come to see my mum in the Ulster Hospital. He couldn’t get her any flowers as the only florist he knew had been burned out — So the story goes anyway. I’m as guilty as him at gilding those lilies and the reality is I had a privileged middle-class upbringing, in some of the loveliest places on God’s earth.
But like a lot of privileged middle-class upbringings in Belfast, I have family members whose lives were changed irrevocably by violence. My favourite cousin, who I used to play Commodore 64 games with, was driving down a Tyrone country road one right, when a group of republicans lay in wait for him because they decided that because the lorry he drove supplied a police station, he should be killed and his children orphaned. He managed to duck as the bullets crashed through his car. He survived, but changed.
My dad decided that now that he had kids he needed a better job, so he trained to be a policeman. Fast forward a few years and republicans got hold of our phone number (798025 — everyone remembers their childhood phone number!). They decided the best craic would be to regularly phone my disabled mum and tell her all our names and how they were going to kill us. Nice. Then eventually they shot my dad. He survived, still does, but changed.
A wee bit about my dad, while I’m here. He flies the tricolour outside his house on St Patrick’s day and posts it on Facebook. He’d probably not use the words, but he’s a staunch loyalist, wouldn’t dream of missing the Queens Christmas message (not sure if he still stands to attention at the end). His dad, my Granda was a county Down Orangeman — 12 July was the best day of the year for us. He took me to see Ireland play rugby in Dublin many times and still screams at the TV if the men in green ‘knock on’. It’s Northern Ireland for football, England for cricket, and team GB for athletics (but keeping an eye on Ireland). I’ve noticed it’s a common set of contradictory loyalties you’ll see in Northern Irishmen.
As for me, I haven’t lived in Northern Ireland for a while now. I met an English girl and that was that. Time away from Northern Ireland can bring with it misplaced nostalgia and a lack of understanding of modern day-to-day life, but it also brings some zoomed-out perspective.
The group of people I don’t see being represented in ‘border poll’ debates are people like my dad. The Northern Irelanders. The people who are proudly Irish, proudly British, proudly Northern Irish and want to get on with life. This was the promise of The Good Friday Agreement and its being betrayed by those who perhaps have always seen it as a means to an end.
The provisions of the 1998 agreement weren’t a list of things that the unionist population wanted. It was full of things that they didn’t want but were willing to compromise on, setting aside decades of fear, hurt, and war. Reaching out to the other side (as they saw it), and asking them what they needed, what it would take to make this thing work. No one was ever going to love it, it was about what both sides could live with.
Unionists now feel hurt and betrayed by their Irish nationalist countrymen, and that reveals itself in a renewed defensive posture. They look back at the 1998 agreement and think, ‘we gave up so much, but the nationalists keep coming back for more and won’t be happy until they subsume us into an Irish republic, crushing and demeaning our British culture and history’. The agreement in the hearts of the people was that we’d both stop pulling in the opposite direction, we’d take the imperfections of Stormont and work together for the betterment of all the people in the six counties. We’d make Northern Ireland the best country possible.
People don’t want another generation of turmoil which is what a border poll would bring. Is the Garda Siochana really going to start policing the peace line at Cuper Way? The one million unionists would likely boycott the Dail. There’d be declarations of independence. New pogroms perhaps. The Garda would have to be armed, and the Irish army would be on the streets of Rathcoole, maybe young frightened soldiers responding to petrol bombs with live rounds.
Who’s for a border poll? maybe it would be 52/48, what happens if polls show it’s 48/52 the other way a decade later after another thousand dead? Let the sleeping war lie where it is, and dream a new dream of a peaceful, loving, prosperous, proud Northern Ireland with content and friendly neighbours.