On February 3 of this year, Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill became first minister of Northern Ireland. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The six-county statelet of two-million, created in the 1921 partition of Ireland, was specifically designed—to paraphrase one of its founders—as a Protestant state for a Protestant people, an instrument of permanent rule by a unionist political elite loyal to the British crown. More loyal, indeed, than most people on the mainland itself. For half a century, this elite ruled an effectively one-party state, disenfranchising many Catholics and gerrymandering electoral districts, until the North shook with thirty years of paramilitary and state violence from the late 1960s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The price of peace was incorporating radical nationalists into the political system, and they proved every bit as good at electoral politics as the insurrectionary kind. Within two decades, Sinn Féin has utterly dominated the nationalist side of the aisle in the North, reducing the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party to a rump and becoming, for the first time, the largest party in Stormont, Northern Ireland’s devolved parliament.
Barely two months after O’Neill’s ascent, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the dominant political force in Northern unionism, was thrown into disarray by the revelation that their leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, had been credibly accused of multiple cases of rape and other sexual abuses over more than two decades. A man whose career began as the election agent of Enoch Powell—the anti-immigrant British MP of the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech—was ending in grotesque disgrace. The Orange State is now led, symbolically at least, by someone wearing green, while the DUP lurches from scandal to scandal, crippled by their support for Brexit, unable and unwilling to moderate for fear of losing the unionist mandate of heaven to the even more reactionary Traditional Unionist Voice party, who reject power sharing with nationalist parties outright. (In a moment of great symbolic weight, TUV leader Jim Allister recently won the seat that DUP founder Ian Paisley—and later, his son—had held for over half a century.)
At first glance, it might seem as if the long wait is almost over, and we are only a few years from the final triumph of Irish republicanism. Indeed, it has become common to hear talk from across the political spectrum, both inside and outside Ireland, of the inevitability of Irish reunification. A popular meme clips a moment from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Data refers to “the Irish Unification of 2024.” We are in a historic moment—though whenever I hear that phrase, I am tempted to reply that all the other moments are historic too. In the North, Sinn Féin has ascended to the highest heights possible within the confines of the post-Troubles settlement, but those confines are fairly, well, confining. The devolved government in Stormont is structured in such a way that it legally enforces a coalition between the largest unionist and largest nationalist grouping in parliament, with other parties having the option to join that grand coalition, should they wish. Both those main parties have essentially equal power, and there is no real difference between the positions of first minister and deputy first minister, which are divided between them. Numerous mechanisms exist to make sure that neither side is able to impose their will on the other. In budgetary terms, the government is beholden to the whims of Westminster. The net result of all of this is that Stormont exists as a permanent caretaker government. Politicians from a supposedly radical party must govern like civil servants. As such, Sinn Féin’s ability to implement any kind of serious agenda, let alone begin the formal process of reunification, is strictly limited.
And this is only one of numerous hurdles—political, legal, electoral, and social—that must be crossed before this centuries-old dream can become a reality. First, a mandate must be achieved, both north and south of the border; Sinn Féin is the most likely vehicle to build this consensus, but their meteoric rise has recently stalled out amid serious strategic errors and a changing social climate. Next, the British government must assent to a unification vote, something in which neither the Tories nor Labour have lately shown much interest. Third, the vote must be won in both the Republic—straightforward enough—and the North, where current polls suggest this would be an uphill struggle. And even if a vote were won, how would the unionist minority, long sworn enemies of Irish nationalism, be integrated into a new Ireland?
Looming over all of these technical and political obstacles is a larger question of what exactly unification would mean in practice. Would it be a shotgun wedding where one side sets the terms, as in the case of German reunification, or the creation of a whole new polity? And who, crucially, would decide?
The Provisional Vision
The first incarnation of Sinn Féin was born in 1905, just before the Irish revolutionary period. Agitation for an independent Irish republic had been ongoing since the late eighteenth century in the form of violence, civil resistance, and parliamentary maneuvering. After a guerrilla war of independence from 1919 to 1921, Ireland was partitioned, with the southern twenty-six counties becoming the Irish Free State, and six counties in Ulster remaining in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, the aforementioned Orange State. Partition was carried out to protect unionist privileges in the North and to avoid a scenario in which the British state had to directly confront and disarm unionist paramilitaries—a kind of alternative civil war. Since the moment of partition, reunification has been the most important goal of the Republican movement.
It might seem as if the long wait is almost over, and we are only a few years from the final triumph of Irish Republicanism.
The Sinn Féin that exists today grew from the Provisional wing of the Republican movement, which split from the Official wing in the winter of 1969–70. It was a complex division, rather than a neat left-right one. The Official side was led by Dublin-based republicans turning in a more explicitly Marxist direction. They ended their armed campaign against the British state fairly quickly, changed their name (to Sinn Féin the Workers’ Party, and eventually just the Workers’ Party), underwent several ideological transformations, and oriented themselves toward the Soviet Union. On the other side of the split were the Provisionals. Initially containing most of the old-guard republicans, including many conservatives, they nonetheless moved leftward while continuing to carry out bombings, assassinations, and other paramilitary activities. Throughout the Troubles, the Provisionals were the main, though not exclusive, antagonist of the British state and loyalist paramilitaries.
Over the years, the Provisional IRA, with Sinn Féin as their political party, benefitted from enormous ideological and tactical flexibility. In the late 1970s, a faction led by Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison grew in power, eventually taking over leadership. They employed a pragmatic and ultimately successful dual power strategy of paramilitary violence and electoral participation, running for parliamentary seats in Dublin, Belfast, and Westminster. At the same time, they developed deep connections with everyone from the African National Congress to Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Some of these connections were practical: Gaddafi sent so many tons of materiel that Semtex from Libya was being used in IRA bombs for decades. But there were genuine ideological connections too. Rank-and-file members drew inspiration and revolutionary aesthetics from left-national liberation struggles of the Third World; while IRA and Sinn Féin leadership were also sincere in their admiration of these movements and saw themselves as part of a broad global anti-imperialist front, they absorbed their allies’ tactics more than their orthodoxy. Few other parties in the 1990s could boast friendship with both the Palestinian Liberation Organization and right-wing New York Congressman Peter King.
Since winning their first seat there in 2004, Sinn Féin has sat in the furthest left parliamentary grouping in the European Parliament, the EU’s legislative body, alongside communists, green socialists, and left populists. They became the standard bearer of the left inside the Republic after the 2008 financial crash and the self-inflicted demise of the Irish Labour Party. Sinn Féin moved gradually into the role of opposition leadership, surrounded by a constellation of center-left and further left forces against the decrepit center-right establishment that has been in power from the foundation of the state until the present day. In the 2010s, they became a sort of European political unicorn, a left-wing party that still had a working-class base. The two traditional center-right parties were eventually forced into coalition as their vote share dropped to unprecedented lows. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin’s already strong vote share in the North inched upward. Ireland seemed to swim against the European tide, moving leftward as the rest of the continent spun further and further right.
It helped that, unlike most of the European left, Sinn Féin could draw on a positive national project. The party is republican first, and anything else a distant second. But Sinn Féin inherited a nationalism containing enough anti-colonial DNA that it hasn’t been easily or entirely co-opted by the race-obsessed far right, in contrast to parties in France and Italy. This dream was combined with a focus on housing, by far the most divisive and urgent issue in Irish politics. They rode this combination to an unexpectedly successful 2020 election in the Republic, becoming the largest party by vote share. It became commonplace to speak of the next government as being inevitably led by Sinn Féin, possibly buttressed by the Social Democrats and People Before Profit parties, and/or sympathetic left independents. And if Sinn Féin were in power both north and south of the border, surely it would only be a matter of time before a national unification vote was held.
The party displayed impeccable timing in the 1990s and also benefitted from remarkable luck, coming to the negotiating table with the British and Irish governments while they had maximum leverage and before the war on terror would make any paramilitary force lose influence in Washington. In the first years of this decade, however, that luck has run out. Sinn Féin’s polling began to decay last year, and that decline has accelerated in the last twelve months, driven by the rising salience of immigration as a political issue and the emergence of an active, violent far-right as a live force in Irish politics. Rather than double down on the issues on which they hold a commanding lead, namely housing and health, Sinn Féin have instead engaged in amateurish overtures toward the right, attempting to define themselves as “serious” on immigration in the manner of center-left parties across Europe. This appears to have led to a further softening of their support on the left, while winning them few votes from the immigration-fixated center and right. The same ideological flexibility that once allowed them to grow rapidly now looks like cynical opportunism and political incoherence. An older generation of Republican activists are dying or retiring, and with them, some of Sinn Féin’s commitment to being a real social force, rather than merely another electioneering political party.
Their performance in June’s local and European elections in the Republic was disappointing: they polled in the low teens, below the two main, center-right government parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. With a general election due no later than March 2025, and likely happening in November of this year, Ireland is, as it stands, looking at a reelection of the current government, possibly supported by new right-wing party Independent Ireland and various clientelist and xenophobic independents. While none of the current government parties are explicitly against a united Ireland, there is precisely zero chance that this coalition would push for unification in anything like the medium term.
Getting to Yes
Still, let’s suppose for a second that Sinn Féin pulls off a Lazarus-like resurrection and manages to cobble together a workable Dáil majority. This is by no means inconceivable, however unlikely. But getting into power in both North and South does not guarantee a smooth path to a united Ireland. The legal basis for reunification rests in the 1998 Northern Ireland Act, which requires both a majority of people in Northern Ireland and a majority in the Republic of Ireland to vote in favor. Crucially, the timing of any referendum is entirely out of the hands of the governments in either Belfast or Dublin. The act states that a border poll must be held “if at any time it appears likely . . . that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland.” Determining this fairly vague proposition would presumably rest on the results of opinion polls, but the language is loose enough to enable significant hedging and delay. The responsibility for determining when the criteria for a vote have been fulfilled rests with the British government, through the secretary of state for Northern Ireland. This position has been shuffled around alongside the various chaotic Tory governments of the last ten years, oscillating between basically competent technocratic dealmakers and complete morons with less interest in and knowledge of the region than your average English pub talker. One such mediocrity was Karen Bradley, who admitted that, before becoming secretary, she “didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland—people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa.”
In the 2010s, Sinn Féin became a sort of European political unicorn, a left-wing party that still had a working-class base.
The result has been years of neglect and drift on the issue, punctuated by periods of intense, Brexit-related wrangling resulting in settlements that have allowed the North to keep its unnatural position both in the UK and sort of inside the EU at once. For the British political establishment, the North is the afterthought of afterthoughts, and most would happily wash their hands of it if they could. The Tory party, technically the Conservative and Unionist Party, retains a historical link to unionism that prevents them from casting the unionists aside entirely. They may now be out of power, but Irish nationalists will find little comfort in the new Labour government. Jeremy Corbyn represented a small minority faction within the party with deep knowledge of and sympathy toward the Irish republican project; among the many slings and arrows directed at Corbyn during his time as leader was the accusation that he was a “terrorist sympathizer” who supported the IRA and various other bogeymen in the British psyche. Given the grand narrative of Keir Starmer’s Labour party as a clean break from this supposedly disastrous period, his government is extremely unlikely to expend any effort on constitutional change in Ireland. Tony Benn, the great Labour left titan, was once another of the party’s most passionate and committed believers in Irish self-determination; it is a bitter irony that one of his son Hilary Benn’s first acts as the new Northern Ireland secretary was to immediately quash any talk of a border poll.
When it comes to Westminster’s intransigence, the Scottish independence movement is an instructive comparison. Despite years of commanding performances by the Scottish National Party in Scottish parliamentary elections, they have been unable to engineer a second referendum on independence since the question was last posed in 2014. (Starmer, for his part, has already ruled the possibility of another vote out.) Formal requests, symbolic votes, white papers, a “referendum roadmap,” and other pressure campaigns have all been ignored by successive UK governments, who understand the effectiveness of hard power, obstinacy, and a blithe disregard for public pressure. In the case of Ireland, if the polling becomes overwhelming, the British government could be held to be in breach of their treaty responsibilities for refusing to hold a referendum, and even open to a court challenge. But the last ten years of British politics would not fill one with confidence that breaking the law would trouble the government too much.
Getting to a referendum, in any case, is only a first step. If an Irish unification vote were to be held tomorrow, what would be the chances of its success? In the North, unification is a live issue as a result of slow demographic shifts: the state has gone from a two-to-one Protestant majority in 1921 to a 46 percent Catholic and 43 percent Protestant population in the 2021 census, with a growing nonreligious and “other” segment. Protestant and Catholic are by no means synonyms for unionist and nationalist, but taken as a whole, this change has greatly increased the motivation for, and political will toward, unification. Presently, a referendum would probably pass handily in the Republic and lose by a respectable margin in the North, where opinion polls usually capture “No” in the high 40s, sometimes touching 50 percent, with a sizable undecided vote.
But this is not a fait accompli: a plurality of voters under forty-five already support unification. At no other time in the history of this benighted statelet has there been a greater degree of fluidity and contingency in Northern public opinion. Taking recent elections as a rough proxy, there is a core unionist vote of around 35 to 40 percent that would reject any constitutional change no matter what. A slightly smaller number are solid nationalists, who would vote “Yes.” The key constituency is in the middle: the soft unionists, soft nationalists, and those who consider themselves neither. There are certain concrete sticking points for these voters, chiefly their access to the National Health Service and the corresponding lack of a truly universal public health care system in Ireland. Grimly, the slow-motion destruction of the NHS through privatization and austerity, and the consequent fall in patient outcomes, may be weakening the appeal of this argument. Beyond practical concerns, there is also a more complex identity transformation happening among this cohort of voters, who are the most likely to describe themselves in surveys as “Northern Irish” in addition to, or instead of, “Irish” or “British.”
There is also a sense that soft unionists have been turned off by the extremism of the DUP and alienated from the political traditions of their parents and grandparents. Many have found a new political home in the Alliance Party, a centrist grouping that grew from the liberal unionist movements of the 1970s, which tried to use the energy unleashed by the Catholic civil rights movement to forge a path for Protestants out of the kind of ethnic domination politics that defined the first half-century after partition. Alliance recently surfed a wave of anti-Brexit sentiment to a firm third place in the 2022 Northern Irish Assembly election, making inroads in historically unionist constituencies. The party is officially neutral on the question of unification, but its voters are persuadable. In their socially liberal, pro-European, economically centrist positions, they resemble far more the political establishment of the Republic than the Bible-thumping, far-right DUP closer to home. And the Brexit saga has led these voters to not only a deep alienation from that party, who campaigned on Brexit and facilitated it as part of Theresa May’s coalition government, but from the political establishment in Westminster too. One needs only to take a look at Ireland’s Olympics team to see examples of young people from a Protestant background proud to compete under the Irish flag.
One Hundred Years of Incertitude
The partition of Ireland is now more than a hundred years old, but the scar it left has not faded. The prospect of reunification is on the whole a hopeful and positive one, into which can be poured the dreams and aspirations of a variety of political traditions. Different movements, Republican and otherwise, have for decades offered visions of what it might look like. The Provisionals in the 1970s put forward the Éire Nua plan, a federalist fantasy of unification that would involve a separate, devolved parliament for Ulster. More recently, civil society groups like Ireland’s Future have held conferences and produced publications attempting to involve a broad spectrum of people in imagining a united future for the island. In the absence of a true reunion, the Irish government in 2021 launched the “Shared Island” initiative, an attempt to deepen economic and social links between the North and South. The economy of the Republic has moved slowly but inexorably away from hyperdependence on London and toward the European Union, and the bespoke Brexit solutions negotiated between Dublin, London, and Belfast are an acknowledgment that the economy of the North is now as much integrated into that of the Republic as it is to the United Kingdom. Trade between North and South has increased from €2 billion in 1998 to more than €10 billion in 2022. As Dublin pulls away from London, Belfast inches along with it.
One needs only to take a look at Ireland’s Olympics team to see examples of young people from a Protestant background proud to compete under the Irish flag.
If the island is beginning to function in real terms as one integrated economy, what of the social structure? At the turn of the twentieth century, as Irish parliamentary nationalism reached its zenith, and the prospect of a partially sovereign independent, thirty-two-county Irish state—known as “Home Rule”—became an imminent reality, unionists committed themselves en masse to armed resistance. Nearly half a million people signed the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, pledging to “stand by one another in defending, for ourselves and our children, our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom,” with many organizing and arming themselves for war in the event of Home Rule being imposed upon them. Under the catchy slogan “Home Rule is Rome Rule,” unionists argued that any independent Irish state would be dominated by Catholics, even under the direct sway of the Pope. (Those who loudly protested that their minority rights would be disrespected in a Catholic Ireland were of course quite happy to disrespect the rights of Catholics in the North for fifty years following partition.) Unionists held themselves to be fundamentally unintegratable to an independent Ireland in 1912 and 1922. Would the same hold in 2024?
What is not obvious to those outside of Ireland is the degree of deference now displayed toward Northern unionists by political and media figures in the Republic, where the political center agonizes endlessly over how best to welcome this sector of society into a hypothetical new Ireland. The need to respect unionist traditions, and a deep suspicion of radical republicanism, was baked into the Irish political system as a result of the violence of the Troubles. This sometimes laudable effort at understanding and conciliation has led occasionally to incidents of absurd self-flagellation for the violence carried out by republican paramilitaries, as if such violence were in some ways the fault of all Irish people. In the bizarre political journeys of the 1980s and 1990s, some parties that had begun as republican paramilitaries began adopting quasi-unionist positions on the national question. As such, unionists in a united Ireland would be likely to find the existing political establishment extremely accommodating to their whims. Wallace Thompson, a founding member of the DUP, recently admitted his belief that the UK cared so little about the North that unionists might even have more influence in a united Ireland.
The left on both sides of the border continues to imagine a united Ireland that goes beyond the grubby compromises of the state and statelet that preceded it, with a new constitution that speaks to the real and urgent needs of people in every county. The more likely outcome, should unification happen any time in the near future, would seem to be a union of the economic elites in both polities under an amended constitution of the Republic of Ireland, maintaining existing inequalities and steering the fortunes of the North out of the sputtering wreckage of the UK. The biggest beneficiaries of such an arrangement would be the soft unionist middle and upper classes, who would remain in control of Northern capital, and whose children would doubtless be given plenty of Arts Council funding to write plays and novels about reconciling their unionist identity with their new political home.
In this scenario, working-class unionist communities, long pawns of the ruling class in Belfast and London, would likely find themselves political and social outsiders, partially by choice, partially by design. These communities are already alienated from the devolved Northern Irish state; there is no reason to suspect they would warm to an all-Ireland one. The project of trying to create a nonsectarian project of solidarity and working-class struggle is one that has defeated numerous political movements in Ireland, from the Northern Ireland Labour Party and the trade unions in the 1930s and 1940s, to the Workers Party in the 1980s. The barriers to the unionist working class joining the left remain incredibly steep. Conversely, it’s not hard to imagine that some would join forces with the surging Irish far right to create a truly baleful social and electoral force. As racist riots broke out across the UK in early August, you could already see stirrings of this unlikely alliance, with anti-immigrant groups marching together in Belfast under the union flag and the tricolor.
Under the catchy slogan “Home Rule is Rome Rule,” unionists argued that any independent Irish state would be dominated by Catholics.
Yet this may be too pessimistic an assessment of Ireland’s constitutional and political future. The reason that a united Ireland remains such a tantalizing goal, despite the inherent difficulties and likely compromises, is that unification is not merely an end goal but a field of social possibility and political contestation. Processes of constitutional change can and do take on their own momentum, transforming society in ways that even their strongest proponents and antagonists could never have imagined. Sinn Féin holds the mantle of Irish republicanism for now, but they hold it only with the consent of ordinary republicans. Their patient strategies have proven effective up to a point, but we would be foolish to imagine that theirs is the only vision of a new Ireland that counts. Nor should we settle meekly for a union that supposes that the Irish state created in 1922, with all its attendant failures, constitutes the best of all possible Irelands.
The Irish Free State, later just Ireland, was created by a reactionary Catholic bourgeoisie that had just won a brutal civil war, crushing the radicalism of the Irish Revolution. As in the North, Southern elites maintained their power through state violence and social domination, just of a different flavor. In a hundred years, they have created economic growth and superficial economic prosperity in the South, but Ireland remains a deeply unequal society: for all of our wealth on paper, our social fabric remains thin, patchy, the result of a century of parsimonious paternalism from governments of the right and the fiscal fileting ordered by EU austerians. To truly unify the island, we must be willing to leave the Republic in the past and create a new state from the people up. It should center its constitutional promises not on the narrow rights of property that leave so many sleeping on our streets, but on more fundamental human needs and desires. More than anything, it must point the way to some future for everybody on this island, lest we succumb to the tormented, violent visions of decline that have animated Europe’s rightward turn in the twenty-first century. Since 1798, the dream of Irish republicanism has been to unify Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter in one cross-sectarian national movement. The unionist project has been to stop this from happening. With the psychic grip of unionism waning, why not hope?