Philip McGuinness’s analysis in this issue of the party manifestos and the issues highlighted during the campaign suggests that most parties did not think that highlighting a focus on the North would increase their voting share. The main exception was Sinn Féin’s call for the British Government to name a date for a referendum on unification and the regular appearance of Michelle O’Neill alongside Mary Lou though not being encouraged or allowed to say very much.
Of the other major parties only Micheál Martin of Fianna Fail made some brief references to his ‘shared island’ initiative and many of the smaller parties included reference to their support for the programme. But thus far the focus on the programme has generally been on limited financial contributions to shared infrastructure like the A5 improvement, the Narrow Water bridge and potential rail developments to the Northwest. No-one presented any policies on what might be needed by way of more far-reaching financial or constitutional changes that might encourage unionist or ‘other’ voters in the North to look more favourably on unification.
This suggests that a more serious discussion of the differences between a focus on unification and one on a more genuinely shared island may be helpful.
No serious discussion of the implications of a vote for unification
Another indication of the absence of interest is the lack of much serious discussion of the implications of unification – opinion polling has focussed on things like a change to the Irish Tricolour – widely defended as a including a nod to the Orange – and other forms of potential symbolic recognition. There has been quite limited engagement by unionists in the programmes of Ireland’s Future. Even Alliance from its neutral position felt it best not to attend a debate in Dublin. The DUP and TUV have been more interested in discussion with the Tories on how the Union could be strengthened than anything else.
And yet almost everyone agrees that it would be foolish or foolhardy to embark on a referendum without a clear understanding of what would be involved if a simple majority vote was achieved. The continuing ARINS surveys of opinion North and South indicate that while most people expect or hope that there will be referendums on unification in five or ten year almost all of them think that there should be advance clarification on what form of unification is on offer. This is especially the case if, as seems likely any vote is finely balanced – as in the Brexit referendum a marginal vote either way could exacerbate the divisions and responses on either side. In the negotiations on the Good Friday Agreement a better criterion was set of sufficient consensus from both unionists and nationalists. Simple majority voting on matters of this kind is a bad idea.
Retention of power-sharing at Stormont?
One of the key underlying issues that needs to be clarified in the context of potential reunification is whether the current power-sharing arrangements are to be retained in a united Ireland – that would perhaps help to persuade unionists and the middle ground that their interests would not be overwhelmed in a single all-Ireland parliament. But it would obviously require a much more thorough revision of the Irish Constitution which many in the South may not wish to embark on. In this the question of how to be either British or Irish or both as currently guaranteed would have to be incorporated and might require some alternation of the references in the current Bunreacht na Eiréann to the ‘Irish Nation’ and the duty of loyalty of all its citizens.
Financial contributions?
Another more practical issue is who is to pay for the continuing sharing of financial resources that currently applies within the UK. When this was last seriously discussed in the 1970s within the New Ireland Forum in respect of possible Joint Authority the prevailing view was that the UK would have to supply the bulk of any finance based on its much greater GDP at the time. If the result of a referendum is to create a single Ireland unit it would have to be worked out what the cost to the Irish Exchequer would be. A paper for the Irish Institute for International and Economic Affairs (IIEA) has estimated this as around €23.8bn annually which might not be welcomed by all in the South despite their thriving current budget surpluses.
Neither Government wants to engage
All this of course is speculation. But the risk of proceeding on a simple binary choice before any of these issues are seriously discussed is clearly real. And as things stand neither government wants to engage in let alone lead a discussion as they did in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement. But in the absence of an intergovernmental initiative to set the terms for any realistic negotiations it is hard to see much progress being made if the pro- and anti-unification parties are left to promote their own very separate agendas.
The British Government is resisting the idea that they should set out the precise way in which they would make a decision on whether to call a referendum as Sinn Féin is calling for. Their approach is to emphasise that there is no immediate prospect or evidence for a majority in the North for unification. Hence they are more than happy to postpone any discussion of the options for as long as possible.
The Irish Government – assuming the continued exclusion of Sinn Féin – is equally reluctant to embark on any serious discussion of the options for a potential vote in the North for unification. The result in the latest constitutional referendum on the status of the care sector has shown how reluctant the Southern electorate is to tamper with their Constitution. There may even be a concern that the people in the South might themselves vote against unification if the full consequences both electorally and financially had to be spelled out. The best conclusion may be that the Irish people probably retain an aspiration for unification without being prepared to make the changes to their relatively settled political and financial systems that would be required to achieve it.
Shared Island Initiative
The Shared Island Initiative is formally defined in the Irish Government website as ‘working with the Northern Ireland Executive and the British Government to address strategic challenges faced in the island of Ireland, further developing the all-Ireland economy, deepening North/South cooperation and investing in the NorthWest and border regions, fostering instructive and intensive dialogue and a comprehensive programme of research to support the building of awareness around a shared future for the island’.
In the 2021 Budget a figure of €500m over the coming years was announced The actual initial financial commitments have been support for the improvement of the A5 road to the Northwest, funding for the development of the Magee campus of the University of Ulster in London/Derry [€44m] and support for the training of recruits to the health and social care profession [€10m]. More recently a programme of some €10m has been announced for work on biodiversity, of which €7m would be directly funded by the Shared Island Initiative along with €3m from the RoI & NI Departments for marine work and a new funding programme for shared community based initiatives. But the opportunity for a higher profile and more serious funding for the preparation of Casement Park for Euro 26 was missed – due perhaps to reluctance by the GAA and the Government to play ball with their own serious funding commitments, or the failure by Sue Gray to secure support in Downing Street for the project.
The study by John Fitzgerald of TCD and Edgar Morgenroth of DCD recently published by the Institute for International and Economic Affairs is based on available data up to 2021 on the costs of maintaining Northern Ireland in the way it has become used to, came up with a maximum annual figure of €23.8bn a year, as shown in the accompanying tabulation:
| € Million | Source: Authors’ estimates | ||||
| Existing | United Ireland | ||||
| Base | Base + Rerating | Base excluding: | |||
| Interest | Pensions | ||||
| 2017 | 11139 | 9939 | 19482 | 8092 | 7368 |
| 2018 | 11474 | 10216 | 19935 | 8556 | 7595 |
| 2019 | 12149 | 10910 | 20625 | 9280 | 8203 |
| 2020 | 19662 | 18442 | 27770 | 17260 | 15573 |
| 2021 | 16131 | 15055 | 23850 | 12786 | 12015 |
But the report emphasises that ‘the precise terms under which Northern Ireland could leave the UK would be subject to negotiation’. It refers to the precedents of partition in 1922 under which the Irish Free State accepted a share of the UK debt at the time of departure (FitzGerald and Kenny, 2020). And it recalls that ‘if Scotland had voted for independence in 2014, the agreement for the break-up of the UK would have entailed Scotland leaving it with a share of the UK debt.’
This would reflect ‘the fact that it is normal when a country breaks up in a negotiated manner that assets and liabilities are shared among the two new jurisdictions’, as happened recently on the break-up of the USSR and of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. The authors add that without this kind of settlement to ‘allow successive regions of the UK to depart leaving all of the debt to be serviced by the remaining population in the UK would seem difficult to justify’. Some other commentators have suggested that ‘in a negotiated settlement, the UK might agree to waive this debt liability for Northern Ireland in return for the ending of the fiscal transfer to Northern Ireland’. The authors calculation is that if ‘the UK agreed very generous departure terms, involving the write-down on the debt attributable to Northern Ireland, the effect of the elimination of interest payments on the Northern Ireland fiscal deficit, as shown in the third panel of Table 7 would result in an reduction of the annual figure from €23.8bn to some €12.7bn.
The authors’ conclusion in full is as follows: ‘While the very low productivity of Northern Ireland’s economy continues to leave it among the poorest regions in the UK, it will have a very large fiscal deficit. Even though Ireland has a much higher national income, funding the needs of the people of Northern Ireland in a united Ireland would put huge financial pressure on the people of Ireland, resulting in an immediate major reduction in their living standards. If, instead, Northern Ireland made major changes in its economy designed to dramatically raise productivity, over time this would narrow the gap in living standards between Northern Ireland, the rest of the UK and Ireland. In turn, this would reduce the Northern Ireland deficit and also reduce the cost of applying similar standards in Northern Ireland to those in Ireland. This could substantially reduce the cost of unification.’
Shared Island Fund
The Shared Island Fund – with a commitment of at least €1billion out to 2030 – is ringfenced funding to enable delivery of all-island investment commitments and objectives. Shared Island Fund projects are taken forward by Ministers and their Departments, working through all-island partnerships, including with counterparts in Northern Ireland and the UK Government and with local authorities, educational institutions and civil society.
Building on the Shared Island concept
An alternative and very different approach to a ‘shared island’ would be to develop a form of ‘shared authority’ or ‘shared responsibility’ by the UK and the Republic over the North. In that scenario the primary need would not be a completely revised Irish Constitution but a new British Irish Agreement to supplement the one that is attached to the Good Friday Agreement and is arguably the more directly binding international treaty between the two states.
The current British Irish Agreement establishes that the primary duty of whichever governments ‘with jurisdiction there … shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions … and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos and aspirations of both communities’ – and it might be added the growing number of those in between. It does not rule out the possibility that both might continue to share joint jurisdiction until there is a much clearer preference for a unification settlement in both communities in the North. This could be developed as a different form of ‘shared island’ approach that would perhaps diminish the risks of more serious divisions between the ‘two communities’ in the North and the people in between.
The text of the Irish Government’s approach to the Shared Island Initiative sets out clearly the joint involvement of both governments and the Northern Ireland Executive in the programme.
In this scenario it would also have to be worked out on what basis the contributions of the UK and RoI are to be fixed. One possibility would be to relate it to ability to pay which might perhaps favour the RoI as the UK Exchequer is so much larger; another might be based on the part of the population in the North each government is expected to protect and provide for, which would be likely to favour the UK – perhaps a 50/50 split based on rough unionist/nationalist sections of the population or some other more detailed formula.
So it would probably be best to expect that the two governments will continue to avoid embarking on any serious assessment of the various options for eventual unification given the reluctance of most unionists to engage in any way in such a process and an equal reluctance of many in the South to engage in the kind of constitutional change that would be necessary in the event of a marginal Northern vote for an unspecified form of unification. The development of a gradual process of constructive sharing by the two governments within the island and support for a less divisive approach within the European Union in the aftermath of Brexit may perhaps be best hope for all of us.