The First Word: Does the South Want the North?

“We have constitution which perpetrates the fallacy that Ireland is one nation with a right to territorial unification…when are we going to recognize that the ‘national territory’ is
Santasyland.”
– John A. Murphy. Sunday Independent Newspaper Dublin

“Northern Ireland Catholics are not our responsibility. They are citizens of a modern democracy and a regional economy subsidized by their fellow-citizens in Great Britain. Only that state can protect them…our job is to merely heip sever the umbilical cord.”
– Patricia Redlich, Sunday Independent Newspaper, Dublin

“The day of national flags, national anthems and a minutes silence should be dead and buried. This sort of old-fashioned and provocative nationalism has no place in the Ireland of today.”
– John Martin, Irish independent Newspaper Dublin

“John Hume is a worried man. He fears the prospect of this community (Irish Republic) turning its backs on Northern nationalists..he is right to worry for that is the suppressed desire of people in the South. For those who seek a united Ireland the end is nigh.”
– Eamonn Dunphy, Sunday Independent

These are interesting times in the Irish Republic, the politics of partition, of working to keeping Ireland permanently separated into North and South has taken root among some leading politicians and commentators. The propagators see themselves hand in glove with Northern Unionists, wanting nothing to do with a United Ireland.

The Irish Independent Group of newspapers, Ireland’s largest chain, keeps up a ceaseless barrage of such articles and viewpoints with hardly a dissenting nationalist view.

All of the articles, and several in other newspapers, are variations on a theme first expressed by Dr. Conor Cruise O’Brien shortly after the latest phase of the Northern Ireland troubles began in 1969. O’Brien sees the Irish Republic as the nation state, with Northern Ireland forever tied to Britain because of the Unionist majority there. Northern nationalists can basically like it or lump it.

O’Brien even suggested recently that some of the nationalists move to the Irish Republic.
The lack of a resolution on the North, the continuing violence there, and the steady drain on the economic wellbeing of the whole island have all led to a powerful revisionist movement sweeping in behind O’Brien’s statements.

This movement shochorns Irish history into a revisionist mould which has led one anti-revisionist historian, Dr John Bradshaw, to remark that if it continues the Irish famine victims will eventually be found to have suffered from a form of anorexia nervosa and not really to have starved to death at all.

Even such an eminent political figure as former Taoiseach of Ireland Dr.Garret FitzGerald has noted that the revisionists have gone too far. In a recent “Irish Times’ column about the 1916 rising, FitzGerald, architect of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, notes that he felt “frustration with the apparent shame-faced reluctance to give due recognition to the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising. ” In this new history, the Unionists have gone from being bigoted rulers, who allowed only one Catholic in 50 years into government (true), to being a minority discriminated against on the island of Ireland.

While no one can argue that Unionists don’t have legitimate fears and should not be railroaded into a United Ireland, the new revisionism has swung completely to the other extreme, and leading proponents now advocate internment on both sides of the border as part of a purely military solution to keep the North apart from the Republic.

But recent census statistics tell their own tale. Nationalists now number almost 43 per cent of the population, up from 38 per cent at the last census, and from 33 per cent some years ago. For the first time, there are more Catholics of grade school age. Four of the six counties now have a nationalist majority.

All of which augurs towards the inevitable reality of a nationalist majority sometime in the next century. Rather than trying to copper-fasten what is already a changing reality of history, the revisionists might be better employed trying to come up with concepts that would allow the two parts of Ireland to come together peacefully.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the May June 1993 issue of Irish America. ♦