Time to Change the Conversation

Imagine you were condemned to go to a dinner party every week and have the same conversation over and over again for 100 years. The same music playing, the same room, table, food and people. Saying the same things, with very slight variations ad infinitum.

Welcome to Ireland. The island, North and South. Branded as a land of craic and great conversation, it is in actuality the land of the same conversation over and over.

Let’s look at what other countries have been talking about during the last century. In Germany they have been through Versailles, the Weimar Republic, Hitler, WW2, the division into East and West, the reunification all while winning the World Cup three times.

The US has had the Roaring 20s, Chicago gangsters, the Wall Street Crash, The Great Depression, the New Deal, WW2, the 50s boom, the 60s youth movement, the neo-right rise with Regan, the tech boom, and wars galore.

So you get the picture. Dinner parties around the world have had changing agendas, while in Ireland we have been restricted to and by one topic. Partition.

Of course there will be many in the South who will tell us that they are not that bothered, but scratch the surface and you will find an anti-Brit sentiment that uncovers a romantic desire to see the island unified. At a restaurant in Kerry many years ago the owner and I conversed over plentiful amounts of Irish whiskey. He got emotional when he dreamt of seeing a United Ireland. I asked if he had ever been to the North, and was not surprised that he had never been near the place. But the dream lived on. At another gathering in the South I was asked, “but Tim in your heart of hearts do you not believe you are Irish?” from a man I met that night, who also wanted unification. Being married to a Dubliner I have been to a lot of social events and despite my attempts to avoid the topic, it is always provoked by my accent.

And so in 2021 it continues. Border polls, what it would look like, who would stay and who would leave, how it would work.

I get the Republican movement in the North. There was real sectarian discrimination and the remnants remain. There was a real need for civil rights, to correct the results of gerrymandering by the Unionists. It has taken years to begin to right the damage done. The Northern Nationalist has a justifiable position, if they want to stay in the same conversation.

But what if they think outside the box. Because in a unified Ireland things will be different for them. Their political capital will be dissolved into nationwide parties that after a while will lose interest in the 12% of the population in the 6 counties. They would probably see the Irish government pandering to the Unionists more, as the need to pacify them would be paramount for many years. Meanwhile those Unionists could be holding the balance of power in the Dail, and use it to effectively continue their Northern power base.

I don’t get the desire for Unification in the South any more. Why on Earth would the people of the South want the North other than for romantic and totally impractical reasons? It would be creating a basket of cats to put in a whirlpool. And that is simply trying to get it organised. Taxes, health, mph or kph, football teams. All of this would drain cash.

So maybe it is time for Nationalists to change the conversation, and to look at a different proposition, prosperity, and put it above the idea of unification. That can be achieved by parking their aspirations for an agreed decade. Then the threat to Unionists can be removed, and there can be a genuine coalition of ambition, to make every person in Northern Ireland/the North more prosperous. To move forward from identity politics to prosperity politics. To take advantage of the huge opportunity created by the Northern Ireland Protocol to do business across the island, in the UK and the EU. To work together to deliver a better economy, with better jobs, better education and better lives.

Having spent 100 years looking backwards, imagine what we could achieve spending 10 looking forward. Being imaginative about what doing business in Ireland can achieve. What being friends rather than in constant conflict could mean to all the young people born in 21st Century Ireland. That going North or South is like moving from Scotland to England or Germany to France, countries that were unable to get on with each other for generations. (OK maybe Scotland isn’t the best example).

So can we do it? Can we be creative and start new conversations? We can if we decide to, and we get both parties to come to the table and agree that prosperity is a more worthwhile ambition than flying a flag of a particular colour. And sign a peace treaty to last at least ten years. The Allies and Germany managed it, the US and Japan, even the USSR and the US managed ten years after 1989.

New ideas, new thinking, new opportunities.