A reunification referendum…
Boris Johnson is facing a Brexit meltdown after Sinn Fein won Northern Ireland elections for the first time – with threats of a reunification poll within five years.
The Republicans sailed to what would once have been an unthinkable victory in the province overnight, with Michelle O’Neill now set to be nominated as First Minister.
However, the Stormont executive looks unlikely to get up and running as the DUP – beaten into second place – has already indicated that it will not agree to take the deputy role.
Sin Fein are a thoroughly nasty party. However, setting that aside, what does this mean in the long term? I’m not convinced that their win here equates to a majority in support of reunification with the Republic. A vote at a local election is not the same as one cast for a constitutional issue. The former can be nothing more than a protest against the government of the day. Also, SF won on a single transferable vote, so were not necessarily the first choice of the majority of the electorate. This, of course, is the flaw with PR systems and any party that wins should bear this in mind. It is not a majority mandate at all, it’s a compromise that hands them the levers of power.
I’ve worked in the province and met plenty of people in the process. What was obvious to me was that decades after the end of the troubles, the divisions still smoulder under the surface. Stand on the walls of Derry and look across at the Bogside to get a feel for it – or even travel through the streets of Belfast and see the unionist flags and murals. Also, the gangsters in the IRA never went away, they still lurk in the background and SF is their respectable face.
So, how that split pans out remains to be seen, but I don’t think it’s as clear as SF seem to think it is. I’m not convinced that a referendum will deliver the result they think it will, but I am certain that these people will now do their best to stir up the sectarian divisions all over again in pursuit of their political goal.
The combined unionist vote was still larger than that for Sinn Fein but had split.
How does Ms O’Neill think that will pan out come referendum time?
The biggest issue for Irish reunification is that the Republic wouldn’t want the North, even if the North vote for reunification. Polls have consistently shown that the South would not accept the North if it meant having to pay extra taxes to fund it.
All the discussions about reunification just look at principles, not practicalities. Once you started giving people the practical outcomes of a vote to unify the two halves then my feeling is that there would be an overwhelming (probably 70-30) majority in favour of the status quo. The North would be faced with big cuts in government spending, and being reliant on a far smaller country to fund their largesse, and would face losing the NHS in favour of the South’s insurance based model (where you have to pay to see doctors for example), and the South would face massive tax rises to pay for many of the subsidies the North currently enjoys.
It would be the ultimate irony if the Republicans in the North eventually got a vote in favour of reunification, but the South refused to have them.
It would be hilarious. However, I also think it unlikely. That majority is still unionist. The split unionist vote may well have given SF victory here, but in a straight binary referendum, I suspect that they would lose.
I agree, my late husband was from Dublin and when we visited, even at the height of the troubles, I met very few who wanted to unite Ireland except in a vague romantic way. Partly for financial reasons but mostly why import a hostile unionist population and just move all the trouble South.
Does the Brexit referendum result have an influence here? Any remainers who live in Northern Ireland might see it as a way to rejoin the EU.
There are enough, both North and South that don’t want it (including many Catholics in the North). Sure, they might raise a Guinness and say “Tiocfaidh ár lá” down the pub, but they know full well that the amount of subsidy that they receive from the English taxpayer is huge and that the Republic of Ireland simply doesn’t have the financial resources to sustain that and the EU is hardly likely to take up the burden from the English taxpayer.
The chance at Irish unification on balanced terms was lost a century ago and it hasn’t become any easier with BRExit (I say that as an ardent Brexiteer).
Even if the execrable Sinn Féin do a decent job in government and don’t further alienate the Unionists, they still won’t win a border poll because enough people on both sides fear the consequences of a reunification in which they are losers, NOT winners.
My expectation is that polarisation and mistrust will increase, not decrease.
It’s curious how the Eu (apparently) thought it would be a jolly good wheeze to split Northern Ireland off the rest of the UK. Presumably in the time honoured tradition of the EU the inclinations of the locals were unimportant compared with ‘ever greater union’?
We both know that the EU doesn’t give a flying phuq about the plebs. The reason they played the border game with the UK was because they thought they could throw a spanner in the works of BRExit.
While it didn’t prevent BRExit from taking place it’s still a bureaucratic nightmare that at some point the UK government will be forced to repudiate. To much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Brussels.
“A vote at a local election is not the same as one cast for a constitutional issue.“
Precisely so. It’s not simply that you might vote “for” something you wouldn’t otherwise; elections can be won on astonishingly low shares of the total electorate. If you can convince 30% of the people to vote for you in a General Election, for example, you’re usually looking at a landslide, but that’s obviously a humiliating defeat in a referendum. And yeah, Stormont’s even harder to read than that because of STV.
The SNP has been in power at Holyrood for fifteen years (most of that time as a minority administration), comprehensively lost its referendum eight years ago, and despite constantly dangling the prospect over our heads like the sword of Damocles, it was so bitter, divisive, and unpleasant there’s no appetite for another. I don’t really see Ulster being much different. Not least because, as JG points out, it’s even more heavily subsidised than Scotland.
When the political wing of a murdering terrorist organisation is accepted as a governing body in the UK, then I’ll know we really are doomed.
Pretty much what Peter Hitchens said.
Figures I saw today show only ~35% want to leave UK. Mot every NI RC is a nationlist
Also worth bearing in mind, SF didn’t gain any seats, DUP lost 3 seats due to switch to TUV as DUP not being hard enough on having NI Protocol binned