Opinion: contrary to the traditional orange and green image, 42% of Northern Irish peope identify as neither nationalist nor unionist
By Darren Litter, Queen's University Belfast
As Jonathan Powell, the UK's chief negotiator of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), has said, Brexit has harmed the 'delicate balance' in Northern Ireland by reawakening the issue of national identity. The GFA - enabled by what Prof Cathal McCall calls the 'debordering' effects of the EU's Single Market - gave rise to an environment in which the people of NI could be Irish, British or Northern Irish, or a combination therein. Even Tony Blair, the UK's prime minister at the time of the GFA, has written that without the open border created by the Single Market, "there would never have been a peace agreement".
EU-UK negotiation of the Northern Ireland Protocol - which de-facto makes NI part of the Single Market - represents recognition of this. However, it could not strike a like-for-like balance for the reason that the UK government was unwilling to make Great Britain part of any similar arrangements.
The national identity crisis anticipated by the peace brokers like Powell has most pronouncedly been seen within the Northern Ireland political framework, especially from unionism, the primary political casualties of the Protocol's quasi-GB-NI border. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has retreated from both the UK and Irish governments, effectively arguing that the NI Protocol is the product of a dishonest London, and the conniving duo of Dublin and Brussels.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today With Claire Byrne, Fine Gael TD Neale Richmond and DUP MP Sammy Wilson discuss the Northern Ireland Protocol
Sinn Féin has framed Brexit as the greatest indicator yet that NI is, as Charles Haughey once famously argued, a 'failed political entity'. Even the otherwise more moderate nationalist/unionist parties of the SDLP, and the UUP have at times adopted positions that are relatively indistinguishable from the DUP/SF axis that they have tended to view as having appropriated the peace process. The Alliance Party, on the other hand, has studiously remained removed from the constitutional question paradigm; and in the process have enjoyed remarkable showings at the 2019 Westminster and European Parliament elections.
It is no coincidence that Alliance has been the breakout success of NI politics. As much as the nationalist and unionist parties have sought to articulate politics to this effect, the people of NI do not subscribe to a constitutional endgame scenario.
While a plurality think it needs reform - an unsurprising figure, given that the agreement is 23 years old, and never purported to possess all the answers - the 2020 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (NILT) indicates that 68% of the population continue to see the GFA as the best basis from which to govern the north. This survey - the most authoritative on NI attitudes (see here for the organizers Professor Katy Hayward and Ben Rosher's useful overview) - additionally demonstrates that contrary to the traditional 'orange and green' image, the most prevalent demographic in NI is those that identify as neither nationalist nor unionist (42%).
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From RTÉ Six One News in May 2019, report on the Alliance Party's gains in Northern Ireland local elections
To be clear, Brexit has had an impact on constitutional expectations in NI. For example, there has been a 19% increase in the volume of people that believe in the likelihood of a united Ireland since 2019, but there is no indication that there is any imminence to this. The survey outlines that only 34% of people think it likely that there will be a united Ireland in 20 years, let alone some of the more short-term time frames that have been set out. This is not to mention the considerable value Northerners place on certain aspects of NI's UK status. 92% indicate that they value the NHS "a lot", and 65% express a similar sentiment regarding being part of the UK economy/having access to the subvention (£9.4 billion in 2019).
There is also the opportunity through the Protocol for NI to become an economy in its own right. Investors from Saudi Arabia - always quick to identify an emerging economic opportunity - have boosted NI's commercial property investment by 79% in the first half of 2021, with a record-breaking £87m deal for the Merchant Square office block in Belfast City Centre.
While there is evidence of a belief that the Protocol could function more effectively, unionism should be careful about its apparent bid to get rid of it. The Protocol gives NI some of the benefits of EU status, and not being in the EU is something 54% of people in NI do not value "at all" about being part of the UK.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland in 2018, a look back at the seminal moments of the Good Friday Agreement peace deal in 1998
All of this is to say that as following Senator George Mitchell's historic announcement of the GFA in 1998; the real momentum in NI remains for the politicians, in touch with the aspirations of the people, to make the society, if not the notion of NI itself, work.
Contrasting provocations over the Irish language or the Queen's 70th Jubilee celebrations, this requires - as one Ian Paisley Jr said to much applause in January 2017 - that the leaderships of DUP and SF come out of their respective ideological positions and emulate the late Dr Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness in "building a proper relationship and recognising what partnership actually means". It also demands that the SDLP and UUP lean into the modernising influence of people like Claire Hanna, Matthew O'Toole, and Robbie Butler rather than compounding the narratives of their larger counterparts. They need to chart a pro-agreement space alongside the Alliance Party, while simultaneously emphasising their own respective attributes (technical legislative solutions, the rights of Troubles victims, reasonable veterans' issues etc). By way of example, the UUP Health Minister, Robin Swann, has an astonishing 75% approval rating because he has shown integrity, competence, and a real sense of wanting to deliver in the interests of all of the people of NI during the pandemic.
The other essential aspect in the NI equation - as Simon Coveney and Julian Smith's instrumental role in the 2020 New Decade, New Approach deal illustrates - is that the UK and Irish governments maintain a robust intergovernmental approach; all the while enunciating the principle that the future of NI is for the people there to decide. This had been waning prior to Brexit, as the UK substantively moved away from the NI issue from 2010, but the deepening "British sovereigntism" of the post-Brexit period has greatly strengthened the pressures on British-Irish intergovernmentalism.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, can the US persuade Britain to honour the NI Protocol?
The UK has signalled a willingness to act unilaterally on NI - arguably in its approach to the 2016 referendum in the first instance, but more recently on the matter of a Troubles amnesty - and has increasingly departed from the precedent - through the Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob-Reese Mogg, and surprisingly the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer - that the UK does not maintain an overtly activist position towards NI remaining in the Union.
Less neutral language is something the Irish government must also be cautious about. One of Ireland's most accomplished civil servants told me that "we need to be very careful at this point in time - when the unionists are feeling that the constitutional position of Northern Ireland is under threat through the Protocol - it's not a helpful moment to then start saying 'well now let's have a border poll'; it looks like, indeed, the Protocol is the thin edge of the wedge, or the start of the slippery slope".
Less neutral language is something the Irish government must also be cautious about
He continues: "I think we need to just compartmentalise this, and say this [the Protocol] has got nothing do with the future constitutional status, that's on its own track, there is provision in the GFA for a border poll, and that may come sooner, it may come later." He further warns that it would be "totally premature" to hold such a referendum, "that it would be lost and set the whole cause back a generation".
Despite the renewed emphasis on the nationalist/unionist dichotomy - owed to, for example, the relatively isolated occurrence of rioting in April 2021 - the overall trend is a composed one and one that suggests all parties to the NI situation redouble their efforts over the peace process. Academics and policy innovators will naturally want to explore/plan for the future, but as far as the political arena, it is that singular, unifying purpose that will secure the best outcomes for the people of north; alongside a return to the general sense that the medium-to-longer term will be what it may.
Darren Litter is a PhD Candidate in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University Belfast.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
