Ben Lowry: A New Ireland? I would actually prefer the old one

It has been a regular point of discussion on the BBC, particularly on Radio Ulster Talkback and on the View.

The idea that a supposed an all Ireland state is imminent has been given weight by other unionists or former unionists, one of whom is the founding members of the DUP, Wallace Thompson.

There is an obvious point to be made in response to that, which is that a range of different types of polling have shown stubbornly high support among people in Northern Ireland for staying in the UK, even though the odd survey on the matter has found opinion to be evenly split.

This obvious point is of particular importance because the UK has essentially no defences against losing a major part of its territory, NI, apart from the discretion of a secretary of state to point out that polls do not show a demand for constitutional change (and remember that republicans and their many helpers, indeed many politicians in the centre ground, have tried to remove that discretion by forcing the UK into a binding legal response to polling data).

But there is another important point with regard to all these claims of support for an all Ireland, that I have not seen unionist supporters of such change address, which is this: is it a ‘new’ Ireland at all?

I pose that question because I have begun to say in recent years that I would much prefer the old Ireland to the new one.

Before I explain my reasoning on that, let me make clear that I am not in this article writing specifically about the legal verdict of the jury yesterday in Dublin, in which they decided that Gerry Adams had been defamed in relation to an anonymous suggestion that he had a role in the murder of the IRA informer Denis Donaldson.

I am referring to a much wider rehabilitation of republicans south of the border, that chimes with an increasing greening of thought south of the border.

My late father, who lived happily in Dublin as a young physicist in the 1950s, used to talk about how radically Ireland had changed from those days. He said Home Rule really had turned into Rome Rule at that time, and that John Charles McQuaid, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, still had great sway in that society. It was a world away, he pointed out, from the Dublin that he regularly visited in the 2000s, right up until past lockdown indeed.

This is obviously true and for a while, 15 or 20 years ago, I though that the transformation of the Republic meant that the significance of the border would begin to disappear.

But something that I did not foresee then began to happen.

Ireland became in some respects more anglophobic than I remember it (although I do not seek to downplay the anglophobia that prevailed during the Troubles, such as the stubborn extradition refusals of IRA terrorists during that time). In one sense, you might say that such anglophobia is more harmless in a time of peace, given that it is only manifest in things such as social media platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter), and not expressed via the burning down of the British embassy in 1972 (after the appalling Bloody Sunday killings) or the murder of Christopher Ewart-Biggs in 1976.

Even so, the more recent forms of anglophobia have been striking.

It exploded after Brexit in 2016, as if that was (as Irish nationalists say) a sign of British imperial arrogance. I often point out that all of the nations on the fringe of Europe, going anticlockwise from Finland (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Scotland and indeed the Republic of Ireland) are, or at some point have been, eurosceptic. They all have movements that advocate leaving the EU or indeed have successfully kept their country out of it. Yet if the UK, the only one of those countries easily big enough to be able to survive outside the EU, actually takes that step then it is depicted, above all by the Irish, as proof of a longing for lost empire and greatness.

Anglophobia was apparent during covid too, when there was a lot of moralising over supposed British incompetence in response to the pandemic in contrast to Ireland’s allegedly superior handling of it all.

And it is apparent above all in the rehabilitation of the IRA.

The chant Ooh Ah up the Ra, which has swept the island and crops up in all sorts of situations, is a harmeless one, we are assured.

The Kneecap use of a republican balaclava is all a big joke, we are also told. It is not the same, or treated the same, as it would be if a loyalist rap band used a black UVF balaclava in supposed jest (ie treated with total contempt).

Meanwhile, polls show that most Irish voters would not even agree to changing their flag, changing the Irish anthem or even joining that friendly association of nations, the Commonwealth, if it meant a reassuring gesture to northerners considering an all Ireland. Note that countries that suffered codified racial discrimination have joined the Commonwealth, but Ireland, which was a fully representative part of the UK, is ever more hostile to such a move.

The academic Prof John Wilson Foster, who is from NI and has lived and worked for decades in Canada, says that Ireland is becoming like Quebec. As it loses it Catholicism it is becoming ever more nationalistic.

So I would take the old Ireland over the new one, which repudiated IRA terrorism almost completely. Support for Sinn Fein was derisory from the early 1980s until after the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

We will continue at the News Letter to cover the outrage of legacy, and how the story has turned against a UK state that prevented civil war in the face of determined paramilitary murder and mayhem.

• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor​​