Ben Lowry: ​We keep hearing about unionism's big problems but nationalism has failed too

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​The former prime minister John Major called on London to issue its criteria for calling a border poll. The former Alliance Party leader Lord Alderdice said we are moving towards joint UK-Irish authority. The former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams issued an ostensibly friendly message to unionists to be involved in building a New Ireland, but was a veiled warning that they face a much worse united Ireland if they decline to play such a role. And Prof Brendan O’Leary, an academic who has done research on the mechanics of an all Ireland, said such an outcome was nearer than it had been in Northern Ireland’s history.

Sir John, who as PM often resisted Irish nationalist pressure, told an Irish Embassy event in London nine days ago that the exact terms for calling a border poll should be set out. He is not calling for a poll but even so I think his call alarmingly misguided, for two reasons.

First, the grounds on which a border poll must be called are already explicit. The Belfast Agreement says: “... the Secretary of State shall exercise the power [to call a border poll] if at any time it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should [form part of a] a united Ireland”.

Second, the UK has, in making such a commitment, conceded far too much. Many unionists saw such a concession in the context of nationalist Ireland accepting that the people of Northern Ireland would decide the fate of the province, including the possibility that NI might stay in the UK forever. But major nation states do not do that with their territory. France, Spain, the US etc do not let a region to decide alone if it can go. They insist it is a matter for the whole country.

There was no safeguard put into the deal, such as that half the electorate (not just those who voted) would have to endorse such an outcome before it can happen. Instead a vote of 50% plus one is suffice for NI (or Scotland) to go. Then, if a poll is held and the vote is to stay in the UK, it cannot be held again more than every seven years but this is likely to mean – in effect – a destabilising poll every seven years, suiting those who want NI to fail.

And if any one of these repeated referendums votes for an all Ireland, it is irreversible .There is no prospect of nationalist Ireland being as generous in return as the UK is being, and saying that in future Northern Ireland can vote to go back to the UK. Thus, extraordinarily, the only power the UK has in the matter is whether or not to hold a poll. I do not agree with unionists who say we can row back from the 1998 failure to narrow the grounds for an NI exit, but Britain must hold on tightly to the power it has re calling a poll, and not concede another scrap on it.

Lord Alderdice wrote: “…in the absence of [Stormont] the inevitable trajectory is towards de facto joint authority … the results of this election suggest that the pace of that trajectory has quickened markedly ...”

This is troubling talk from the former Alliance leader, who as recently as 2017 was sympathetic to unionist criticism of EU demands that there be no change at all at the Irish land border. Far from talking with apparent approval about joint authority, he wrote then on Facebook: “We stopped having to have security checkpoints [at the border] because the IRA stopped killing people. Why is it that the UK government which has real responsibilities and interests must be non-partisan but the Irish government which has interests but little responsibility outside its borders is able to be as partisan on the North as it wishes?”

Meanwhile, Professor O'Leary said he understood why unionists did not want to give legitimacy to talk of building a ‘New Ireland’. He said if he was advising unionists he would tell them not to do so.

And that is my own advice. Despite the succour an ex Tory PM and ex Alliance leader have given to Sinn Fein’s push for constitutional change, unionists should dismiss the idea of an inexorable move towards an all Ireland. They should ignore sectarian taunting about demographic change and point out that Protestants, far from being declining Neanderthals, were into secularism decades before Catholics. Weekly church attendance among Anglicans/Presbyterians was already under 50% in 1968 while Catholics were still at 95%. The latter community has mostly attended Catholic schools while Protestants attend state schools that are largely only nominally Protestant and often integrated in ethos. This helps explain why Protestant census numbers have fallen faster than Catholic and why the unionist vote too. But the total nationalist vote, just under 40% of votes in the 1998 Stormont election, is now just over 40%, a quarter century later.

Unionism has profound problems. But nationalism has failed abjectly to persuade anyone who wasn’t brought up Ulster Catholic of a ‘New Ireland’.

• Ben Lowry {@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor

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