Ruth Dudley Edwards: The curious incident of Irish unity and voters who showed little interest

In “Silver Blaze”, a short story about a missing horse, he is asked by Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade if there is “any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” says Holmes.

“The dog did nothing in the night-time,” responds Lestrade.

“That,” explains Homes, “was the curious incident.”

Apart from hat-tipping to a shared island and reconciled people, the dog that didn’t bark over the past few weeks was a united Ireland.

Though Mary Lou McDonald and a few other faithful colleagues kept insisting occasionally that they could hear it, everyone else seemed deaf to the occasional woof.

In its strangely brief (nine pages to Fianna Fáil’s 195, Fine Gael’s 120) manifesto, Sinn Féin had devoted a page called “Planning for Constitutional Change” to telling the southern electorate that, “The discussion on constitutional change is everywhere. Partition has failed us all.”

The document read like a wearily-agreed compromise between the party’s tunnel-visioned “strategists” in Belfast and those trying to find something the southern electorate might get excited about.

Mary Lou McDonald told us on page one that “Sinn Féin is committed to delivering on the things that matter most to workers and families: healthcare, the cost of living, housing, education, childcare.”

But there wasn’t much more on that. Just a lot of complaints about “Tory cuts”.

There was of course room for the present foreign policy obsession of the left.

Obviously no one cares about such comparatively recent persecutions as the cultural genocide of the Uyghurs in China or the removal of all women’s rights in Afghanistan (where their silencing now extends to a ban on speaking in public even to other women), but in the longest paragraph on the page “Delivering Positive Change”, terrorist-loving Sinn Féin was still focused on “support and solidarity” with “the people of Palestine” — their chums in Hamas who sometimes go a bit far.

A reunified Ireland would, of course, have no place for “sectarianism, racism, homophobia, age, or disability discrimination” and the magic route to it was via yet another of those Citizen’s Assemblies that have been so obligingly progressive.

(Some people are beginning to work out that since they are time-consuming in the extreme, they are bound to be dominated by the unemployed and political activists.)

So thin was the political food on offer that in a slightly desperate speech just a week before the election — which appeared to be aimed at the young audiences — McDonald declared that, “We now need to step up the conversation about the future of Ireland, about how we confidently manage constitutional change, and build the momentum for the achievement of Irish unity in our time.”

The Good Friday Agreement was apparently the pathway to achieving a new Ireland within the EU, with a referendum process involving “all our communities on this island”. “Seismic change” was underway. “This is the conversation of a generation, and it must be at the centre of this general election.”

It didn’t get many of them out of bed on the big day.

Even the dogs are asleep.

l Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of ‘The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions’ and 'Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice.'