Letter to the Taoiseach: Your Shared Island unit is welcome if it means no push for united Ireland, but so much has to change before any new beginning

(See below for more information on the context of this article and how Mr Brewster reaffirmed approval for its publication 36 hours before he tragically died at the age of 57)

Dear Taoiseach,

The announcement of the Shared Island Unit is welcome news for those of us who understand that its purpose is to signal that there is no wish on your part to take any step towards a united Ireland.

Evidently you understand the need to nullify the clamour from Sinn Fein’s quasi-Trumpists with tricolours.

Shunting Northern Ireland into European protectorate status doubtless serves Boris Johnson, but it is also the ideal result for you — direct influence through the Belfast Agreement and the over-arching involvement of the EU ensures that nothing unpleasant will spill over the border.

We know how your population seeks to distance itself from northern nationalists — as depressed by the beery students of Fermanagh and Tyrone as Churchill was by their dreary steeples.

Pace St Augustine, the policy is “Lord, make us united, but not yet.”

The pursuit of re-unification is akin to a broken marriage where the parties have lived apart for years.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, the husband persists in seeking a reconciliation; at some level the wife may have occasional regrets. But when the husband insists that she must come back, resume the relationship on his terms, and forget any thoughts of another relationship, and furthermore denies the history of domestic violence, he will rightly be seen as manipulative and deluded.

Who could expect her to entertain his ‘proposal’?

However, if I have misread your motives, and you have so far departed from the political sure-footedness which has characterised your career to date, permit me to remind you of some salient facts to take into consideration.

It is obvious that the current campaign for unity is merely the latest re-brand of the age-old assumption that unionists, once out-manoeuvred will then be corralled within the current structures of the Irish state.

Throw them a few painless concessions, such as a commitment to allow Orangemen to parade until they drop, and — the argument goes — the Prods will huffily accept the inevitability of their destiny.

But there is no reason to expect that an irate loyalist community would not be able to replicate the decades of disorder inflicted by a cabal of south Armagh smugglers, Belfast’s inbred IRA families and a coterie of old Marxists and bring their own disruption to the streets of Dublin.

The only way to prevent this outcome is to ensure that this outcome can be avoided is to share the pain equally, and that will involve toppling significant national totems.

A few pointers would help you here.

That flag will have to go — the joke that the orange tradition has equality has never had any currency — otherwise you would have seized on that perfect fusion of British and Irish in the name Londonderry and embraced it as your own.

Likewise, any national anthem which glorifies the acts of those who perpetrated Dunmanway and Altnaveigh on the British-Irish (or, as the anthem styles us, the ‘Saxon foe’), is unsustainable.

The necessary symbolic gestures towards the British-Irish tradition will be painless by comparison — re-joining the Commonwealth presents few difficulties, but restoring other items of British constitutional furniture, such as the Order of St Patrick, (the flag of which you will find probably the least controversial option) might prove challenging.

Regular Royal visits will be disconcertingly popular.

Inconveniently, many of the national heroes of your country have blood of Irishmen on their hands — Michael Collins and Kevin Barry being the most obvious.

State veneration of them is as unacceptable as the Confederate statuary in the United States is to the African American population.

Neutral names must be found for state buildings and roads which presently commemorate them.

The century of anti-British hostility will have to be formally rejected.

We Irish are good at summarising seismic events in understatement — ‘the Troubles’ being a case in point.

It should not be too taxing to use those linguistic skills to devise a suitable term for your secession from the United Kingdom — in the spirit of helpfulness I would suggest ‘the Aberration’.

A first step should be a public recognition of Fianna Fail’s role in the arming of the IRA in 1968; another a recognition that the persecution of the British-Irish population in 1919-1922 was an act of national shame, formally recognised as such, and a national apology offered.

A memorial for the Royal Irish Constabulary will be erected.

Universities can play their part, with faculties of British-Irish studies, which you will fund.

Ulster-Scots regions will receive equal funding with the Gaeltacht.

Do I think that there is sufficient imagination and generosity to adopt these proposals? Not for a minute.

I suspect the offer of the Twelfth remaining a holiday, and a couple of stamps featuring Carson and Craig, would be our lot.

But any new beginning would have to horrify those pushing for a united Ireland as much as those being asked to leave behind the country of their birth, or it would be worthless — as I feel sure your Shared Island Unit will quickly recognise.

• David Brewster, who died on January 20 days after his 57th birthday, was a lawyer, author and senior Orangeman. A former Ulster Unionist party officer and member of 1998 talks team, he broke with party over the Belfast Agreement. Mr Brewster described himself as “a thran Ulster Scot”.

He submitted this open letter to Micheal Martin to us in late November. We asked him to send a photograph of himself, and he sent the picture above. At that time our opinion pages were busy with material on a range of subjects such as Brexit. On Monday January 18 we contacted him by email to say we might still want to publish the article in the coming weeks and to ask him if he had any objection to it being used more than a month after he sent it. He replied in the evening saying: “Not at all”.

Little more than 36 hours later, on Wednesday morning, Mr Brewster died in his Limavady office.

——— ———

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our advertisers — and consequently the revenue we receive — we are more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription.

Subscribe to newsletter.co.uk and enjoy unlimited access to the best Northern Ireland and UK news and information online and on our app. With a digital subscription, you can read more than 5 articles, see fewer ads, enjoy faster load times, and get access to exclusive newsletters and content. Visit https://www.newsletter.co.uk/subscriptions now to sign up.

Our journalism costs money and we rely on advertising, print and digital revenues to help to support them. By supporting us, we are able to support you in providing trusted, fact-checked content for this website.

Alistair Bushe

Editor