Yes, there’s an appetite for Irish unification… but I’ve seen the reality of Northern Irish democracy
By Ruby Hegarty
As Michelle O’Neill now sits as First Minister in Stormont; Sinn Féin stands as the largest party, and the 2021 census revealed that the Protestant population is outnumbered by Catholics in Northern Ireland, it appears a united Ireland may be looming on the horizon. But for some, the fragility of Northern peace may be too great to risk.
New academic research from the University of Liverpool identified a “substantial shift” in support for Irish unification among Alliance party members, while the Belfast Telegraph reported 40% of party members would vote for reunification in the event of a referendum.
Beyond Stormont’s walls, recent polls further suggest that many young voters would vote definitively for a 32-county Republic- and with it arises a contentious question: Is partition headed for a rocky departure?
Irish reunification is “within touching distance,” according to Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald, and a referendum can be expected “in this decade” she said. It is no secret either that Michelle O’Neill holds a particular affiliation for a united Ireland, and Sinn Féin’s triumphant win in Northern Ireland only appears to solidify the growing prospect of future reunification. Yet the Republic’s rhetoric perhaps does not fall between the same lines, with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar suggesting Northern Ireland has bigger issues at hand. “The priority for any new executive in any government in any country has to be the day-to-day concerns for people,” Mr Varadkar told a press conference. The question of a united Ireland, he said, “Is not a question to answer today.”
Meanwhile UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has also expressed his desire for Sinn Féin to concentrate on “day to day” problems in Northern Ireland, instead of “constitutional change” -in which Sunak was likely alluding to O’Neill’s call for a border poll on Irish unity by 2034.
But outside of the Dáil; Westminster, or Stormont, young people in Northern Ireland have a hunger for a future devoid of a Northern border. So-called ‘peace-babies’ view the Union as no longer a tenable option, with many wanting a “return to the European Union within a united Ireland,” told 19-year-old Ellie-Jo Taylor to the Guardian. In view of young people in Northern Ireland, 25-year-old Tara Grace Connolly cited the “disastrous consequences of Brexit” and the “British government’s blatant disregard for Northern Ireland” as the raison d’être for an increased desire to leave the United Kingdom. “Why would we want to stay part of a union that fails to show basic respect to its own citizens?” she further remarked to the Guardian in October 2023.
Ellie-Jo and Tara’s opinion is widespread, too. A recent LucidTalk opinion poll from last month demonstrated that 48% of 18-24 year-olds support Irish unity.
But as a student, and a young person in Northern Ireland, I fear that political stability is a strong breath away from total collapse- and the 2022 election is precisely the reason why.
As an over-enthusiastic politics student in my first year at Queen’s, I jumped at the chance to work as a democratic observer in the May 2022 election. The day was long, but it unveiled Northern Ireland for what it is: a post-conflict society still teetering on the edge of vicious disorder.
Many polling stations were filled with outward displays of family voting; husbands telling wives who to vote for and parents filling in polling cards for their children. I was prepared for that- the last 103 years of Union have been saturated in political corruption.
What I was not prepared for was the unscrupulous behaviour of many politicians. In one polling station, the councillors running for election stood outside, visible through the glass windows, arm-to-arm with a number of men: some members of the party, others not. Before proceeding to vote, they asked everyone for identification: warning them that they now knew who they were, where they lived and what car they drove.
Outside, the conversation veered from what the men wanted to do to “Shinners” to how they might get their vote up. “Give them 50 and the vote is ours,” said a prominent Unionist councillor. Maybe it was misdirected, dull-witted banter?
“We kill all Taigs,” asserted another man.
These were not futile remarks. My partner on this day, an older man from the area, briefly, and flippantly notified me that he had taught them all how to shoot. He was an expert, and had since passed down his expertise- and his guns.
A friend of mine, also a student at Queen’s, shares similar stories of paramilitary intimidation regularly occurring in a shop she works in part-time. “Metal baseball bats are used if we don’t pay [them] protection money,” she told me. “And it happens a lot more often than you’d think, but they’re masked, so what can you do?” she said. Another time, she recalls, a boy from Fermanagh- around 13 or 14 years old, came into the shop in tears, asking for help. Across the street stood “twenty, or maybe thirty men, all dressed head to toe in black,” she said. “We [the employees] knew exactly who they were, but it happens quite a bit,” she further explained.
Stories of sectarian violence and threatening behaviour are common, and since discussions of a united Ireland have become more mainstream, many have shared fears over a potential surge in paramilitary violence.
A poll from 2021 found that 90% of loyalists and unionists believed that a referendum on Irish unity could spark a return of violence in Northern Ireland, reported the Belfast Telegraph. “I think a united Ireland sounds like a good idea, and it sounds like a good idea to me when you think about Brexit and everything,” says one Unionist student at Queen’s. “But I’d be scared that quite a lot of us would lose our identity, and for some people, that will mean they will resort to violence in order to counteract that,” they explained.
As peace-babies are witnessing the return of Northern Irish politics from years of paralysis, it is clear that some still remain pessimistic of Northern Ireland’s position in the UK. But a hunger for Irish reunification cannot be satiated without an honest assessment of the potential paramilitary response north of the border. It may be a decade away- but fears of upscaled paramilitary violence are certainly growing, and not without good reason.
Edited by Cerys Platt