Is Sinn Fein really serious about Unity?

The word on O’Conall Street is that the Irish government does want a border poll this side of 2020.

Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams is trailing all over the United States outlining their ‘Strategy for Unity’. Can’t tell you what the strategy is because they don’t let the press attend these public meetings and they have never published a policy paper on the matter, unlike the SDLP did in 2005.

The Shinners have also launched into a period of reflection following their poor showing in the recent local and European elections in the South. Yesterday Eoin O’Broin managed 600 words about the party’s need to regroup and renew. I respect his opinion but found it fascinating that the economy or the role of business had no part in his plan to rebuild our island and bring the people of Ireland closer together.

Maurice Hayes, also writing yesterday in the Irish Independent noted;

Oddly, in all of this, Mr Adams, whose leadership was central to the transformation of the party and its role in the North, increasingly appears to be surplus to requirements. Foreign trips to promote reunification are reminiscent of deValera when he lost office in 1948, and with the same purpose of talking to people abroad rather than the unionists at home.

Sinn Fein is a party badly needing to develop social and economic policies which will attack the problems in the South and attract support there, and also needing to manage the transfer of leadership from one generation to another.

I agree with Hayes, this is a debate which extends well beyond nationalism. For a United Ireland to become a reality, Irish nationalists will need to have convinced a significant part of the unionist community that a yes vote is not such a bad thing and that their identity, rights and economic status will not be affected in an Irish State. In other words unity will only be true when it unites people and their representatives have a lot of talking to do before they can claim to be united. The divisions are not just in Northern Ireland. There is a fault line between North and South built on seventy years of jurisdictional disparity. In the South church and state coexist in a way which has worked well for the 26 counties but would be unsustainable in a united Ireland and several generations have ignored the North, wishing it away with the coarse remark that ‘you are all the same up there’. Southerners do not understand northern nationalists and despite a constitutional claim over the territory which lasted until ‘98, bizarrely see unionists as foreigners.

Stephen King, the former UUP advisor, tells the story of when Bertie Ahern apologised to the UUP delegation after they were asked to remove their poppies before a meeting with him. That was back in the run up to 1998. Ahern was right. The poppy is precious to very many people on this island and that is something we simply need to accept. It is also means something to tens of thousands of Irish nationalists who lost their ancestors in the First World War.  To describe it as offensive is to stand there waiting to be offended. There are very many symbols, British and Irish, which will not survive in the new Ireland. I think the poppy will and so it should. But poppies won’t put money in your pocket no more than you can eat a flag.

When communities prosper they have the opportunity move on. When people’s standard of living goes up their insecurities go down. The south maybe be more postnationalist today then twenty years ago and that is partly down to its recent prosperity. The north will prosper too and with increased wealth, spread across the whole community, attitudes will change and priorities will shift. A stakeholder society will replace and dependency one.

The great opportunity for nationalism is to recognise this and move from protest to positive politics. IN the immortal words of Bill Clinton: It’s the Economy Stupid!