Stuart Carroll is a dual British-Irish national and expert in the Good Friday Agreement having covered UK and Irish politics for over 23 years. He is a former cabinet member for adult social care, health and children services and former member of the UK Vaccines Taskforce. He currently chairs the Conservative Health Policy Forum.
Donald Trump has an admirable ability to reduce complicated political questions to simple propositions.
Sometimes that is 47th President’s genius. On Ireland, it is his mistake.
He has said he would “love” to see Ireland unified and suggested that, if it is going to happen eventually, it “may as well happen now”. There is something wonderfully Trumpian about this. There is Northern Ireland. There is Ireland. Put them together. Problem solved. Except Northern Ireland is not a property transaction, and the border is not an inconvenient wall between two adjoining golf courses.
I say this as someone who is both Irish and British. I hold both nationalities and have a personal attachment and family history in both countries. More importantly for the practical argument, during my time in government I worked on these questions from inside the machinery of state, including through my roles on the Vaccines Taskforce and advising the Cabinet Office, where I contributed to work that ultimately produced the Windsor Framework. We spent disproportionate and painful time dealing with the Northern Irish Protocol with major opportunity costs. That experience reinforced something often missing from discussions about Irish unity: apparently simple propositions involving Northern Ireland become extraordinarily complicated when somebody actually has to make them work.
Trump’s fundamental mistake is confusing aspiration with inevitability. Many people in the Republic instinctively favour a united Ireland. But asking whether somebody likes the of reunification is very different from asking whether they are prepared to pay for it. The serious question is not whether somebody in Dublin, Cork or Galway would enjoy seeing a united Ireland on the map. It is whether they would accept the taxation, spending choices and institutional upheaval necessary to make it happen. When recently in Mulranny on holiday, I did my own Les Dennis, with a pint of Beamish in hand, and asked the proverbial 100 people their thoughts on Irish reunification. Virtually everyone replied saying nice idea but too expensive. Top answer. And Irish people know the price of a good or bad deal.
Estimates of the fiscal consequences vary enormously, with figures discussed in Irish politics ranging from roughly €3 billion to €20 billion annually depending upon the assumptions used. That is a lot of loot for a small country of 5.5 million and with a net government debt of around €138 billion. Moreover, nobody can responsibly pretend to know the precise number because nobody yet knows what reunification would mean. What happens to Northern Ireland’s public-sector employment, pensions and welfare? Which tax system applies? What happens to the NHS? What happens to schools, policing and the civil service? Which services converge upwards, which downwards, and who pays during the transition? What happens to defence? These are not details to be settled after a referendum. They are central to what people would actually be voting for.
This is why it is worth watching Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael rather than merely listening to Sinn Féin. Ireland’s traditional parties of government hardly need lessons in Irish nationalism. Fine Gael’s full name is, after all, Fine Gael – The United Ireland Party. Yet both understand that governing involves finance departments, hospitals, housing budgets and taxpayers. The closer politicians get to responsibility for paying for reunification, the less useful romantic slogans become. “We ourselves” sounds great after a few points of the Black Stuff, but less appealing the following morning. When I speak to politicians in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, romance is rarely confused with reality.
Then there is the small matter of the people who live in Northern Ireland. There is currently no demonstrated majority there for reunification. Demographics are not destiny. Catholics do not automatically vote nationalist, Protestants do not automatically vote unionist, and younger voters may care considerably more about mortgages, salaries, healthcare and pensions than politicians obsessed with constitutional identity imagine. Just look at that last Stormont elections. The voters who eventually determine Northern Ireland’s future may be neither committed republicans nor traditional unionists, but pragmatic people asking one devastatingly simple question: will my family actually be better off?
There is another question rarely confronted seriously enough: united into what? Reunification is usually imagined as Northern Ireland simply joining the existing Republic. But persuading hundreds of thousands of people with a deeply British identity to participate willingly in a new state may require the Republic itself to change. What happens to the flag and anthem? Does Stormont survive? Would the settlement be federal or devolved? What constitutional guarantees would protect British identity? Reunification might therefore be less an enlargement of today’s Republic than the creation of a new country. Voters in the South would have to decide whether they want that too.
And all of this is before the Good Friday Agreement. This is where Trump’s “may as well happen now” formulation really falls apart. The genius of the Agreement was not that it finally answered whether Northern Ireland was British or Irish. It recognised that reasonable people profoundly disagreed and replaced coercion with consent. Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom while that is the democratic wish of its people; if that preference changes, the constitutional position can change with it. Washington does not decide. London cannot simply decide. Dublin cannot simply decide. The people do.
Having worked around the practical consequences of the Northern Ireland settlement during government, I would be extremely wary of anyone treating these arrangements as constitutional paperwork that can be tidied up afterwards. The Windsor Framework demonstrates how technically difficult it can be to reconcile Northern Ireland’s place in the UK, an open land border, the EU single market and the political commitments flowing from the peace settlement. If moving sausages and parcels can require years of negotiation between London, Belfast, Dublin and Brussels, imagine changing sovereignty itself.
But Unionists should not congratulate themselves too quickly. Trump is wrong to describe Irish unity as inevitable, but the Union is not ineluctable either. It never has been. The Union created in 1707 with Scotland was a political construction, not a law of nature. Even when Bonnie Prince Charlie got savaged at the Battle of Culloden – and misplaced his backbone in exile to drink Bouchlet in France – most Scots just accepted the pragmatic reality. The settlement that created Northern Ireland in 1921 was born from another period of profound constitutional change. Wales’s place within the United Kingdom cannot simply be taken for granted either. Scotland has already come within ten percentage points of leaving it. Political unions endure because successive generations decide that they remain worthwhile, not because history has placed them beyond challenge.
That should be the wake-up call for Unionism. Yes, the recent gathering of nationalist First Ministers was blatantly opportunistic, but far too often the Unionist case amounts to pointing at the risks of separation and saying “no”. That is insufficient and vacuous. To quote Roy Keane, be better and do your job. Yes across the Devolved Nations, people have not necessarily voted for nationalism, but rather voted against mainstream parties who have domestically failed. In an increasingly uncertain and expensive world, Unionists need to raise their game and prove the value of the Union. Show what 70 million people sharing economic, diplomatic, defence and fiscal capacity can accomplish that four smaller states could not achieve as effectively alone. Demonstrate the value of a common currency, integrated markets, fiscal transfers, shared defence, global diplomatic reach, energy security, research institutions and the ability to absorb shocks collectively rather than separately.
Moreover, make that argument in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, not merely Westminster. A Union that appears to mean England occasionally reminding the other nations how much money they receive will eventually fail. A confident Union should be a partnership in which Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England can identify tangible advantages from belonging to something larger than themselves. In an era of war in Europe, enormous technological investment, ageing populations, expensive energy and intensifying competition between great powers, scale matters again.
Yes, Ireland could eventually unite. If a majority in Northern Ireland freely chooses that future and the people of the Republic agree to the corresponding settlement, Britain should honour the result. That is the bargain. But consent works both ways. It cannot mean respecting Northern Ireland’s wishes only once Northern Ireland produces the answer nationalists want.
Trump is therefore wrong because Irish unity is not inevitable. Yet Unionists would be equally wrong to assume the United Kingdom is ineluctable. Neither 1707 nor 1921 wrote eternity into the constitution. Neither does the present settlement in Wales. Unions survive because people believe they work.
The task for modern Unionism is therefore not simply to preserve the Union. It is to demonstrate why, in an uncertain, dangerous and increasingly expensive world, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are stronger, safer and more prosperous together. The future of the United Kingdom will ultimately rest on the same principle that rescued Northern Ireland from its past. Consent.
And consent has to be earned.