Whatever may have happened in yesterday's Northern Ireland referendum - and by the time some readers get around to reading this article its outcome may already be clear - it seems certain that the electorate in this State voted in favour of abandoning the territorial claim in Articles 2 and 3 of our 1937 Constitution. This is, therefore, an appropriate moment at which to reflect on the origin and significance of these Articles for Irish history in the latter two-thirds of the 20th century.
In 1937 Northern Ireland was still a relatively recent creation. It was regarded as temporary by most nationalists both in the North and in this State, and - although they would have been reluctant to admit it - also by many unionists, who did not become convinced that it might prove permanent until the second World War.
It is often forgotten that while Northern Ireland had acquired its own Home Rule Parliament in June 1921 it was nevertheless subsequently brought into a 32-county Irish State by the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Of course that treaty also gave the North's Home Rule Parliament the right to opt out of the new Irish State and to revert back to the United Kingdom - a right that was exercised on 7th December, 1922.
But this opt-out was not expressly stated to be permanent, and in view of the continuance of the Government of Ireland Act provision for the later creation of an all-Ireland Parliament by agreement between North and South, the departure of Northern Ireland could, perhaps, be regarded as having been potentially temporary.
In the meantime there was provision for a Council of Ireland with power over railways, fisheries, contagious animal diseases and such other matters as the two parliaments might agree upon. Under pressure from the British government, the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Sir James Craig, agreed that this council should be established within five years. But at the November 1925 conference between the British, Irish and Northern Ireland governments following the Boundary Commission debacle, the two Irish governments agreed to abandon the council in favour of a system of meetings between the two governments - meetings which never took place. It is against that now largely forgotten background that the insertion of Articles 2 and 3 into our Constitution in 1937 has to be seen.
In purely 26-county terms, these Articles had their own rationale. By asserting a claim to Northern Ireland as part of the "national territory" they assisted the process of weaning people from abstentionist republicanism into constitutional support for the Irish State.
That, indeed, was a principal purpose of the new Constitution introduced by Eamon de Valera - who paradoxically, as well as being head of the Irish government, was at the time of the enactment of the new Constitution also an abstentionist Fianna Fail member of the Northern Ireland Parliament, representing South Down.
The process of marginalising the IRA by drawing much republican support into the fold of Fianna Fail was successful - to the point where the IRA's wartime involvement with Nazi Germany failed to destabilise Irish non-belligerence or to deter de Valera's government from extensive secret co-operation with Britain. However, by 1945 these Articles could be argued to have achieved their purpose, and especially in view of the wartime hardening of unionist - and British - attitudes towards the Irish State, their effect thereafter seemed to me to be exclusively negative: they simply posed an obstacle to any possible coming together of the two parts of the island.
I have never subsequently departed from that view. It is clear that many people in this State developed a belief that these Articles strengthened the chances of reunification - a view that seems to have been based on a vague feeling that they gave us a legal claim that could at some stage be prosecuted in some judicial forum.
But the reality, as every Irish government has known, was that we never had any legal case for the enforcement of reunification, and we could never have pursued such a case before any international tribunal. That being so, it has always seemed to me that the only possible practical use to which these Articles could have been put would have been to offer a spurious justification for an invasion of Northern Ireland by the forces of this State - and that is something that no Irish government has contemplated.
But while these Articles performed no useful function, in the post-war period they proved a rallying ground for a dangerous form of irredentist nationalism, played out between our political parties as part of their domestic infighting, and in a manner that had no regard for the impact of this posturing upon the people of Northern Ireland.
This process started when de Valera lost the 1948 election and embarked on a world tour during which he made the evils of Partition his central theme. The coalition government's response to this challenge - the declaration of a republic - evoked an irrational hostility from the British Labour government, and it was only the alert opposition of our Commonwealth partners of the day that prevented the enactment by Britain of a punitive termination of free travel between our two states.
That British reaction attempt, and the accompanying abandonment of the former British position of supporting Irish unity by agreement in favour of a negatively expressed guarantee that this would not take place without the consent of the Northern Ireland Parliament, evoked a storm of protest here. The coalition Taoiseach, John A. Costello, was moved to threaten publicly to "hit Britain in its pride, pocket and prestige".
A principal architect of the ensuing anti-Partition campaign was, of course, Conor Cruise O'Brien, then a senior Foreign Affairs official and subsequently Director of the short-lived government-owned Irish News Agency. Then, and for a decade thereafter, I had the pleasure of contesting this irredentist stance not just in Ireland but in articles in papers in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, South Africa and Canada.
For two decades after 1948 the opposition parties remained firmly in the grip of Fianna Fail's irredentism, based upon the Article 2 and 3 concept of asserting a claim on Northern Ireland. And those in the IRA who were not persuaded by these constitutional provisions to "come in from the cold", and who launched campaigns against Northern Ireland in 1954 and again in 1969/70, may well have taken encouragement from what the Supreme Court later described as the "constitutional imperative" in these Articles.
Sean Lemass had a more mature view than most of his political contemporaries of Anglo-Irish relations and of the Northern Ireland issue. In June 1940 he had clearly been unhappy with the government's rejection of the British offer of Irish unity in return for an Irish declaration of war on Germany. It was he, indeed, who teased out with the British cabinet negotiator an alternative proposal for Irish unity in exchange for Ireland inviting British troops to be stationed here to assist us to repel a possible German invasion while not actually entering the war - an alternative that de Valera rejected.
When he became Taoiseach in 1959 he sought to call a halt to the futile anti-Partition campaign, dropping the insulting "Six County" appellation and writing to the editor of the Irish Press to protest against its substitution of this term for the phrase "Northern Ireland" in its report of one of his speeches.
Later, Lemass arranged the exchange of visits with Terence O'Neill, and as a backbencher after his retirement in the Constitution Committee that he had earlier established he supported a proposal to amend Article 3.
When I decided to join Fine Gael in 1964 I first secured the agreement of its leader, James Dillon, that I would remain free to oppose the claim to Irish unity without the consent of a majority in Northern Ireland - the issue upon which Fine Gael had aligned itself with Fianna Fail since at least 1948. In September 1969 I secured the party's support for a Northern Ireland policy document I had drafted which reversed this stance, firmly rejecting reunification without consent. I believe Jack Lynch shared this position, but felt unable to make it an explicit part of Fianna Fail policy. It was left to Albert Reynolds to take that step in the Downing Street Declaration in December 1993, which opened the way to the agreement reached in Belfast on Good Friday.
Given that Fianna Fail's reluctance to take this explicit step in earlier decades owed much to a concern not to weaken its capacity to prevent republican elements within its ranks from drifting to Sinn Fein, it is paradoxical that it was Sinn Fein's peace process initiative that finally led Fianna Fail to unambiguous insistence on the consent principle.
For this clear repositioning of Fianna Fail on the consent issue, and thus on the related issue of Articles 2 and 3, was of course the price that had to be paid to secure from John Major's government an equally explicit acceptance of the principle of Irish self-determination (albeit by North and South separately), which was the key to Sinn Fein's justification of the peace process to its members.
It is with great satisfaction that I welcome yesterday's vote to amend Articles 2 and 3, thus clearing the way for a constructive relationship between North and South. We cannot say that this will lead to Irish political unification: we simply do not know where it will lead. What we do know is that without this belated revision of our Constitution there could be no hope of the two parts of our island ever coming together again.
It will be for future generations in the two parts of this island to decide its future. What we have just done has simply made it possible for them to take such a decision in their own time - freely, without being burdened with the baggage of a troubled past.
