Holding a referendum on Irish unity in the near future would be highly irresponsible and could result in nationalists and republicans voting against it, due to the fact that the necessary preparatory work has not been done, former taoiseach Bertie Ahern has warned.
“To have a referendum on the Border would be highly irresponsible at this time . . . even people who are totally republican, like I am, people who are totally nationalistic and want to see a new Ireland, they would vote no,” said Mr Ahern.
Speaking in a Questions and Answers session with Irish Times columnist, Stephen Collins at the Daniel O’Connell School in Cahersiveen, Co Kerry, Mr Ahern outlined some of the conditions needed for a Border poll, as set out in the Good Friday Agreement which he helped negotiate in 1998.
He said one of the provisos for a Border poll is a long period of stability in Northern Ireland where the political institutions have operated without interruption but that has not been the case with Sinn Féin collapsing the Stormont executive from 2017 until 2020 and the DUP bringing it down last year. .
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“You can imagine having a Border poll and I was an advocate of the Border poll and you would ask me the questions – how me how are we going to integrate An Garda Síochána and the PSNI, how are we going to amalgamate our local authorities, how are we going to put the NHS into the HSE.”
Mr Ahern said he couldn’t answer any of those questions because the necessary preparatory work has not been done.
He said that a huge amount of groundwork needs to be done and, while he believed this was possible, somebody has to actually work the technicalities of how a new agreed Ireland would actually work in areas such as health, education, policing, taxation and other elements of daily life.
He said meetings on the issue were being held at the Royal Irish Academy while Dublin City University was also involved in a project with Queen’s University Belfast looking at how a new and agreed Ireland might be financed. But it would be some years before that research yields results.
“When I am asked, when will a referendum be held, I continually say it will be towards the end of this decade – people who call for a Border poll, to be honest, are being mischievous because they know you can’t have that [immediately].”
Mr Ahern said that by pointing out the difficulties in holding a poll on Irish unity within the next year or two, he thought he had “even helped get Sinn Féin off that hook because they’ve stopped looking for a poll next week” but he cautioned about the importance of using language in any future debate.
He said he preferred to use the terms “shared Ireland” or “agreed Ireland” or “new Ireland” rather than “united Ireland”, which he felt was seen by unionists as antagonistic and made harder the challenge of persuading them to join with the Republic in a new, agreed political entity.
“But that isn’t easy because they believe that even to go to a meeting about an agreed Ireland, they are in some way accepting the status quo won’t maintain – I’ve had this debate with Peter Robinson and others, and they won’t go on to a platform because they feel that is giving ground.”
Mr Ahern said he meets regularly with loyalists, and he has found them open to the concept that some day the constitutional position of Northern Ireland could be changed but that would require a lot of hard work by the Irish Government to persuade them of the merits of change.
“That’s going to be hard – they don’t see themselves as loyal to No 10, they are loyal to the monarchy. They have that ingrained thing that they are British and that the flag symbolises their Britishness. They look to the king, and they respected the queen for all her life,” he said.
“They would like to get on with the South but the idea of being taken over or amalgamated is something they would go back to arms on. I do believe that over a sustained period, if we can get trust, confidence and reconciliation and explain the issues, you can work towards an agreed Ireland.”
Asked what he thought unionists who voted for the Belfast Agreement thought they were voting for and whether they felt that the prospect of a united Ireland was something that was far into the future, Mr Ahern said he didn’t think they were thinking too far beyond the immediate.
“I think unionists who supported the agreement probably believed they were voting for peace, for new institutions. They were voting for difficult things that they didn’t like, like the reform of policing and demilitarisation of all the Border posts and all of the military bases that were around the North.
“I don’t think too many of them went out in 1998 on the basis that in the short term there would be a new Ireland – that wasn’t [what] they were voting, more for peace. But I have to tell you there are a lot of ordinary unionist people who say ‘we will participate in the debate and see where it goes’.
“One thing I’ve learned about unionist thinking – and you probably know this yourselves – if you want unionists to move or you want unionists to come with you, the one thing you don’t do is go on television telling them why they are wrong not to do it. It just doesn’t work with them.
“If you keep saying to them ‘we’re going to have a Border poll and you’re going to be in a united Ireland’, you just get their back up and you bring out the worst in them and if you want to convince them, you have to deal with the arguments,
“If you say to a unionist, ‘Do you like the cancer service that we are doing now, the way we are working North and South?’, or deal with epilepsy on an all-Ireland basis, in education, universities aren’t that far apart, North and South, so we go out and convince them how we can do it.
“You suggest bringing the PSNI and the Garda Síochána together and they say ‘How would you do that?’ and you say ‘Isn’t there one of yours already in charge of An Garda Siochána’ so that would be handy enough. So you can deal with the issues but if you ram it down their neck, Ulster says no.”
