If we really want a united Ireland, are we ready to form one recognising the Britishness of a large part of the population? asks Derek McDowell
In recent months it has become evident that a battle for ownership of Irish nationalism has been joined. Fianna Fáil has announced a number of measures apparently aimed at reclaiming the State's nationalist heritage from Sinn Féin. The word "unity" now competes with the term "republican" for pride of place on its literature. Even the Progressive Democrats, through the personage of my namesake, are at it too.
I suppose this need not to cede "republicanism" to Sinn Féin is understandable. My republicanism has been more 1798 than 1916. But undoubtedly Sinn Féin has made particular attempts in recent months to lay a claim for ownership of the State's republican tradition - the "make partition history" campaign and Dáil motions calling for a Green Paper on Irish unity are evidence of that.
Such a debate would be interesting for a particular reason. Primarily, because it is my experience that it is those that feel most passionately about Irish unity who are often the most reluctant to contemplate the kind of measures that might constitute progress towards it.
Most people in the South pay lip-service to the notion of a united Ireland but very few of us have given serious thought as to how it might be achieved and what the result might look like. By default then, we are inclined to think of unity primarily as an exercise in "greening the North".
But at the core of any serious debate in the Republic are a number of key questions. Are we really serious about a united Ireland or is it just a totem pole? What are we willing to do to persuade unionists to join us in creating a new Ireland? What would a new Ireland look like? Are we willing to risk our largely comfortable existence in order to bring it about?
Take a simple example. Ireland's Call is an explicit recognition by the IRFU that its team is an all-Ireland team and that many of those who play rugby in the North are Protestant and unionist. It has slowly been accepted as a national song, though I know friends of mine who still balk at hearing the song being played as the national anthem when the Irish rugby team plays away.
Yet during the recent debates on the use of Croke Park by other codes, I recall one delegate saying he could support the motion as long as only the national anthem could be played in the stadium. Which attitude, that of the IRFU or the GAA delegate, is more likely to be a building block to "unity"?
That is not to be critical of the GAA for that attitude is inherent in many of us, and understandably so because our independence and statehood were hard won.
In the mid-1990s I was a member of an all-party committee of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, which spent a lot of time looking at the barriers to unity and reconciliation. It was the first time that I personally had done any thinking outside the box on the issue and it taught me a lot.
The committee dealt in turn with issues such as church-state relations, education, health, symbols, social legislation and a host of other issues.
The idea was to take a self-conscious look at society in the Republic and see how it could be changed to make it more palatable for unionists.
Those of us on the liberal left were looking to put together a blueprint for a secular republic, French style, where there would be separation of church and state, good public services and a genuinely republican concept of shared citizenship. In short, things we'd like to see anyway.
But on reflection, we were missing the point. Most unionists will continue to be hostile to the notion of a united Ireland no matter how secular, rich, liberal or post-Catholic the Republic becomes. They don't want to be part of a united Ireland because almost all of them regard themselves as British.
And in truth there is simply no prospect that unionists will wake up tomorrow morning or the morning after that and decide that they aren't British after all. There is no precedent in Europe for people giving up their sense of identity. By pretending that it might, even subconsciously, we are doing a disservice to the goal of a united Ireland.
It follows then that any "united" Ireland must be put together in the knowledge that it will contain within it a large minority who think of themselves as British.
So the question is what, if anything are we prepared to do to acknowledge the Britishness of so many of our people.
We could do it by creating a Belgium, in effect two separate states with an overarching structure holding the two together. The Northern state could continue to maintain links to Britain while the Southern state would not.
Alternatively we could look to reinstate links between the unitary state and Britain. We could, for example, rejoin the Commonwealth or allow our citizens to receive British honours. Measures such as these are surely the bare minimum of what would be required to command the loyalty of Northern Protestants. That will be difficult for many of us to accept, me included.
Personally, I confess to occasional doubts as to whether it is worth it. I'm not entirely sure that I want to redefine my identity to create an all-Ireland state which is some way British. We may owe it to Northern nationalists to give it a go, but I suspect many of them would be even less inclined to try.
But one thing I am clear about. I have no interest whatever in creating a unitary state with a discontented, destabilising and potentially violent minority in the north-eastern corner.
In short, I believe we should say to unionists:
Come, let us create a common future, not to a Southern design, but something to which we can all subscribe, something which will reflect our common past, British and Irish and a mix of both. Let's do it because it makes sense for you and for us. Let's discuss it knowing that we have all signed up to the principle of consent.
That's the scale of the task ahead. The question we need to ask ourselves is are we up for it. And our first responsibility if we are serious about it, and this is a particular challenge for republicans of all hues, will be to stop pretending that the challenge is not as far-reaching and fundamental as it is.
Derek McDowell is a Labour Party member of the Seanad