Hello. Welcome to Irish Passport.
Let’s do it.
Welcome to the Irish Passport.
I’m Tim McInerney.
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
We’re friends! Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi?
Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording one, two to three.
OK.
Hi, everybody.
Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Irish Passport podcast.
We had to rush to our microphones and record this special episode because of the really exciting events in the U.K. — the election, which has resulted in a hung parliament and has raised speculation that the DUP, the Northern Irish Party, may be called in to shore up a conservative government. So we’ve been flooded with questions because of the shock result about, you know, who are the DUP? So we decided to make this special episode which is about unionism.
And we’re not the only ones asking questions. Here is David McCann of the Northern Ireland blog, political blog Slugger O’Toole, with some of the questions that he was asked this morning.
Hi, I’m David McCann. I am the deputy editor of the Northern Ireland current affairs website, Slugger O’Toole. The DUP has traditionally been seen as one of Northern Ireland’s more traditionally conservative political parties. So, it is an unavowedly pro-union party. So it wants to keep Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. Some English journalist friends who are DM’ing me on Twitter and ringing me and asking me similar sorts of questions. So who is Nigel Dodds? And what’s he like? And what did the DUP stand on this? And why won’t Sinn Féin take their seats in the House of Commons? You have to remember the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party, the Conservatives don’t seriously contest in Northern Ireland. We kind of have our own political system with our own main parties who contest locally. They don’t contest across the rest of the U.K. So it has always been seen as a place apart.
That was David McCann speaking to me on the phone this morning. We had a little chat to digest the results and what they might mean for the U.K. and for Northern Ireland. Like you said, he’s been inundated by questions. So we’re going to break it down and just start from the beginning. Who’s who in this whole story?
Yeah. And for our listeners around the world or for people who may have been hiding under a rock somewhere, the U.K. just voted in what they call a hung parliament. And if you’re wondering what this says in a nutshell, it means that no one party has won enough seats to secure an overall majority in the Westminster government.
It’s a massive shock for the U.K. Conservative Party and for their leader, Theresa May. So essentially she didn’t have to call this election. She chose to. She called a snap election in a gamble, in the hopes of increasing her majority even further than she had to give her a mandate to negotiate Brexit. But now, you know, her political future is completely in question.
Right. And nobody knows yet what’s going to happen. Chances are that by the time you listen to this, something else is gonna have happened. It’s all gonna become clearer, hopefully, over the next few days. But whatever happens, it’s definitely going to have huge implications for the upcoming Brexit negotiations between the U.K. and the European Union. These negotiations will essentially outline what the U.K.’s exit from the EU is going to look like. And a lot of this election was actually built around who or what was going to be promising to get the best deal in these negotiations with Europe.
Right. So you might be asking at this point, “Aren’t I listening to the Irish passport?” Like, where does Ireland come into this whole story? Well, a lot of publishers may be trying to play it down, but Ireland will be at the very center of any Brexit scenario.
Yeah, all of this is kind of silently revolving around the infamous border question. The border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, which is an independent state, is set to become the only land border between the U.K. and the European Union once Britain leaves the EU.
Yes, so of course the Republic of Ireland is not leaving the EU. It has one of the highest approval ratings of the EU in the whole rest of the 27 remaining members. So it’s going to be a land border and it’s a politically and historically contentious one.
If you want to learn more about the border, where it came from, and how people living there have reacted to these recent developments, we urge you to go back and actually listen to our last episode, our pilot episode of the Irish Passport, which is totally dedicated to the border. But for now, we’re going to focus on this hung parliament on its significance in relation to the border.
So right now, the U.K. Conservative Party is short about 10 seats, roughly, if it wants to make a parliamentary majority. And all eyes instantly went to Northern Ireland because the Democratic unionist Party or DUP have just won 10 seats.
Right. So, it’s an obvious solution for the Tory party to enter into a coalition with the DUP.
Or some kind of arrangement, we should say, like a minority government which is just supplied votes by the DUP.
Indeed. Right. And the DUP have said that they’re up for this. And Theresa May just said, a few minutes ago actually, that she’s up for this, too. So let’s establish who are the DUP? And what do they represent?
Okay. So the DUP are a unionist Party. They’re the biggest unionist party in Northern Ireland. So that basically means they’re pro-British in their outlook generally and they’re committed to keeping Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. That puts them at odds with the other major party in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin, who want the opposite. They want Northern Ireland to be part of one united Ireland. The origins of the DUP are that it was founded by the late Reverend Ian Paisley. His son is still in politics. There’s another Ian Paisley knocking around these days, but his father was a, you know, a religious radical, and the party to this day is still quite closely linked to a number of Protestant churches and particularly the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which was founded by Paisley himself
Being a unionist Party, the DUP have traditionally been quite hostile to cooperation with the neighboring Irish Republic. The party has drawn many of its members, actually from the former Ulster Resistance paramilitary group. The Ulster Resistance Group collaborated, to give you an idea, during the conflict with the Ulster Volunteer Force and the UDA, another extremist group, which were the main pro-British terrorist groups active during the conflict. So there’s not a little touch of irony here, considering that conservatives accused Jeremy Corbyn of collaborating with Republican extremists during the campaign. The DUP, incidentally, also opposed the Good Friday Agreement, originally in 1998, and that agreement brought about the cross-community Northern Ireland Assembly. However, in the last few years, they have softened their stance a little bit.
We should say that bringing old, former paramilitary members into politics isn’t something unusual in Northern Ireland. And, you know, it’s not just the DUP that do this. So at the moment, the DUP are also the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, which like Tim said, was formed in 1998 as part of the peace process to put an end to the armed conflict. It’s a form of devolved government within the United Kingdom. So it’s designed so that the rival parties, rival factions, have to share power and they have to work together. So that means the nationalists who want Northern Ireland to leave the U.K. and join the Irish public and the unions like the DUP, have to rule together. It’s far from a perfect system and it’s not really working that well at the moment. But it has been hailed as a success, generally, in bringing more peace to the province right now.
Nobody expected it to work actually, as well as it has really, because this assembly has brought together people on a regular basis now who never would have sat at the same table before 1998. And now they do it all the time. So interestingly, I suppose it’s fair to say, Naomi, that the Assembly has also established a peculiar kind of left-right politics in Northern Ireland, righ? So the nationalists headed by Sinn Féin are mostly very left leaning, while the unionist headed by the DUP are extremely right wing, very right wing, even by U.K. standards. I mean, there are actual creationists and climate change deniers in this party.
Yeah. Having said that, interestingly, David McCann did point out that they can be quite populist and rather left wing economically, but in terms of their social policy for particularly, you know, they are pretty conservative, so they might be slightly analogies to kind of evangelical Republicans in the United States. You have, you know, some who are young earth creationists; don’t believe in climate change; think gay sex is a sin, and they are very staunchly blocking any increase in abortion access, which is almost totally banned in Northern Ireland at the moment.
Yeah, and they’ve had a pretty bad record in particular with gay rights, last year, I think it was, one of their politicians Trevor Clarke admitted that he believed only gay people could contract HIV. And a few years before that, there was a campaign in Northern Ireland led by the DUP, I believe, called “Save Ulster from Sodomy.”
Oh. Wow. Ok. Well, of course, they are also pro-Brexit. Now, this is possibly slightly a confusing stance because a hard Brexit, you know, in particular raises kind of fundamental questions to the viability of Northern Ireland. As we discussed in our last episode, but the DUP are always keen to take the most pro-British stance that there is so they stood firm with the conservatives on that one.
Right. And in some respects, some people might see Brexit as a kind of protectionism against further integration between Northern Ireland and the Republic. We might remember that the border is open between Northern Ireland and the republic, largely because of the free movement of people guaranteed by the European Union.
It’s really interesting now. The recent political upheavals, including Brexit, but not just that, the last Stormont assembly, which of course the unionist lost their majority for the first time in the history of Northern Ireland, and they’re having quite a distinct and a destabilising effect on politics in Northern Ireland. So Brexit has reignited talk about a united Ireland and it’s making Unionists and Loyalists, some of them anyway, feel a little bit vulnerable. I spoke to Sophie Long, who’s an academic at Queen’s University Belfast. She describes herself as a progressive unionist. So essentially she supports Northern Ireland being part of the U.K., but she doesn’t think it’s like the single most important thing that should dominate all politics. So as part of her academic work, she worked within the Progressive unionist Party, which is a small left-wing unionist party. And from this embedded viewpoint, she studied grassroots loyalism, that’s loyalism to Britain, and she stood herself as a candidate. I spoke to her about how loyalists feel at this moment, a kind of a moment of political change and upheaval. We spoke prior to the U.K. election, but just after the Stormont Assembly election in March, which for the first time in history, the unionist lost their majority in Stormant.
So, Sophie, can you tell me how would you explain to someone who isn’t familiar with Northern Ireland, what what are unions? And what are loyalists?
Unionists. So you have different strands of unionism. You have people who just support the continuation of the union of Northern Ireland in Great Britain. But you have like unionist identity, which can mean being a part of the Orange Order, supporting marching bands and other cultural institutions. You can be a unionist and a loyalist, but you normally can’t be a loyalist and not a unionist. So if you’re a loyalist, you’ll either be a working class unionist, or you’ll be a Unionist who is either experienced or enacted violence, or you have a more comfortable relationship with loyalist paramilitaries than Unionists would. So in general, it’s about class and violence. That’s the difference.
Can you tell me a little bit about your research and what you discovered?
Yeah, no worries. So I was embedded as a member of the PUP and working doing training for the PUP, Progressive Unionist Party, since May 2015 until just recently. So what that meant would have been working closely with a young group of kind of left-leaning PUP members running for election in May 2016 in Upper Bann, working with some of the guys up there. And then working as Director of Communications putting out press statements, sitting on the Executive, attending branch meetings, committee meetings. All that sort of stuff. Which meant that I had basically unfettered access to the political elites in the party, but also the grassroots loyalists who feel object–despised and they feel that kind of their cultural preferences are devalued, their political contributions are unrecognised; the labour market doesn’t want them. The education system telling them all these kind of things, which mean that they’ve been marginalized. So loyalists over the past 20 years have persistently argued that they are framed as deviant, apolitical, violent, retrograde, unthinking knuckle draggers. There’s evidence that they have been portrayed in those ways. And there’s evidence of some of it is warranted. So my research was really to investigate if this is true. And also who do loyalists want respect from? Because if you find out who somebody wants the respect of, you can find out about who they want to collaborate with, what their significant relationships are. And so some of the findings were basically that a bit of a generational difference in the PUP — that’s who I’ve focused on. The older generation want to repair the relationship with mainstream middle class unionism. They believe that will make them stronger. And the majority of the younger generation who would be post-ceasefire, they want loyalism to be an independent class conscious, feminist, socialist kind of movement, which rejects the kind of abusive relationships that goes on with mainstream unionism. I think that what we need to do is actually look at like the empirical problems people are facing: mental health, education, employment, physical health. All the evidence shows if you put money into that stuff — youth workers — all that kind of stuff. People’s outcomes will improve and therefore, the way we talk about the stuff might might be slightly different.
And how are the unionist and loyalist communities reacting to the Brexit vote?
In a couple of different ways. Because Brexit has triggered this talk of a united Ireland, unionist-loyalist communities are kind of retreating from like a more comfortable position and starting to sort of wonder about whether or not they’re going to be ushered into a United Ireland. I’m sure you know all the stats, but like the majority of people identify as British. Two thirds, I think, voted Brexit. So they were kind of pleased initially to get the outcome they wanted. But now that Sinn Féin seem to be politically dominant and a little bit more articulate. There’s a bit of worry there. The election result in the same way again, you know for the first time since the creation of the state, we don’t have a unionist majority. Now if you conceive of your identity in terms of “us” and “them”, that’s very, very worrying. And also, if you think about the way that nationals were treated in Northern Ireland, if you assume they’re going to do that right back to you, you’re gonna be very, very worried. So I’ve heard some people talk about a return to violence — quite openly, which I just think is, they’ll be scooped up by the spooks within days, you know. There’s no major weapons left, maybe 20 percent. So there’ll be lifted initially, but it’s almost this kind of sense of duty, like sacrifice to the cause that you give it a go anyway, even though you know…
After our chat, I decided to visit a loyalist area to speak to some of the community that Sophie and I had been discussing. So I decided to go to a Pipe Band competition in Lisburn. Pipe marching is kind of a bastion of, you know, unionist and loyalist identity. This one was hosted by the Pride of Ballymacash Marching Band. It’s operated out of the Lisburn Orange Hall, and essentially dozens of bands from all over Northern Ireland dressed in really ornate uniforms, some of them quite expensive, and carrying drums and pipes, they all gathered outside the Orange Hall and chatted. Some of them were buying chips from burger vans and waving Union Jacks, and they held a competition. So that means that the bands marched around the town of Lisburn in a route that goes through the streets, businesses, past houses, all of that. And on their route they’re judged. It’s a competition so some of them will get like higher marks and some of them will get lower and then there’s like an event and a party afterwards. So in some parts of Northern Ireland marches like this — you know, an overt and some would say quite territorial demonstration of British identity — it rankles with residents who are from the nationalist community. Not all marches like this are contentious, though. Let’s hear more from the marchers themselves.
My name is Colin Ward. I’m the drum major of Skeogh flute band. The word is taken from the Gaelic. It actually means furry thorn. And that’s where a town long, just outside Drumore, about three miles outside Drumore County Down. The band’s history goes back into the 1800s.
That’s just to describe what you’re wearing, you’ve got like a red jacket with very rich gold brocade and medals. And also you have, you’re not wearing it now, but over there you’ve got a tall bearskin hat. So could you explain a little bit about just what the uniform is?
Well this is, it’s a replica Irish Guards uniform. The bearskin is a genuine bearskin, it’s not an imitation one of synthetic fur. It’s a genuine bearskin.
Where’d you get the bears?
Well they’re, seemingly they’re taken from the brown bear. I carry a regulation sword as well, which is all part of the adornments. And the medals are medals that I have earned myself through my service for Queen and country. So I wear them on parade, when I’m on parade as well.
So what does it mean to march around the streets? What’s the significance of it?
Well, it’s part of our culture. The Protestant culture goes back hundreds of years. We’re a culture we’re very proud of, I myself am very proud indeed. We’re going to get a bit of background noise here.
Yeah, here comes the band.
Yeah. So the band is just coming up the road here now in a minute. This is the host band. And what they do is they’ll parade first. Now, whenever that host band comes in and finishes, then the rest of the bands will start to form up and they’ll gradually move off one by one.
My name’s Jim. I’m the band captain of South Belfast Young Conquerors. I’m from Donegall Pass in Belfast.
Can you tell me a little bit about the tunes that you play and what meanings they have?
Just tradition blood and thunder tunes. Tunes related to the Orange Order, things like that there you know, there are a few bands I see play tunes that are in the charts.
Is this your son?
That’s my son, yeah, he’s a drum major. He leads the band.
Really?
So he does yeah.
So how old is he?
Eight
So what’s the importance of keeping up with these traditions then?
We just feel as if we’re being stripped of absolutely everything. You know, saving it’s, it’s a big part of our tradition to keep these band parades going. A lot of people don’t want these parades, but we just see the money it brings into the economy every year, perhaps millions, upon millions. People want it to stop but we’ll not stop. So we need to keep them going.
And why do you think people don’t want them?
Just don’t want unionist loyalist bands on the streets. You understand that people have different views, but the answer is, it’s our heritage we were brought up as. You know when people don’t like that but what do you do? You know, we’ll say we’re not be going anywhere.
I’m Ken Tait. Band captain of Lagan Valley. We’ve been going from 1979. We come from a large loyalist housing estate in South Belfast. And we have about 60 members at the minute, so we have. All male. It’s gets a lot of young men and people away from the housing estates, it gets them out and about. Maybe people with the same interests as them, same tradition, stuff like that there. And I don’t know whether you know or not but the band scene where people that are in bands are always have a black… people don’t always know what goes on in them. People think that all the fellows that are in bands are all unemployed, whereas 99 percent of the fellows in our band work for a living. You couldn’t be in a band if you were unemployed because it costs that much money. Most of them are self-funding, so don’t rely on anybody for money. The likes of, we just got new flutes here. 30 — seven and a half thousand pound for the flutes. And this unifrom is a year old and cost us thirty grand, thirty thousand pound. Everyone that joins us is about 500 pound and we have thirteen of them. So we have. So there’s a lot of money involved. Everybody needs something to belong to. All the kids in the band look up to the elder guys in the band. We’re all, we’re trying to keep our tradition going because it’s under attack from all kinds of sectors. We’re bascially a working class organisations, and that’s to say middle class upper class people look down on you and think you’re just the worst of society. And I’m talking about from our own Protestant community as well, not even nationalists. Nationalists don’t even understand because they think we’re all tight in to each other, which we’re not. It’s just a whole, it’s a lifetime experience for me. Now I’m in a band since I was a wee lad like that there, I’m fifty four now, so it’s a whole lifetime experience.
The chairman of the Pride of Ballymacash, the hosting band, whose name is Barry Williamson, invited me into the Orange Hall for a chat. It was the first time I’d ever been in an Orange Hall. I have to say, I was really curious about it. So these are like the club houses of the Orange Order, which is a bastion of Protestant and pro-British identity in Northern Ireland. So it was like an ordinary community hall with a space for tables and a small kitchen. And there was a sort of a stage where you might have a band. There were also twin portraits hanging of Queen Elizabeth, the current British monarch, and also William of Orange. William of Orange was the Dutch-born, Protestant king whose victories against Catholic forces in the 17th century are still celebrated every year by the Orange Order. So let’s hear more from Barry Williamson. So can you tell me what does the flute band involve?
We parade nine months of the year. We practice eleven months of the year. We put so much time into it, it’s like a part-time job most of the time. Although sometimes it overtakes your job as well. We put that much effort into, especially when you run the band like ourselves would. It does take up a lot of time but you love so that’s why you do it. We’ve done it for years, we’ve all been in it from when we were kids. My kids are here behind you now. It’s good for the kids as well. We’ll get the kids in from a young age. There’s a lot of kids here you bring in, you take them kids off the street as well. We’re normally, you bring them in, teach them an instrument, a bit of discipline, a bit of self-respect and stuff.
And can you explain to someone who’s not familiar with the culture at all, what’s the importance of the parades to you?
The majority of parades we do would be competition parades. So the bands go out then they’re marked in different categories like there’s large bands, small bands, melody flute band. A lot of bands go out every week to be the best. Some of the bands we have here in this country are the best of what they do in the world. And there’s other bands who maybe aren’t as good, but they’re good for the community. A lot of people see the bad side of things.
A couple of the bands that I was talking to said, they told me that they felt the bands were a bit vilified.
We are. We’re vilified and marginalized to a large degree, again, the way we’re sitting talking talk to you now, a lot of time people don’t want to talk because they get put across in the wrong way. And it’s not right. We need to talk. We need to express our culture and we need for people to know what we’re about. You know, we’re not knuckle draggers. We’re out trying to do the best by our community. The way you see things portrayed poorly in the press, that’s a very small percentage. You know, you get a couple of contentious parades each year. We don’t even take part in the contentious parades ourselves. There was a couple around Belfast. Maybe further afield it would be contentious, but it’s a very, very small minority as I say.
So for you, you don’t feel there’s like a political element to it?
Well, of course it is. You know, the way Northern Ireland is, there is a political element to it.
And how about the whole Brexit debate? Did it play out in your community at all?
Not really, no. We see Brexit as a good thing, obviously. But, I know a lot of people don’t think that. But we see it as a good thing. And I’m sure the vast, vast majority people in the unionist community and in the marching bands would see it as a good thing.
I headed back down to the street again as the last bands left on their route. I had been told before visiting Lisburn that this was a good event for me to go to as someone from the Irish Republic. Because the paramilitaries who were dominant in this area are the more well-behaved establishment variety: the UDA or Ulster Defense Association. The DUP was endorsed by a group linked to the UDA during the election campaign. I wasn’t planning to chat to anybody about paramilitaries, but to my surprise, one man in the crowd brought it up spontaneously. We were chatting. Unprompted, he pointed to a passing band and said cheerfully, “We’re UDA! They’re UDF, but we’re all friends!” He was giving out leaflets to advertise another band parade. So I asked him for a quick chat. Can you tell me what, what’s the the annual, the march that you’re promoting here?
Well, this one is 30 years of age. Right. This young Andrew Mason is a young member of a band who was murdered, who went to see his young girlfriend in an area which Republicans took him away and killed him. It was 30 years ago that happened and we’re celebrating it. That’s what we’re doing. You can take that with you and you can read it and put it on your radio show or whatever. But all we’re saying is, we don’t forget. We don’t forget. This young guy was only a teenager and died for what? Because he wore a band uniform. When I hear a band play tonight, I like to think you, you’re in here, you’re not intimidated in any way. You can stand here and watch the band parade all night. The same as any Roman Catholic. If they want to come along here the night then they’re more than welcome. UDA. UVF. IRA. Sinn Fein, whatever. They are all terrorists. They’re all terrorists. I was a terrorist at once!
Really?
Yeah. And now I wakened up. I did 14 years in prison.
What was that for?
Trying to shoot somebody. Looking back now I can see myself saying, what the hell was I doing here now? What the hell was I doing then? For what? For what? For being betrayed by the British government.
Do you think the British government has betrayed you?
Yes! Yes, 100 percent!
Why?
[skipto time=26:53.980]
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They let Sinn Féin IRA into our government to tell us what to do!
That was a really interesting report to hear, actually. You know, it might be worth mentioning as well, for a lot of the people in the U.K. who are maybe a bit shocked about the extremism of this party that may be getting into the Westminster government, that this party, just like any other political party, I suppose, is a bit of a mixed bag.
Of course, you know, we can’t stereotype anybody from any community. I mean, no, humans are all the same and you get all shades and all shapes and sizes. You know, I got the sense when I was talking to to the marchers that, you know, for some of them, the whole pipe band tradition is a great opportunity to you know, drink some beer and just let off steam and even air like sectarian hostilities. But, you know, for others, it’s more like scouts. It’s more like something completely innocent, which is more about family and kids and learning music and passing on traditions. And, you know, for me, I sensed it could be both things at the same time as well. But the edge was never far away.
Sure. And we will definitely be returning to look at this issue in the future. And we’ll also be looking, of course, at the other side of the coin at the nationalist community in all its variety. And at Sinn Féin.
Absolutely.
Of course, a part of the reason why we’re not speaking very much about Sinn Féin today is because they, unlike the DUP, don’t actually take up the seats that they win in Westminster.
Right. It’s fascinating. So year after year, all constituencies elect MPs that will never take their seats, and they know they’ll never take their seats. It’s a policy called abstentionism. I heard a lot of people asking actually from the U.K. if Sinn Féin would consider giving up this policy if it meant being able to create a progressive coalition with the U.K. Labour Party and perhaps some other parties thrown in. Tim, where does this policy come from historically?
Right. Well, this abstentionism was actually one of the founding political strategies of Irish Republicans, right since the war of independence. In 1918 after a 1918 election where Sinn Féin won a resounding majority all over the island of Ireland, the constituencies that voted in Sinn Féin refused to take their seats in Westminster, which meant that more or less, the entire country refused representation in Westminster. And that started the ball rolling for Irish independence. And that tradition continued right into recent decades. The idea is that the nationalist Sinn Féin parties still don’t recognise U.K. control of Northern Ireland and instead swear allegiance to the Republic. It was a huge issue at the beginning of Northern Ireland’s history as a separated, partitioned province because little pockets of Northern Ireland would just keep essentially defecting and trying to join the Republic by practicing this nationalism of the mind.
Wow.
Yeah, and this was actually one of the reasons that gerrymandering became so common to just stop this from happening.
Gerrymandering, just to be clear. That means the manipulation of electoral boundaries to ensure a particular result, right?
Indeed. And it’s common all over the world. In fact, this is essentially exactly getting a lot of people into particular constituencies to make sure that one side of the political spectrum always has the upper hand. And this is what happened in Northern Ireland with unionism for a long time. And it was one of the main reasons for the conflict up there in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
You know, I find it quite interesting. While Sinn Féin have become increasingly a mainstream party in the Republic of Ireland, in the U.K. they’re like totally toxic. You know, like, I don’t know if you saw this during the campaign, but pictures of Jeremy Corbyn with Gerry Adams, who’s, you know, an ordinary politician almost at this stage in the Republic, were printed on the front page of newspapers like it was, you know, the smear to end all smears and will just sink his campaign.
So I suppose, you know, tabloid newspapers in particular, it’s easy to stick the word terrorist over somebody’s face and try and manipulate people in that way.
Well, the U.K. press is pretty astounding in terms of its, wearing its biases on its sleeve, I suppose. Some newspapers more than others. Actually, David McCann had something interesting to say about this. Let’s hear from him.
I do think it is important to point out Sinn Féin are an Irish Republican Party. So see all this Westminster intrigue about, oh, well, you know, should DUP maybe prop up the Tories and maybe they get ABC and D? Sinn Féin and their voters have got no interest in that whatsoever. They wouldn’t prop up a conservative government anyway, even if they were in balance of power position. They wouldn’t be seen near them.
Or any other kind of government, I wouldn’t think.
Or any other kind of government. Because the problem is, is that labour are out about 260 seats. They need every other opposition party to pretty much roll in behind them just to form a minority government and that’s just, that’s just not likely to happen. So for Sinn Féin and their base, they’re very happy to just sit back and kind of kick up their heels on this because Sinn Féin’s focus is the island of Ireland, and Sinn Fein, if you take a look at Northern Ireland’s new electoral map, hold every seat that is on the border and they will use that to maximum effect to advance their cause around the island of Ireland. That’s very much Sinn Fein’s pitch. We’ve got 23 Dáil TDs, we’ve got 27 MLA and we’ve now got seven MPs and four MEPs. So they’re going to argue that the political center of gravity should be in Ireland, not in Westminster.
Now, this brings us to the big, looming issue, which is only getting more complicated as this process goes on. And that is the possibility of a border poll.
A border poll. Yes. And of course, a border poll means, it means a referendum on whether Northern Ireland should join with Ireland and be united Ireland basically. So it’s worth saying that, you know, this is quite a well-established possibility. It’s not something radical and unprecedented, like we might say the Brexit vote. It was actually set down 20 years ago as part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. So that basically states that if a majority of voters and northern want to be part of Ireland, they can do so via referendum.
Of course, 20 years ago this seemed quite distant because the majority of people within the northern Irish border have always been unionist. But this has been changing in recent times.
Yes, there’s been this persistent shift in demographics, which means that unionists have been steadily losing their majority, bit by bit. And of course, there’s the whole new motivational factor of Brexit, which really, you know, was a game changer.
Sure. Brexit is causing this huge shake up in how people are even looking at this border poll. And from now on, it’s not necessarily all based on cultural background. So let’s hear from David McCann again one last time on this.
A border poll, or as we’ve now started calling it locally, a unity referendum, is basically a vote that can take place under the provision of the Good Friday Agreement to ask the citizens of the north to do they wish to leave the United Kingdom and unify with the south, unify with Southern Ireland. Sinn Féin have called for this. The SDLP have also called for this after the Brexit process. So Sinn Fein’s policy is that this should take place within the next five years. So by 2021, which would be Northern Ireland’s centenary yeaR. And basically does Sinn Féin’s results mean that mean that that will happen? Well, the combined forces of nationalism have up their votes. In 2015, they got about 38.5 percent of the vote in Northern Ireland. They’re now at about about 41.1 percent of the vote. So they have made a jump. The only problem for them is that unionism has also done very, very well. DUP have had a bump in results too. So that’s going to really kind of downplay any kind of call for a border poll because the DUP have opposed the border poll. The U.K. government has said they see no need for a border poll. So I don’t see anything in the immediate term. But again, the way politics is moving, Naomi, and the way things have fallen in the last 24 hours, you know, I wouldn’t say never.
Stranger things have happened, I suppose.
Stranger things have happened.
The issue of a border poll is something that I ask Sophie Long about as well. And I thought her answer was absolutely fascinating. Let’s hear what she said. And what do you think would happen if there was a vote? What do you think would happen?
A border poll? Everybody thought people wouldn’t vote for Brexit cause it was an unknown and sometimes a risky unknown as better than an unpleasant no. So I wouldn’t be confident anymore. I would have been previously. And actually that’s a lot of the work being done with loyalism at the minute hinges upon the argument that the union is safe. The union isn’t safe anymore. So it’s going to be more difficult to do that work. So yeah, you might actually end up being a united Ireland.
Really?
10 years. Maybe 30.
How would you personally feel about that?
I think there are political and legal arguments that we as loyalists can make that would protect us. So instead of just saying “no” or taking up arms, you can make arguments about cultural and social rights under the UN, all those sorts of things. A 32-county, capitalist island run by Sinn Féin, I’d be deeply uncomfortable. And, you know, they’re not really pro-women. They’re not really like pro-LGBT. Some of the stuff is quite instrumental, strategic for them. And I’ve heard some worrying things about what they intended to do with loyalists if they ever did get a united Ireland. But I think that if that’s the case, you know, there’s stuff there’s stuff we could do. So the immediate aim would be to reduce loyalist nervousness and any potential for violence. So I wouldn’t be happy in that sort of united Ireland. But a different united Ireland with rights for workers and women and all that kind of stuff, like a progressive, united Ireland. It’s just as well being in it, isn’t it? Like I could go.
Well, we’re just gonna have to wait and see what’s in store for the next few days. For now, I think it’s all we have time for, but just to remind you to listen back to our border episode and we’ll have more coming up soon.
Yeah. Our forthcoming episodes on the Irish language and on the Catholic Church will be coming soon so keep an eye out for them.
This is the Irish Passport podcast produced by me, Naomi O’Leary.
And me, Tim McInerney.
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Thanks so much for joining us.