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Irish unity is inevitable

This article is more than 14 years old
Seumas Milne
In addition to the political will for unification, there is a strong economic case that can no longer be ignored

It's not hard to see why Sinn Féin wants to turn up the volume on Irish unity – or why the party threw its weight behind a packed London conference at the weekend aimed at driving the issue up the political agenda.

This month's police and justice devolution deal set the seal on a 15-year process that has brought the republican leadership into the heart of the power structure in Northern Ireland. It's already delivered far-reaching reforms of that structure, the withdrawal of troops and once unthinkable advances in civil rights and equality.

But to many of Sinn Féin's natural supporters, the central goal of Irish republicanism – the end of British rule in the north and the reunification of Ireland – looks as far away as ever. That fuels the armed dissident republican campaign, however politically marginal it looks likely to remain.

And as the Sinn Féin leader, Pat Doherty, put it to the London conference (Gerry Adams pulled out for family reasons and Martin McGuinness was grounded by Aer Lingus engineering problems), the Good Friday agreement was an "accommodation, not a settlement" and "the underlying cause of conflict persists".

Meanwhile, the collapse of the south's once-lauded Celtic tiger economy and the savage cuts imposed by the Dublin government have been seized on by unionists and others to deride the prospect of any move towards Irish unity.

Why, they ask, would northerners now want to link up with the basket case in the south, or the south take on responsibility for Britain's taxpayer subsidies to the de-industrialised north? The idea is a nonsense, Andy Pollak, director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, told the Sinn Féin-sponsored event on Saturday

But as former City economist Michael Burke argued, the economic case for reunification and independence is in fact stronger than ever. Dependence and control by Britain have been disastrous for the Northern Ireland economy, where living standards were comparable to Britain's at the time of partition and far higher than in the south. Now they are well below the British average and far less than in the south, where independence allowed trade diversification and economic development impossible under British rule. Even after the implosion of the speculative boom, median weekly earnings were still £532 in the south late last year, compared with £357 in the north and £397 in Britain.

Ireland is more than wealthy enough to fund a national health service, Burke pointed out, if only its politicians could be convinced to make their friends pay tax. And any process leading to unity would clearly require far-reaching social and economic reform on both sides of the border.

The dysfunctionality of that externally imposed partition for a modern economy, and the demographic trend towards a nationalist majority in the north were of course recurrent themes at the London gathering, along with the historic democratic and national case for independence and self-determination.

But so was Sinn Féin's insistence on the necessity of "reconciliation between Orange and Green" and the need to persuade unionists that Irish unity is in their own economic and social interest. Even after more than a decade of the peace process, it was startling to hear Doherty insist that the Orange Order, sectarian scourge of northern Catholics and nationalists for decades, is "part of who we are as a people" (did that mean we were wrong to oppose the unionist veto in the past, one republican veteran wanted to know).

Irish unity will no doubt have a different meaning in a 21st-century global economy, Ken Livingstone speculated, than when he first campaigned for dialogue with republicans at the height of the armed conflict a generation ago – let alone in the context of a possible breakup of the rest of the United Kingdom, as others suggested from the floor.

But the conviction voiced by Sinn Féin leaders and SDLP assembly member Conall McDevitt at the London conference that Irish reunification is inevitable is surely right. The crucial question on this side of the Irish sea is whether Britain will help that process or hinder it.

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