The Facts About Irish Unity
The Facts About Irish Unity
There has been much talk of unionist unity this week – and the prospect of some kind of accommodation between the two main unionist parties grows stronger by the day.
The irony of all this is that the main motivating factor which is driving a unionist pact is fear – fear that Sinn Fein will become the largest party in the Assembly elections of May of next year, which will mean Martin McGuinness becoming First Minister.
This is a genuine possibility and one which would cause serious consternation for proponents of the union.
And yet there has never been a time when the case for the union has been stronger. The Republic of Ireland, along with Portugal Greece and Spain is one of the so-called PIGS – the fractured economies of Europe which are so fragile they could endanger the future of the Euro.
The Dublin government has responded gamely to the challenge with a series of austerity measures designed to cut public spending Anyone who has visited the Republic recently knows just how much the country continues to suffer from the recession.
In the context of the Republic’s current economic difficulties it is inconceivable that it would welcome the prospect of Irish unity. Remove the subvention from the British Exchequer and Northern Ireland becomes a Third World country with a public sector so bloated and out of control that the prospects of it being able to balance its books are zero.
The cold hard reality is that at this juncture and for the foreseeable future Irish unity does not make any sense at all – it would mark the creation of an economic basket case.
The only way it could happen is if somebody else were to pay for it and then subsidise it: and given the parlous state of both the UK economy and of the European Union the prospect of that is also zero.
These are facts that everyone involved in political discourse on these islands needs to understand, come to terms with, and work around.
That’s why it is baffling to note unionists taking so little time to argue what is now an irrefutable case.
Ultimately the success of unionism is not so much about resolving the schism between the Ulster Unionists and the DUP, it is about taking the case for the union across the sectarian divide and to engage with those traditional nationalist voters who are, in increasing numbers, doing the maths and wanting to live their lives in their best economic interests.
There may very well be fear in some unionist quarters of Sinn Fein, but there should not be too much fear about debating the national question, as things stand this is not an argument they can possibly lose.
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