Alex Kane: The truth is the vast majority of Irish people don’t see unity as a priority

In Brian Feeney’s column last Friday, he was criticising Simon Harris and Micheál Martin for failing to plan for what he described as the ‘constitutional imperative’ of Irish unity.

That imperative, he argued, is set out in Article 3 of Bunreacht na hÉireann: “It is the firm will of the Irish Nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by a peaceful means with a consent of the majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island.”

Now then, Brian, you and I are both writers, but I have to tell you that Article 3 does not strike me as an imperative.

It’s the sort of happy-clappy, fuzzy, all-over-the-place linguistic fluff that press officers and speech writers (of which I have been both) use to please their bosses and secure a headline.

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The sort of language deployed in peace process agreements because it’s intended not to frighten the horses too much on your opponents’ side of the fence.

Both the Irish government and Sinn Féin needed something to get them across the finishing line without pushing Trimble too far, and Article 3 was part of that something.

Indeed, so fuzzy is Article 3 that it actually facilitates what Brian describes as Harris’s gibberish, enabling a ‘slipperiness in meaning’ approach to what you clearly think is a constitutional imperative.

Surely, if it were a set-in-stone imperative, then Harris and Martin wouldn’t be able to trot out their glib responses.

Also, wouldn’t they be coming under enormous political/electoral pressure to do something about it if their voting bases viewed it as an imperative?

Isn’t the reality that the vast majority of the Irish, in both jurisdictions, don’t wake up every morning and wonder how the constitutional imperative is progressing?

If truth be known, most of them probably aren’t even aware of Article 3 and, even if they were, wouldn’t interpret it as anywhere near the top of the government’s to do list.

If either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael believed their own bases and a broader electorate – including non-voters – viewed unity as an imperative, then they would be prioritising it. If unity was some sort of priority, let alone an imperative, then we would surely know about it by now.

But let me come at this from another angle and accept that Article 3 is an imperative.

If it is, then why hasn’t any Irish government since 1998 pushed a British government to facilitate a border poll?

More important perhaps, why has no Irish government pushed a British government to even set out the terms and conditions under which a British Secretary of State – the person defined as responsible for so doing in the 1998 agreement/act – would or could call a border poll?

Or, putting all of that another way, why are successive Irish governments deliberately choosing to ignore a constitutional imperative?

The constitutional guarantee for Northern Ireland – which unionists have clung to since 1921 – is that it remains part of the UK until such times as a majority of its electorate decides otherwise.

Our version of a constitutional imperative, if you like. But most unionists would share the view that successive British governments have been pretty slippery in how they have interpreted that guarantee.

Indeed, most unionists probably believe that those successive British governments have done the exact opposite and instead have chosen to ignore it altogether.

Which leaves us with a bizarre little conundrum. Irish governments, according to Brian, are ignoring a constitutional imperative to push for unity; while British governments, according to me, are ignoring the constitutional imperative to respect the pro-union views of a majority here.

And maybe it’s that very conundrum which encourages both governments to avoid what we might regard as constitutional imperatives. They don’t want to rock any boats.

The Irish don’t want to push unity in case it angers unionism/loyalism to the point of rejecting the Good Friday Agreement institutions, and the British don’t want to push the constitutional status quo in case it angers nationalism/republicanism to the same point.

Somewhere in the background I can now hear the miaowing of the constitutional equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat.

We have forms of words which both are, and at the same time aren’t, constitutional imperatives.

So, as ever, politics in Ireland finds itself in a seemingly impussyible situation.

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