The Tánaiste Simon Harris visited Belfast on Tuesday and tried to brush aside the only topic that matters, the constitutional future of the north. Like it or not, it’s the topic on which every election here is contested. He didn’t want to talk about it.
Asked about the prospect of a referendum on reunification he repeated his mantra: “That’s not where my priority is today.” We know that. It’s his stock answer. Then he blathered on about making the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement work to their full potential.
Two points arise immediately from his remarks. First, reunification may not be his priority, or indeed the current Irish government’s, but it’s a constitutional imperative. Article 3 of Bunreacht na hÉireann as ratified by referendum in June 1998 by a 94% vote states: “It is the firm will of the Irish Nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island.”
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Harris has never given a second’s thought to how to implement this. When it comes to the national question he is a blank sheet. Before being elected leader of Fine Gael last year he sang dumb on the question. As Taoiseach he dodged around it as he did on Tuesday saying there could be a united Ireland in his lifetime or, there’s never been an Irish Taoiseach or Tánaiste who has not wanted Irish unity. Anything to avoid answering the simple question, how does he plan to achieve it, because the answer is, not only does he not have a plan, there’s no evidence he wants to achieve it.
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Secondly – yes there were two points – he, like the Taoiseach, repeatedly tries to rewrite the Good Friday Agreement. On Tuesday Harris said, among other things about it, “In many ways, the GFA had at its core two fundamentals – peace and prosperity.” Run that over in your mind. Apart from the fact that it’s just not true, it’s typical glib Harris verbal incontinence. The Greeks had a word for it: logorrhoea. We call it gibberish. “In many ways” is one of his favourite constructs enabling slipperiness in meaning. Indeed in a previous answer Harris had just invented “in many ways” another “beauty of the GFA… respecting differences”.
The fact is that the core of the GFA which takes up its first three pages including Annex A and Annex B is ‘Constitutional Issues’. Quite simply, it provides the mechanism for self-determination of the Irish people which the British blocked in 1919 after the Irish people voted overwhelmingly for independence.
Reunification may not be his priority, or indeed the current Irish government’s, but it’s a constitutional imperative
Having laid out the mechanism in ‘Constitutional Issues’ and before the annexes, there comes the following paragraph: “The participants [the northern parties and two governments] also note that the two Governments have accordingly undertaken in the context of this comprehensive political agreement, to propose and support changes in, respectively, the Constitution of Ireland and in British legislation relating to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland.”
Not much about peace and prosperity eh? Besides, there’s another consideration. If a mechanism to provide for self-determination of the Irish people hadn’t been central to the GFA neither Sinn Féin nor the Irish government would have signed up to it. When Harris and Micheál Martin talk about fulfilling “the full potential” they choose to ignore what it is, namely that self-determination neither of them will lift a finger to plan for, let alone achieve.
Harris hasn’t got the pitch to himself however. Micheál Martin also tries to rewrite the GFA by emphasising that the full potential of the GFA is reconciliation and that there needs to be “political focus on reconciliation”. Again, like Harris, a crafty, slippery way to avoid the issue. Who is against reconciliation? Of course he never says how you’d recognise when it had happened or what the criteria are. Yet somehow you can’t do anything until this magical, mystical destination is reached.
Seamus Heaney in 1997 exposed the cant in this word as used by politicians. He said: “Reconciliation has become a policy word – official and public.” In other words meaningless and therefore entirely appropriate for the commitment of Martin and Harris to the Irish state’s constitutional imperative.
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