In January 2013, Sinn Féin’s Mitchel McLaughlin launched his party’s call for a border poll. The DUP put its then enterprise minister Arlene Foster on air to respond.
“Sinn Féin are trying to cause instability in Northern Ireland,” she told the BBC.
“If we have the border poll then that instability goes away and, in actual fact, what we have is a very clear validation of the union and that’s something we’re looking at, at the moment.
“So I’m saying to Mitchel McLaughlin and I’m saying to him very clearly, ‘We may just call your bluff on this one Mitchel, and be very careful what you wish for’.”
This statement was replete with the arrogance that has brought us to our present impasse - and that arrogance was widely noted at the time. However, the calling of Sinn Féin’s bluff was considered successful and republicans became rather muted on the subject for several years.
After the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014, a Belfast Telegraph survey found majority support for a border poll, yet minority support for a united Ireland. Interestingly, nationalists were far more in favour of a poll than unionists, even knowing they would lose it.
It seems everyone saw it as a chance to clear the air.
So what has changed since?
At the DUP manifesto launch last month, Foster said Sinn Féin’s renewed demand for a poll was “divisive and destabilising”.
As the divisiveness is what does the destabilising, there was redundancy in this expression - and post-election, divisiveness appears to be with us regardless.
There seems little doubt that Sinn Féin is using a poll as a destabilisation tactic. Nationalism cannot currently win it - as Gerry Adams admitted in January, when he said: “there are more unionists than republicans.”
The election result has disguised just how many more, but the DUP believes 58 per cent of all votes cast were by unionists, based on transfers.
Calling for a border poll that nationalism cannot win is outside the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Féin went further in its 2017 manifesto, calling for one all-Ireland poll - a clear breach of the consent principle fundamental to the peace process.
No explicit rationale has been offered for this but it is obviously tied in with the nationalist belief that Brexit has broken the spirit of the agreement, if not the letter. ‘Brexit changes everything’, as the republican refrain now goes.
The other huge change to be considered is the new balance of the assembly, with unionists and nationalists both in the minority and centrist parties holding the balance of power (or powerlessness, if the petition of concern survives.)
The centrist bloc is substantial - 13 per cent across multiple parties. It grew almost as quickly as nationalism even in last week’s exceptional election and is growing faster if any lengthier period is examined. So Stormont’s three-legged stool could be an enduring piece of political furniture. It is not necessarily steady, however.
Alliance leader Naomi Long has compared it to Belfast City Council, where the 2012 flag row showed how susceptible the arrangement is to cynical troublemaking.
A border poll would help establish a baseline for this new political reality, removing unionist anxiety, republican temptation to exploit it and centrist vulnerability to being played by either side.
Without that certainty we are doomed to be stuck in the paradigm of the last election campaign, when the DUP and Sinn Féin cried and crowed about the union being in peril, while everyone else pleaded otherwise. Left unchecked, this will squeeze Stormont politics to a halt.
Perhaps that is what Sinn Féin really wants, at least if it does not get everything else it wants. However, as it is calling for a border poll, its bluff can still be called.
Legal opinion differs on whether the secretary of state is restricted to only holding a poll when nationalism seems likely to win. But if he held one at the insistence of Sinn Féin and the DUP, who would object?
The ‘countdown to unity’ effect some unionists fear from a border poll is misplaced. The agreement states a vote must be held no more often than every seven years, rather than every seven years - and the experience of Quebec shows that losing two independence referendums in a row can kill a nationalist project stone dead.
Foster’s arguments from 2013 are more persuasive and urgent than ever. If only the DUP could find someone less antagonising to make them.
newton@irishnews.com
