How Sinn Fein’s success may make the union more secure
The prognosis is widely shared: Sinn Fein’s electoral success means that Northern Ireland’s days are numbered.
It isn’t just Piers Morgan and Paul Mason: serious folk like Richard Haass, the former US special envoy to Northern Ireland, say the Assembly election draws a question mark over the future of the UK. Fintan O’Toole wrote that only a fool would say a United Ireland hadn’t moved a step closer.
So, having given the matter some thought, I have to own up to being a fool. Not only do I feel all these people are wrong, I think on balance the union has been made marginally safer by Sinn Fein’s advance.
The short version of the explanation is this: unionism is the threat to the union, not nationalism.
The longer explanation requires some back story and a few statistics.
First things first. There are number of ways in which Sinn Fein becoming the largest party does indeed make a United Ireland more likely: holding the first minister position lends credibility and a platform.
But as has been widely noted, Sinn Fein’s advances represent an advance within nationalism rather than an advance by nationalism. The overall nationalist vote has not shifted since the first Assembly election in 1998.
A United Ireland will require nationalism to convert existing voters to the cause or for nationalism to increase its share of new voters. Nationalism will not broaden its franchise from the lectern in Bodenstown cemetery where Sinn Fein leaders give an annual address from Wolfe Tone’s resting place. Sinn Fein has a way to go before it can talk about building an Ireland for all without provoking sardonic laughter.
2016 and All That
If Stormont gets back up and running, Sinn Fein is in something of a dilemma. To see why, we have to go back to the Assembly election of 2016, seven weeks before the Brexit referendum. Sinn Fein’s share of first preference votes fell by 3 percentage points, putting them 5 points behind the DUP.
Turnout in the 2016 Assembly election was relatively low, at 55 per cent. Sinn Fein had trouble motivating its base. Small wonder: in the 100th anniversary year of the Easter Rising, it was helping run a jurisdiction whose name its leaders refused to utter. In August, following the EU referendum, Arlene Foster, the DUP first minister, was able to write a joint letter with her deputy first minister Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Fein, outlining their common concerns for Northern Ireland through the Brexit process.
That co-operative spirit soon went out the window. The DUP went on to hitch an ill-advised ride with the Conservatives’ Brexit hardliners (see here), only to be dumped by the side of the road when the Tories secured a safe majority. The Northern Ireland Protocol was the result.
Meanwhile Sinn Fein pulled down Stormont in response to the Cash for Ash fiasco. Then they stayed out of Stormont while trying to force the DUP to concede an Irish Language Act. The DUP and Sinn Fein were punished by voters in the 2019 General Election for their refusal to govern.
So this is the Sinn Fein conundrum: if the DUP get back to Stormont, as some suggest they will if they get a face-saving tweak to a rebranded Protocol, Sinn Fein will be back to running a jurisdiction it exists in order to eradicate.
Running Northern Ireland disillusions its base, as in the 2016 Assembly election. But not running Northern Ireland infuriates the moderates, as in the 2019 General Election.
That is the first way in which a Sinn Fein’s victory could conversely strengthen the union.
But it is beyond nationalism that things get seriously interesting.
Still Looking for Lundy
The DUP have been warning of the Sinn Fein bogeyman since time immemorial. Every election was a border poll proxy. The largest party has the right to nominate the first minister. So once the DUP surpassed the UUP as unionism’s largest party twenty years ago, moderate unionists were effectively held hostage by the DUP as the party that could keep the top job out of Sinn Fein’s clutches.
Now the bogeyman has emerged from under the bed. Or at least will do, if the DUP elect a deputy first bogeyman. And first Minister O’Neill will have exactly the same powers as deputy first minister O’Neill.
At a stroke that will make the unionist vote more fluid in future assembly elections (less so in first-past-the-post Westminster elections). Many unionists will feel free to vote with their feet, just as hardliners already have by fleeing to Jim Allister’s absolutist Traditional Unionist Voice.
That ought to free up the political marketplace to appeal to voters that have been turned off unionism but haven’t — yet — been turned off the union. I’ve previously called these people “scundered unionists” — those of a broadly pro-union outlook who are too embarrassed by political unionism to vote for or identify as unionists. Under Doug Beattie, the UUP has been trying to bridge this gap by attracting younger candidates, setting out a more progressive and socially liberal stall and offering a more pragmatic approach to the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Counting Catholics beats canvassing them
Nationalism has a parallel problem. If the old model of Northern Ireland held, its share of the vote would have been steadily rising in lockstep with growth of the nominally Catholic population and the slow decline of the nominally Protestant population. Beware any analysis that relies on counting Catholics rather than canvassing them.
Rather than nationalism surpassing unionism, it is treading water while unionism slowly sinks. The constituency that has been growing for the last twenty years is the “Neithers”: a group that eschews the old labels. Most are irreligious and secular in their outlook, they tend to be younger and they are more likely to be female.
They have been the largest political camp in Northern Ireland since 2006, according to the long-running Northern Ireland Life and Times survey which indicates that they generally have a preference for the status quo of devolution within the UK.
Politically, the Neithers are beginning to find their voice, chiefly through the Alliance Party.
The Neithers are clearly the kingmakers for deciding Northern Ireland’s future. All the more so when you consider the ranks of those who don’t bother to vote in party political elections but presumably would express a preference in a once-in-a-lifetime border poll.
Non-voters are more socially liberal on a range of issues and more in favour of religiously-mixed schooling — especially Protestant non-voters, according to a Liverpool University study based on the 2019 Westminister election.
“Non-voters and those who do not state a religion also tend to be more socially progressive”, noted Peter Shirlow and Jon Tonge, the academics behind the research. “Younger Catholics and Protestants, especially non-voters, generally agree on social and inter-community issues.”
This group represents an opportunity for non-nationalist parties who aren’t beholden to old unionist tropes. Look at the politics of non-voters of a Protestant background (in favour of integrated schooling, in favour of gay marriage, in favour of liberalised abortion law, relaxed about religiously-mixed marriage) and compare it with the social policies of the DUP and the TUV.
If the UUP or the SDLP can put making Northern Ireland better in the foreground and the constitutional question in the background, they can begin thinking about how to tap up the silent Neithers. Otherwise, the job — and the electoral spoils — will be left to Alliance.
There is serious work to do in healthcare, infrastructure, productivity and education. The revolutionary act of trying to make Northern Ireland better through poltics will have the happy by-product of making Northern Ireland more secure in its skin. It would show that a Northern Ireland younger Neithers want to inhabit is at least in theory compatible with a Northern Ireland within the UK and separated by a soft border from the Republic of Ireland.
A dead-end, flag-fixated unionism is the primary danger to the union. The DUP’s self-inflicted Brexit injuries are a symptom of that problem.
The more that political parties roll up their sleeves and focus on improving life in Northern Ireland, the less the focus will be on the constitutional cure-alls on offer from the political extremes.
The rise of Sinn Fein, ironically, may have given the political system just the shake it needed.
