A United Ireland?

I recently read an article regarding the possibility of a United Ireland.  As someone of Irish descent, I will have to admit that I understood little of the politics of Irish history and the reason there was a division of Northern Ireland from the rest of the country.  My month-long trip to Ireland in 2012 was travel restricted to the southern portions as I was using a rental car that prohibited driving into the northern portions of the island nation.

A Kerry Couple
Photo by William Lawrence 1895
(from my grandmother's collection)

I knew of The Troubles as they are called and found that, even after getting to know B&B owners during an extended stay, few were willing to discuss that period beyond saying that I should do my own research.  One nice couple told me that few outside Ireland really understood how the Irish were treated by the British.  It was suggested that I go back to that distant past to begin my understanding.

St Colman's Cathedral, Cobh, Ireland
(southeast of Cork City, 2012)

After that vacation, I did manage to learn that, unlike the stories I had heard of the backward shanty-town Irish who were stupid to try to survive on a limited crop of mostly potatoes and who were driven to starvation in the mid-1800s, I found that history to be flawed.  The potato blight that attacked the potato crops was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Blarney Castle

Years of absentee landlord control from Great Britain had forced the Irish to farm only the worst land while British aristocrats grew and exported crops from the better Irish farmland.  Irish Catholics were prohibited from entering professions and were not allowed to own land.  They were forced to rent small plots.  Potatoes were one of the few crops that could be grown on the land left to the Irish.  When that crop was hit by the fungus-like microorganism that turns the potatoes into a foul-smelling mush, that limited food source disappeared and millions of Irish died of starvation under the watchful eyes of their British occupiers.  Millions of the survivors emigrated in the largest migration from an island nation in history.

Turf Cart (wheelless) 1906

By 1919, the Irish nationalist party, Sinn Féin declared an Irish republic.  To head off a civil war, Britain portioned the island in 1920 into a Protestant-dominated northeast and a predominantly Catholic south and northwest (Republic of Ireland).  Those left behind as religious minorities in their section of the island were then the subject of continued discrimination.

King Street (now MacCurtain), Cork City, 1906
(from my grandmother's collection from her birthplace)

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s in America went far beyond our borders and the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland demanded an end to the discrimination.  Protestant Unionists owned and controlled most Northern Ireland businesses that refused to hire or promote Catholics.  Irish segregation was along religious lines for employment, housing, and education.  Gerrymandering of electoral boundaries split Catholic voting power.  Even the right to vote in local elections was restricted to property ownership.  If you owned six houses, you got six votes.  If you rented, you could not vote at all.  This meant that Protestants, who had the better-paying jobs, controlled the vote.

By the late 60s, a recession hit Northern Ireland’s industries hard and unemployment was felt by all, but was particularly worse for Catholics.  In 1967, NICRA (Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association) was formed to end discrimination and obtain equal rights (one vote per person) to participate in government.  NICRA was infiltrated by the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who wanted to use the group for its own ends.  This was the beginning of The Troubles or Na Trioblóidí as it is called in the Irish, that lasted for 30 years ending with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.  It was not so much a religious conflict as it involved the status of Northern Ireland as either part of Great Britain or part of a United Ireland.  The death toll stands at around 3,500 for this period.

Enter Brexit, the oxymoron.  Britain’s bitter divorce from the European Union that paradoxically isolated Northern Ireland with trade laws, customs declarations, tariffs, and goods inspections, may provide some incentive to reunite Ireland as part of the EU.  Currently, the trade barriers are not along the north-south border of Ireland as one might assume, but between the UK and Northern Ireland.  One would assume this would be the lesser of the two evils.

Part of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was that the six counties of Northern Ireland could sever ties to the UK if the majority of the people voted to do so.  There are currently more Catholics in Northern Ireland than Protestants according to a 2021 census.  There may also be a financial incentive as Ireland has a budget surplus and the UK is dealing with high inflation, a somewhat sluggish economy, and higher interest rates.  Northern Ireland is also dealing with a dysfunctional government after the Democratic Unionist Party walked out over trade and border policies.  Forty percent of the drinking water in the north comes from a single lake that is currently suffering from a blue-green algae bloom.

With Brexit as a guide as to what not to do, a plan for unification is being approached with caution.  Now that there is a majority Catholic population in the north, the original 1921 UK plan to ensure Protestant domination of the six counties, may be at an end.  Can a unified Ireland be that far off?