Beguiling Constitutional Narratives 8 🪶 Of Demons and Angels

Mike Burke ✍ No one in the north is as demonic as proponents of Irish unity, no one so angelic as the middle ground and its allies, who eschew constitutional politics altogether or show a steely determination to do absolutely nothing about altering constitutional circumstances.

This biblical discourse is not new, but the current debate on constitutional change reinvigorates the old sanctimonies.

Commentator Andy Pollak is particularly unrelenting in his prosecution of binary constitutional villains. Lately, he has turned his attention to Ireland’s Future, the civic nationalist group campaigning for unification. He says:

I dislike the crude majoritarian thinking of groups like Ireland’s Future, with their insistence that the people of the disputed and divided northern province of this country have to choose between one—and only one—of two diametrically opposed future constitutional options: continued membership of the United Kingdom or Irish territorial unity.

This choice is of course embedded in the Good Friday Agreement, which was itself a codification of long-standing constitutional practice dating back to partition. So, really, all Ireland’s Future is insisting on is that the Agreement and its democratic ratification be respected. But Pollak will have none of it. He sees no reason why the “holy grail” of the GFA should not be tossed in the bin and its democratic ratification ignored. This kind of “constructive thinking” will allow unionists to consider constitutional alternatives that may be less anathema to them than is a united Ireland (Pollak, 2024b).[1] Pollak’s stance here is the latest iteration of his long campaign to privilege unionism over nationalism, the practicalities of which he has had to update recently since he’s just realized that a direct and naked unionist veto over constitutional change may be a tad undemocratic.

But Pollak is not yet done with Ireland’s Future. Being “crude majoritarians” does not begin to describe the group’s worrying political profile. They are in many ways just like the IRA. Pollak makes this point with an especially insidious misapplication of the transitive property of equality, which states: if a=b and b=c, then a=c. His rendition is: if Ireland’s Future=Sinn Féin and Sinn Féin=IRA, then Ireland’s Future=IRA. Pollak employs his faulty guilt-by-association logic to scare away key constituencies from supporting what he sees as Ireland’s Future’s misguided campaign for unification. That is, by delegitimating the goal of Irish unity and all the organizations advocating it, he wishes to frighten those groups seen as crucial in determining the outcome of any border poll: the middle ground, wavering unionists, soft nationalists, and the undecided. He pushes all the scaremongering buttons associated with DUP-speak and loyalist epithets: Sinn Féin is full of militarists and ideologues; it is the party of the IRA, which is disproportionately if not solely responsible for the north’s bloodied past; Gerry Adams and his lieutenants are trying to resurrect the menacing pan-nationalist front; Ireland’s Future are little more than Sinn Féin fellow travellers and proxies who are furthering the nefarious republican project. If people could just see the truth, if they could just see IRA “terrorists” in a building planting a bomb instead of civic nationalists on a podium addressing a crowd, then northern Protestants like Jimmy Nesbitt and non-republican parties from the south would not be so quick to attend Ireland’s Future’s events. Demons unmasked, unity defeated. (Pollak, 2022 & 2024a).

Pollak’s account of the baseness of the campaign for Irish unity also draws from and reinforces contemporary media portrayals. Sam McBride and Newton Emerson are the latest in a long list of news commentators to reiterate warnings about the pernicious relationship of a hidden but still powerful IRA to a visible but forever subservient Sinn Féin. McBride cautions that senior Sinn Féin politicians are controlled by shadowy, backroom figures linked to the IRA (McBride, 2024). Emerson wonders if a Sinn Féin government would have neo-fascist Blueshirts prowling neighbourhoods to enforce the party’s authoritarian edicts (Emerson, 2024). Once such images are ingrained in public discourse, it’s relatively easy for Pollak to implicate groups like Ireland’s Future simply by associating them with Sinn Féin. Supporters of Ireland’s Future, indeed any advocates of Irish unity, become useful idiots, helping to further an insidious agenda they don’t see or understand.

Ireland’s Future is certainly not above criticism, but the kind of verbal assault Pollak and others mount should be dismissed not just because it’s unfair and biased but also because it’s based on innuendo, false analogy and ad hominem arguments. Whatever one might think of the IRA or Sinn Féin or the links between the two, Pollak’s demonizations should not go unchallenged. They shamelessly engage in the politics of fear to undermine the entire project of reunification.

Given Pollak’s identification of demons, his collection of angels should come as no surprise. His blog regularly features people who “go beyond the binary unionist-nationalist straitjacket” (Pollak, 2024b). He has high praise for, among others, Jarlath Kearney’s almost incomprehensible musings on constitutional change, Seamus Mallon’s one-sided approach to reconciliation, and political scientist Padraig O’Malley’s numerous attempts to justify unionist advantage. The refrain of this angelic chorus is that a united Ireland must wait, now and forevermore.

This cast of characters inhabiting hell and heaven is also part of many scholarly accounts of contemporary northern politics. Academics Jennifer Todd, Sarah Curristan and Stephanie Dornschneider-Elkink, for instance, examine moderate constituencies who distance themselves from unionist and nationalist blocs. They draw a stark contrast between the blocs and the moderates. The two “composite ethno-religious-national blocs” are “closed, totalizing and exclusivist”, in a word “tribalist”; the moderates are cosmopolitan, humanist, universalist, pluralist, compromise-seeking, and transformative (Todd et al., 2022, pp. 886-87).[2] These contrasts mirror Alliance Party perspectives on the north and the conventional account of the politics of the middle ground. They are also reminiscent of British state interpretations of the nature of division and conflict in the north (Burke, 2024 & 2019). There are, apparently, multiple gods to anoint angels in the struggle against the forces of darkness.

Advocates of a united Ireland get ensnared in these gross social stereotypes that immediately discredit the aim of constitutional change. These oversimplifications and mischaracterizations need to be exposed for what they are. It’s okay to be nationalist or republican, to consider yourself Irish, to speak the Irish language, or to campaign for reunification. To hell with what Pollak and his ilk say.

Conclusion

The eight beguiling but outrageous constitutional narratives surveyed in this series make uncomfortable reading for people who believe in a united Ireland. But they constitute only a small and probably gentle sample of the onslaught that will come should a border poll ever reach the immediate constitutional agenda. Any approaching anti-unity barrage should be met with the kind of response it deserves: determined discursive and political resistance.

Notes

[1] All direct quotations for which I do not cite a page or paragraph number are from internet documents that do not use a numbering system. Otherwise, I indicate the page, paragraph or column number of direct quotations.

[2] The authors note that the label moderate “is something of a misnomer” because many moderates are in fact radical in their push for transformative change (p. 886). But the Manichean contrasts the authors employ do unequivocally create a moderate alternative to what they construct as the narrow atavism of the blocs. Moderate is not such a misnomer after all.

References

Burke, M. (2019). “Should We Trust Irish Historians?” The Pensive Quill, 12 August. Retrieved from.

Burke, M. (2024). “The Inhabitants of Middle Earth: Exploring the ‘Centre Ground’ in Northern Politics.” The Pensive Quill. 17 April. Retrieved from.

Emerson, N. (2024). “Why is the Covid Inquiry so confrontational?” Irish News. 18 May. Retrieved from.

McBride, S. (2024). “Nothing to see here... Sinn Fein closes ranks for a Covid whitewash.” Sunday Life. 19 May. Retrieved from the Factiva (Dow Jones) electronic database of news articles.

Pollak, A. (2022). “Is Ireland’s Future effectively a front for Sinn Fein? Or is that the wrong question?” 2 Irelands Together. 10 October. Retrieved from.

Pollak, A. (2024a). “Leo Varadkar and Ireland’s Future have very different ideas of reconciliation and consent.” 2 Irelands Together. 28 March. Retrieved from.

Pollak, A. (2024b). “Jarlath Kearney—two states, one system. A novel idea worth considering?” Slugger O’Toole. 17 April. Retrieved from.

Todd, J., S. Curristan and S. Stephanie Dornschneider-Elkink. (2022). “How moderates make boundaries after protracted conflict. Everyday universalists, agonists, transformists and cosmopolitans in contemporary Northern Ireland.” British Journal of Sociology 73:4 (September): 885–902.

⏩ Mike Burke has lectured in Politics and Public Administration in Canada for over 30 years.