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Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on  3-September-2026.

The gate is shut from outside and the door is held from inside. Everything else is commentary, including this.

Photo by Paul Harris on Unsplash


The Gate and the Door: 2 Jaws

On Thursday 27th August, five weeks after taking office, Andy Burnham visited Belfast for the first time as Prime Minister. Before he came, Michelle O’Neill told journalists what she intended to prioritise. Not the constitutional issue. The budget. She said they needed Burnham to secure a fair deal that would support public services. Nurses, she noted, were already speaking about strike action. They had been starved of funding for years. If he wanted to leave any mark, he could do it by altering the funding model. What existed now was not sufficient. She would put that to him.

He then arrived and dismissed the prospect of a border poll. When asked whether he would be the Prime Minister to trigger one, he said he was there to listen and work with others, but certain matters would not be open for discussion, and that was one of them. According to him, referendums make people turn inward and create divisions that take years to mend, while politicians ought to focus on the cost of living and on reaching agreement on a budget. He repeated the same wording to three different outlets that day, something Claire Hanna observed and interpreted as the obvious conclusion suggested: this was no accidental remark. It had been scripted beforehand.

O’Neill described the comments as anti-democratic, said that night that she had challenged him directly, and insisted that the right to a referendum was protected by the Good Friday Agreement and had to be respected. On that point, she is correct. A few days afterward, at a hunger strike commemoration in Ballina, she went further, saying that a unity referendum is not a favour to be bestowed on the people of Ireland by any English politician, and she made clear that Sinn Féin would not abandon Stormont, because leaving would simply hand the departments to British ministers.

Lay the sequence out and its structure becomes plain. For the meeting, the First Minister said the main issue was money. The Prime Minister came with a prepared refusal on the constitutional question, declined to offer money as well, and went back off home to England. The First Minister then asserted an actual right, and reaffirmed that she would not use the one lever available to her, which is also true. She secured neither the settlement nor the referendum, and she surrendered nothing and obtained nothing. By Wednesday, the position was unchanged.

The gate is locked from the outside. The door is being held from within. Between those two refusals lies the whole northern nationalist position, which over the past month has produced some of the sharpest political analysis written on this island in years, and not a single proposal that would require anything of the people making it.

That is the bind. That is the vice. Sinn Féin is not the only instance of it, though it is the main one. It governs the commentariat, the left, and the people who write essays about it, myself included.

The Free Thing and the Costly Thing

I have argued previously that clarity in Irish politics follows the trail of cost. Politicians become precise when precision is free and drift into vagueness as the price increases. You can locate a person within a structure by watching where their language starts to lose its nouns.

Extend that from an individual to a position and you get the subject of this essay.

Diagnosis costs nothing. A columnist pays nothing to write that Stormont cannot function. A party chair pays nothing to catalogue the DUP’s obstruction. A socialist pays nothing to note that the Irish left has failed to come together. The analysis is strong because analysis is cheap, the demand for it is vast, and nobody producing it has to surrender anything they already possess.

Remedy is another matter. Any course of action that would genuinely alter the position requires someone to pay: to give up an option, to cement an adversary, to state a policy that fractures their own coalition, to pass a project they control to people they do not. As a result, predictably, the remedies never arrive. In their place comes the ask: a request that someone else behave differently. The other side should stop destroying things. The British government should notice. The left should take the lead. The Secretary of State should sort it out.

An ask is not a remedy. It is diagnosis with a profession or vocation attached.

There is also a smaller version of the same pattern, worth noting because it shows how far the free thing can spread. When Stormont collapsed in 2017, nationalist Ireland came to believe that the alternative to devolution was not direct rule but some version of joint authority between London and Dublin. It proved seductive enough that a third of Sinn Féin voters told pollsters that it was their preferred constitutional outcome. It cost nothing to believe it. No negotiation, no concession, no price was required, which is exactly why it spread.

But it was never actually available, and in January 2024 the British government said so in writing. The command paper that secured the DUP’s return to Stormont, Safeguarding the Union, says the Agreement allows only two constitutional possibilities, continued membership of the United Kingdom or a united Ireland, and that the British government does not regard any other model, including any form of joint authority between the United Kingdom and Ireland, as compatible with the Agreement. The same paper says that a prosperous Northern Ireland with stable devolved government is the surest way to persuade the majority that its best future lies within the Union, and it commits the government to making the case for the Union and to creating a foundation to promote it.

That is worth dwelling on. The institutions Sinn Féin now leads were restored on terms in which the British government committed itself, in a paper laid before Parliament, to campaigning against the party’s founding goal and to rejecting the intermediate arrangement that much of its base thought was imminent. All of this is public. It has been public for two years.

Two Indictments and Two Asks

Consider the two most substantial interventions from the party-and-commentariat world over the past month, each made by a serious figure and each presented here in its full force.

Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin’s national chairperson, issued a detailed indictment of the DUP: arrogance, sectarianism, economic illiteracy, obstruction of the Good Jobs Bill, refusal of the Irish language strategy, the entire record. He then called for a new initiative on Irish unity, a single forum where all strands of what he called Irish national democratic opinion would gather, deliberate, agree and speak together. The indictment is sound. The ask is that the DUP change its direction, and that nationalism assemble itself. Neither request costs Sinn Féin anything. The forum, in particular, asks nationalism to do what it finds easiest: speak to itself.

Brian Feeney, writing in the Irish News, said the new Secretary of State is a decent man being fed rubbish by his officials, that the budget arithmetic is impossible and cannot be made workable, that unionism has shifted sharply rightward and elevated culture wars, and that partition is and always has been the problem here. Most of that is defensible, and much of it is plainly true. The final operative sentence of the column is: he should then tell Burnham.

Feeney is the most revealing example, and I want to treat him fairly, because he got farther than anyone. Weeks earlier he had suggested something genuinely costly: that after next year’s election Sinn Féin should renew its mandate and then refuse to form an executive until the British government published the criteria for calling a referendum. That is a real remedy. It has a price, identifies who pays it, and does not rely on anyone else’s goodwill. Yet within a few weeks the same writer had returned to hoping the proconsul would sort it out and say so upstairs. That is not a lapse of nerve on his part. It is gravity. When you let go, the cost-free ask is where the argument settles.

Two of the sharpest people working in this area, in one month, and between them not one proposal that would cost their own side anything.

I should be careful here, though, because there is a version of this that is too tidy, and the past week has produced its clearest exception.

This argument does sometimes name prices. Writing at the end of August, Siobhán Fenton proposed one and then did what almost nobody does with a proposal: she worked out who would have to bear it. Her proposal is the Feeney-boycott: after the May 2027 election, the parties should refuse to form an executive until the British government publishes the criteria for calling a referendum, with Sinn Féin able to say it has upheld its side of the Agreement and it is now Britain’s turn to uphold its own. She then constructs the coalition. The SDLP, because its authorship of the Agreement makes this the one boycott it might tolerate. Alliance, awkwardly positioned because Naomi Long has already called for the criteria to be published and a boycott seeking only clarity is difficult to portray as tribal. The smaller parties, if they return members. And then, unprompted, she argues against herself: that it may be too confrontational, that it could alienate the centre ground that will decide the referendum, and, most importantly, that publication might weaken the pro-unity case in the short term, because whatever the threshold turns out to be it is almost certainly not met yet, and saying that openly would stall the momentum the campaign currently has.

That final point is a cost voluntarily assigned to her own side, and it is the rarest thing in the whole discussion.

Still, note where she stands. Fenton is a journalist. She once worked for the party and no longer does. Feeney, who proposed the same boycott some weeks earlier and had already returned to appeals within another few weeks, is a columnist. Neither of them will be in a room in May 2027 deciding whether to form an executive. However well designed the proposal is, the price would still be paid by somebody else’s leadership.

That is the more truthful version of the finding. The issue is not that nobody can imagine a cost. It is that the ability to name one is inversely related to the chance of having to bear it. The farther you are from the thing that must be surrendered, the more clearly you can see that it ought to be. That describes a critic, and I will return to that.

What the Fleadh Actually Showed

The strongest objection to everything I am arguing was published on The Pensive Quill a week ago by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, and it should be answered rather than folded away.

His argument is about the Fleadh in Belfast, which nationalist Ireland has spent August reading as evidence that the north has changed beyond recognition. It did change, and the celebration was real. But, he points out, the Fleadh took place in the United Kingdom. Irish identity can now flourish in Belfast much as Scottish and Welsh identity flourish within the same state. Culture is not sovereignty. And the uncomfortable possibility is that the Good Friday Agreement, rather than opening a path out of the Union, may have made the Union much better at accommodating Irishness.

I think he is right, and I think the reason is the mechanism of this essay. The Union grants what is free and withholds what is costly. Irish-language signage, a fleadh in the city centre, an Irish name on a public building: none of these reduce British sovereignty, and a confident state can afford them. Sovereignty itself is the expensive item, and it is not available at any price. So cultural flourishing is not evidence of constitutional movement. It may be the opposite: the sign of a settlement that has learned precisely how much it can concede without conceding anything.

That should disturb anyone who took the Fleadh as a milestone. It certainly disturbs the argument I made two weeks ago.

But it is only half the story, and the other half matters more, because it is the only thing in this whole month that looks like a price being paid rather than merely named.

Read the Fleadh as Ó Súilleabháin does and it is a story about the British state, about what a confident Union can afford to permit. Read it the other way and it is a story about what nationalist Ireland is prepared to offer, in practice, on a street, over eight days, to people who do not share its constitutional goal and will not. Protestants were central to organising it. The deputy First Minister of a unionist party spoke at the opening and was heard. A loyalist flute band played at City Hall. A former UDA man, Davy Adams, wrote afterward in the Irish News that he had finally seen the New Ireland he had spent years failing to describe, and what he described was not a place where his tradition was merely tolerated but one where nobody much cared which foot he kicked with.

That is not a cultural festival being granted by a state. That is a guarantee being rehearsed by a community, and it was rehearsed without a British minister’s permission and at nobody’s invitation but its own.

The distinction matters because it separates accommodation from inclusion, and the whole argument of this essay turns on that. Accommodation is offered from outside by a power that keeps what it values. Inclusion is done from within, at cost, by people who could have chosen otherwise. The first is what the Union extends to Irishness. The second is what happened in Belfast in August, and it is the one thing that answers Ó Súilleabháin’s objection rather than simply absorbing it. If the concern is that the Union has become better at holding Irish identity, the answer is not to deny it. It is that Irish nationalism, for eight days, showed it can hold British identity too, and did so publicly, and nothing collapsed.

None of that is minor, and none of it is new. It is the oldest proposition in the tradition. Tone’s entire formulation was to replace the common name of Irishman for the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, which is not a plea for tolerance but an argument that the categories should stop being the issue. McCracken was a Presbyterian who died at the end of a rope for a republic he understood in exactly those terms. The reason South Africa works as a comparison is the same reason: the Congress tradition was non-racial from within its own ranks, so the voice that eventually spoke already contained the people it would need to reassure. That is not a concession to unionism added to republicanism from the outside. It is republicanism’s founding sentence, and the Fleadh was eight days of it in action.

The problem, and it is the problem with everything in this essay, is that eight days is not a settlement. What was shown on the street has not been written into a single document, offered at a single table, or costed in a single prospectus. It remains an instinct rather than a guarantee, and instincts are free.

The Asymmetry

It troubles the argument in a second way, which I did not recognise until Anthony McIntyre stated it plainly in response to that essay.

As he observed, unionism is divided at party level but remarkably unified on the constitutional question. Whatever else separates it, it holds together on the Union. Nationalism is close to the opposite: unified at party level, where Sinn Féin has dominated, and much more uncertain constitutionally. Nationalists are more willing to accept rule from London than unionists would ever be to accept rule from Dublin.

If that is correct, and I think it is, then something I wrote two weeks ago needs revision. I had argued that the one truly encouraging figure in northern polling was rising unionist consent, the increasing willingness among unionists to accept a referendum result they would lose. I still think that trend is real and that it is the variable that matters. But willingness to hold a vote is not the same as willingness to lose one, and a bloc that fractures over flags and parades while remaining firm on sovereignty is a bloc whose consent shifts within a much narrower range than I allowed. I moved too quickly. The mechanism is right, but the room for it is smaller than I said.

A New Ireland For Whom

Here is where the same mechanism creates the silence that should concern republicans most, and I am not the first to say it this month. Ó Súilleabháin said it more forcefully than I will, and Colin Gannon has been making a version of the point in Jacobin for years.

Ask what a united Ireland would actually be, and the discussion immediately thins. Who owns its wealth. Who can afford its housing. What kind of health service it would run. How, if at all, it would redistribute resources. What prevents a thirty-two-county state from reproducing the inequalities already present on both sides of the border. These are not questions for the day after unity. They determine whether unity offers anything worth voting for.

They remain unanswered for the same reason everything else here remains unanswered. To specify a cost. The moment you say what kind of Ireland you want, you split the coalition assembled to want an Ireland at all, and a movement that has spent thirty years building that coalition is not going to risk it for the sake of a policy platform. So working-class communities are asked whether they want a new state before being told what it would do for them, and the constitutional question is placed first while its social content is postponed without limit.

The oldest expression of this came from within, long before the current arguments. Brendan Hughes, speaking to Fourthwrite in 2000, said the facade had been cleaned but the bone structure was the same. He was talking about the north. He might just as well have been describing the offer.

The One Who Paid

Two weeks ago I wrote about the one movement that reached this goal and kept it, and I will not repeat the case, only the part that matters here. What made the South African transition succeed was not analysis. Everyone had analysis. What made it work was that Joe Slovo, the person with the most to lose by saying it, named a price his own side would pay and argued for it publicly, in the movement’s own journal, to the people who would bear it: guaranteed employment for the civil service of the state he had fought, a government of national unity with posts divided by share of the vote, and a front that dissolved itself into a table where the other side could say no. He was explicit that a leadership which hid the cost from its base would be accused of selling out, so he did not hide it.

Every one of those was expensive, and that is the whole point. They were not requests aimed at the National Party. They were prices the ANC paid, on its own, in advance, to make the other side’s consent possible. Nothing in current Irish nationalism resembles that, and the absence is not accidental.

What Would Have To Be Given

So, at the risk of doing the very thing I have spent seven sections describing, here is what a serious proposal would need to include. Not what Sinn Féin should do. What anyone serious would have to accept.

First, the recognition that this requires two strategies, not one, which is Fenton’s point and the most useful sentence written on this subject this month. Winning a referendum and getting one called are different problems that require different campaigns, and the movement has only ever built the first. What follows bears on both, but the second is the one that has never been attempted at all.

Preparation before the vote, not agitation for it, which means the costed prospectus nobody wants to write because writing it closes off arguments people would rather keep open.

Guarantees to unionism that unionism helps author, not guarantees presented to unionism by the party that opposed it. That means a table where the other side can say no, which is a real transfer of control and not a forum where one tradition speaks with one voice.

A movement broader than any single party or tendency, which means the people who presently own the unity question would have to give it away, and it is their most valuable asset.

And the social content set out in advance, which means telling people what sort of Ireland before asking them to vote for one, at the price of the coalition that vagueness protects.

Each of those costs somebody something. That is how you know they are remedies rather than asks. It is also exactly why none of them is on the table.

Including This

Which leads me to the part of this essay I would rather not write.

I have spent the spring & summer naming things. The party is constrained by the institutions it leads. The left will not shut the door that would create a bloc. The chairman’s forum is a front for one tradition. The commentariat produces indictments and asks. All of that, I think, is true, and some of it took real work to establish.

None of it cost me anything.

Naming is what this position rewards, and I have been collecting the reward. I have not proposed a single thing that would require the tradition I write from to surrender anything and truly mean it. I have described, with considerable precision, the price others would have to pay and paid none of it myself, and the essays have been better received the more accurately I have described it. The market for accurate diagnosis is excellent, and I am in it.

So the final movement is neither a demand nor a prophecy. It is an admission that the mechanism I have spent seven movements dissecting has its own author inside it, and that a body of work which only ever names things is not a way out of the bind. It is one of the more eloquent things happening within it.

And yet the essay’s own evidence contains its exception, and I have spent eight movements walking past it.

In August, over eight days, the costly act was carried out. It was neither merely suggested, nor priced, nor handed off to a commission for later. It was completed on a street by people with no office to defend and nothing personal to profit from the act. Inclusion came from inside instead of being an accommodation bestowed from outside, offered to a tradition under no duty to accept it, and nothing collapsed. Whatever remains uncertain, that no longer belongs to the realm of theory. It occurred in full view, and thousands witnessed it.

The gap between that and a settlement is genuine, and I have been straightforward about that: eight days do not make a document, and instincts cost nothing. Yet note how much narrower that gap is than the one outlined elsewhere in this essay. It does not call for Burnham to relocate, or for the Treasury to soften, or for a party to summon courage that its incentives discourage. What it does require is that someone put into writing what Belfast has already shown, and then place it on a table where the other side is free to refuse. The difficult part is the demonstration, and the demonstration has already taken place.

The gate is shut from outside, and Burnham has just shut it again. The door is held from inside, and O’Neill has just explained why she is holding it. Everything else, for now, including this, is commentary.

Further Reading

Everything below is worth your time, and most of it is better than the summary I have given it here. Read them in whatever order suits you, though the first two are what set this month’s argument going.

Declan Kearney, “Time for a new initiative on Irish unity”, An Phoblacht, 14th August 2026. The fullest statement of Sinn Féin’s current unity strategy, and the source of the proposal for a single forum of all strands of Irish national democratic opinion. Whatever you make of it, it is the party arguing its own case at length rather than through a press release.

Brian Feeney, Irish News, August 2026. Two columns worth reading together. The first proposes that Sinn Féin renew its mandate next May and then decline to form an executive until the British government publishes the criteria for calling a referendum. The second, “In case the proconsul hasn’t worked it out yet, the problem here is partition”, argues that the difficulty is partition and that the Secretary of State ought to say so to the Prime Minister. The distance between them is the subject of this essay. Feeney has been writing in that paper for thirty years and was an SDLP councillor before that, which is worth knowing when you read him on Sinn Féin.

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, “The Provo Paradox”, The Pensive Quill, August 2026. The strongest challenge to my own argument, written from inside the tradition by a man who gave it twenty years. His reading of the Fleadh is the part I have had to think hardest about, and his question about what kind of Ireland is being offered, and to whom, is one nobody has answered.

Siobhán Fenton, “Should nationalists boycott Stormont until the British government publishes the criteria for a border poll?”, 30th August 2026. The most practically useful piece written on this in a long time, because it works out who would actually have to carry the proposal and then argues honestly against its own case. Her point that winning a referendum and getting one called are two different campaigns is the one I keep returning to.

Colin Gannon, “Ireland’s Left Should Lead the Campaign for Irish Unity”, Jacobin, August 2026. Makes the case that a unity campaign built on material change in both jurisdictions could break the deadlock. Behind a free registration wall, which is a nuisance, but he has been asking the question about the social content of a new Ireland for years and deserves the credit for getting there early.

Safeguarding the Union, CP 1021, presented to Parliament January 2024. The command paper that bought the DUP’s return to Stormont. Read paragraph 64, which rules out joint authority as inconsistent with the Agreement, and paragraph 6, which states that making devolution work is the surest way to persuade people their future lies within the Union. It is a short read and it is more candid than anything said out loud since.

The ARINS / Irish Times North and South Survey. The most careful polling on constitutional attitudes on this island, and the source of most of the numbers people quote at each other without having looked at them. The material on unionist attitudes to holding a referendum, as distinct from winning one, is the part worth your attention.

Joe Slovo, “Negotiations: What room for compromise?”, The African Communist No.130, Third Quarter 1992. Available in full through the O’Malley archive at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The document that made the South African settlement possible, written by the man with the most to lose by writing it. It is short, it is unsentimental, and it is the clearest example I know of a leadership telling its own side what a settlement would cost before asking them to accept one.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

The Vice 🪶 Everyone Can Name The Problem 🪶 Nobody Will Pay For The Answer

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on  3-September-2026.

The gate is shut from outside and the door is held from inside. Everything else is commentary, including this.

Photo by Paul Harris on Unsplash


The Gate and the Door: 2 Jaws

On Thursday 27th August, five weeks after taking office, Andy Burnham visited Belfast for the first time as Prime Minister. Before he came, Michelle O’Neill told journalists what she intended to prioritise. Not the constitutional issue. The budget. She said they needed Burnham to secure a fair deal that would support public services. Nurses, she noted, were already speaking about strike action. They had been starved of funding for years. If he wanted to leave any mark, he could do it by altering the funding model. What existed now was not sufficient. She would put that to him.

He then arrived and dismissed the prospect of a border poll. When asked whether he would be the Prime Minister to trigger one, he said he was there to listen and work with others, but certain matters would not be open for discussion, and that was one of them. According to him, referendums make people turn inward and create divisions that take years to mend, while politicians ought to focus on the cost of living and on reaching agreement on a budget. He repeated the same wording to three different outlets that day, something Claire Hanna observed and interpreted as the obvious conclusion suggested: this was no accidental remark. It had been scripted beforehand.

O’Neill described the comments as anti-democratic, said that night that she had challenged him directly, and insisted that the right to a referendum was protected by the Good Friday Agreement and had to be respected. On that point, she is correct. A few days afterward, at a hunger strike commemoration in Ballina, she went further, saying that a unity referendum is not a favour to be bestowed on the people of Ireland by any English politician, and she made clear that Sinn Féin would not abandon Stormont, because leaving would simply hand the departments to British ministers.

Lay the sequence out and its structure becomes plain. For the meeting, the First Minister said the main issue was money. The Prime Minister came with a prepared refusal on the constitutional question, declined to offer money as well, and went back off home to England. The First Minister then asserted an actual right, and reaffirmed that she would not use the one lever available to her, which is also true. She secured neither the settlement nor the referendum, and she surrendered nothing and obtained nothing. By Wednesday, the position was unchanged.

The gate is locked from the outside. The door is being held from within. Between those two refusals lies the whole northern nationalist position, which over the past month has produced some of the sharpest political analysis written on this island in years, and not a single proposal that would require anything of the people making it.

That is the bind. That is the vice. Sinn Féin is not the only instance of it, though it is the main one. It governs the commentariat, the left, and the people who write essays about it, myself included.

The Free Thing and the Costly Thing

I have argued previously that clarity in Irish politics follows the trail of cost. Politicians become precise when precision is free and drift into vagueness as the price increases. You can locate a person within a structure by watching where their language starts to lose its nouns.

Extend that from an individual to a position and you get the subject of this essay.

Diagnosis costs nothing. A columnist pays nothing to write that Stormont cannot function. A party chair pays nothing to catalogue the DUP’s obstruction. A socialist pays nothing to note that the Irish left has failed to come together. The analysis is strong because analysis is cheap, the demand for it is vast, and nobody producing it has to surrender anything they already possess.

Remedy is another matter. Any course of action that would genuinely alter the position requires someone to pay: to give up an option, to cement an adversary, to state a policy that fractures their own coalition, to pass a project they control to people they do not. As a result, predictably, the remedies never arrive. In their place comes the ask: a request that someone else behave differently. The other side should stop destroying things. The British government should notice. The left should take the lead. The Secretary of State should sort it out.

An ask is not a remedy. It is diagnosis with a profession or vocation attached.

There is also a smaller version of the same pattern, worth noting because it shows how far the free thing can spread. When Stormont collapsed in 2017, nationalist Ireland came to believe that the alternative to devolution was not direct rule but some version of joint authority between London and Dublin. It proved seductive enough that a third of Sinn Féin voters told pollsters that it was their preferred constitutional outcome. It cost nothing to believe it. No negotiation, no concession, no price was required, which is exactly why it spread.

But it was never actually available, and in January 2024 the British government said so in writing. The command paper that secured the DUP’s return to Stormont, Safeguarding the Union, says the Agreement allows only two constitutional possibilities, continued membership of the United Kingdom or a united Ireland, and that the British government does not regard any other model, including any form of joint authority between the United Kingdom and Ireland, as compatible with the Agreement. The same paper says that a prosperous Northern Ireland with stable devolved government is the surest way to persuade the majority that its best future lies within the Union, and it commits the government to making the case for the Union and to creating a foundation to promote it.

That is worth dwelling on. The institutions Sinn Féin now leads were restored on terms in which the British government committed itself, in a paper laid before Parliament, to campaigning against the party’s founding goal and to rejecting the intermediate arrangement that much of its base thought was imminent. All of this is public. It has been public for two years.

Two Indictments and Two Asks

Consider the two most substantial interventions from the party-and-commentariat world over the past month, each made by a serious figure and each presented here in its full force.

Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin’s national chairperson, issued a detailed indictment of the DUP: arrogance, sectarianism, economic illiteracy, obstruction of the Good Jobs Bill, refusal of the Irish language strategy, the entire record. He then called for a new initiative on Irish unity, a single forum where all strands of what he called Irish national democratic opinion would gather, deliberate, agree and speak together. The indictment is sound. The ask is that the DUP change its direction, and that nationalism assemble itself. Neither request costs Sinn Féin anything. The forum, in particular, asks nationalism to do what it finds easiest: speak to itself.

Brian Feeney, writing in the Irish News, said the new Secretary of State is a decent man being fed rubbish by his officials, that the budget arithmetic is impossible and cannot be made workable, that unionism has shifted sharply rightward and elevated culture wars, and that partition is and always has been the problem here. Most of that is defensible, and much of it is plainly true. The final operative sentence of the column is: he should then tell Burnham.

Feeney is the most revealing example, and I want to treat him fairly, because he got farther than anyone. Weeks earlier he had suggested something genuinely costly: that after next year’s election Sinn Féin should renew its mandate and then refuse to form an executive until the British government published the criteria for calling a referendum. That is a real remedy. It has a price, identifies who pays it, and does not rely on anyone else’s goodwill. Yet within a few weeks the same writer had returned to hoping the proconsul would sort it out and say so upstairs. That is not a lapse of nerve on his part. It is gravity. When you let go, the cost-free ask is where the argument settles.

Two of the sharpest people working in this area, in one month, and between them not one proposal that would cost their own side anything.

I should be careful here, though, because there is a version of this that is too tidy, and the past week has produced its clearest exception.

This argument does sometimes name prices. Writing at the end of August, Siobhán Fenton proposed one and then did what almost nobody does with a proposal: she worked out who would have to bear it. Her proposal is the Feeney-boycott: after the May 2027 election, the parties should refuse to form an executive until the British government publishes the criteria for calling a referendum, with Sinn Féin able to say it has upheld its side of the Agreement and it is now Britain’s turn to uphold its own. She then constructs the coalition. The SDLP, because its authorship of the Agreement makes this the one boycott it might tolerate. Alliance, awkwardly positioned because Naomi Long has already called for the criteria to be published and a boycott seeking only clarity is difficult to portray as tribal. The smaller parties, if they return members. And then, unprompted, she argues against herself: that it may be too confrontational, that it could alienate the centre ground that will decide the referendum, and, most importantly, that publication might weaken the pro-unity case in the short term, because whatever the threshold turns out to be it is almost certainly not met yet, and saying that openly would stall the momentum the campaign currently has.

That final point is a cost voluntarily assigned to her own side, and it is the rarest thing in the whole discussion.

Still, note where she stands. Fenton is a journalist. She once worked for the party and no longer does. Feeney, who proposed the same boycott some weeks earlier and had already returned to appeals within another few weeks, is a columnist. Neither of them will be in a room in May 2027 deciding whether to form an executive. However well designed the proposal is, the price would still be paid by somebody else’s leadership.

That is the more truthful version of the finding. The issue is not that nobody can imagine a cost. It is that the ability to name one is inversely related to the chance of having to bear it. The farther you are from the thing that must be surrendered, the more clearly you can see that it ought to be. That describes a critic, and I will return to that.

What the Fleadh Actually Showed

The strongest objection to everything I am arguing was published on The Pensive Quill a week ago by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, and it should be answered rather than folded away.

His argument is about the Fleadh in Belfast, which nationalist Ireland has spent August reading as evidence that the north has changed beyond recognition. It did change, and the celebration was real. But, he points out, the Fleadh took place in the United Kingdom. Irish identity can now flourish in Belfast much as Scottish and Welsh identity flourish within the same state. Culture is not sovereignty. And the uncomfortable possibility is that the Good Friday Agreement, rather than opening a path out of the Union, may have made the Union much better at accommodating Irishness.

I think he is right, and I think the reason is the mechanism of this essay. The Union grants what is free and withholds what is costly. Irish-language signage, a fleadh in the city centre, an Irish name on a public building: none of these reduce British sovereignty, and a confident state can afford them. Sovereignty itself is the expensive item, and it is not available at any price. So cultural flourishing is not evidence of constitutional movement. It may be the opposite: the sign of a settlement that has learned precisely how much it can concede without conceding anything.

That should disturb anyone who took the Fleadh as a milestone. It certainly disturbs the argument I made two weeks ago.

But it is only half the story, and the other half matters more, because it is the only thing in this whole month that looks like a price being paid rather than merely named.

Read the Fleadh as Ó Súilleabháin does and it is a story about the British state, about what a confident Union can afford to permit. Read it the other way and it is a story about what nationalist Ireland is prepared to offer, in practice, on a street, over eight days, to people who do not share its constitutional goal and will not. Protestants were central to organising it. The deputy First Minister of a unionist party spoke at the opening and was heard. A loyalist flute band played at City Hall. A former UDA man, Davy Adams, wrote afterward in the Irish News that he had finally seen the New Ireland he had spent years failing to describe, and what he described was not a place where his tradition was merely tolerated but one where nobody much cared which foot he kicked with.

That is not a cultural festival being granted by a state. That is a guarantee being rehearsed by a community, and it was rehearsed without a British minister’s permission and at nobody’s invitation but its own.

The distinction matters because it separates accommodation from inclusion, and the whole argument of this essay turns on that. Accommodation is offered from outside by a power that keeps what it values. Inclusion is done from within, at cost, by people who could have chosen otherwise. The first is what the Union extends to Irishness. The second is what happened in Belfast in August, and it is the one thing that answers Ó Súilleabháin’s objection rather than simply absorbing it. If the concern is that the Union has become better at holding Irish identity, the answer is not to deny it. It is that Irish nationalism, for eight days, showed it can hold British identity too, and did so publicly, and nothing collapsed.

None of that is minor, and none of it is new. It is the oldest proposition in the tradition. Tone’s entire formulation was to replace the common name of Irishman for the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, which is not a plea for tolerance but an argument that the categories should stop being the issue. McCracken was a Presbyterian who died at the end of a rope for a republic he understood in exactly those terms. The reason South Africa works as a comparison is the same reason: the Congress tradition was non-racial from within its own ranks, so the voice that eventually spoke already contained the people it would need to reassure. That is not a concession to unionism added to republicanism from the outside. It is republicanism’s founding sentence, and the Fleadh was eight days of it in action.

The problem, and it is the problem with everything in this essay, is that eight days is not a settlement. What was shown on the street has not been written into a single document, offered at a single table, or costed in a single prospectus. It remains an instinct rather than a guarantee, and instincts are free.

The Asymmetry

It troubles the argument in a second way, which I did not recognise until Anthony McIntyre stated it plainly in response to that essay.

As he observed, unionism is divided at party level but remarkably unified on the constitutional question. Whatever else separates it, it holds together on the Union. Nationalism is close to the opposite: unified at party level, where Sinn Féin has dominated, and much more uncertain constitutionally. Nationalists are more willing to accept rule from London than unionists would ever be to accept rule from Dublin.

If that is correct, and I think it is, then something I wrote two weeks ago needs revision. I had argued that the one truly encouraging figure in northern polling was rising unionist consent, the increasing willingness among unionists to accept a referendum result they would lose. I still think that trend is real and that it is the variable that matters. But willingness to hold a vote is not the same as willingness to lose one, and a bloc that fractures over flags and parades while remaining firm on sovereignty is a bloc whose consent shifts within a much narrower range than I allowed. I moved too quickly. The mechanism is right, but the room for it is smaller than I said.

A New Ireland For Whom

Here is where the same mechanism creates the silence that should concern republicans most, and I am not the first to say it this month. Ó Súilleabháin said it more forcefully than I will, and Colin Gannon has been making a version of the point in Jacobin for years.

Ask what a united Ireland would actually be, and the discussion immediately thins. Who owns its wealth. Who can afford its housing. What kind of health service it would run. How, if at all, it would redistribute resources. What prevents a thirty-two-county state from reproducing the inequalities already present on both sides of the border. These are not questions for the day after unity. They determine whether unity offers anything worth voting for.

They remain unanswered for the same reason everything else here remains unanswered. To specify a cost. The moment you say what kind of Ireland you want, you split the coalition assembled to want an Ireland at all, and a movement that has spent thirty years building that coalition is not going to risk it for the sake of a policy platform. So working-class communities are asked whether they want a new state before being told what it would do for them, and the constitutional question is placed first while its social content is postponed without limit.

The oldest expression of this came from within, long before the current arguments. Brendan Hughes, speaking to Fourthwrite in 2000, said the facade had been cleaned but the bone structure was the same. He was talking about the north. He might just as well have been describing the offer.

The One Who Paid

Two weeks ago I wrote about the one movement that reached this goal and kept it, and I will not repeat the case, only the part that matters here. What made the South African transition succeed was not analysis. Everyone had analysis. What made it work was that Joe Slovo, the person with the most to lose by saying it, named a price his own side would pay and argued for it publicly, in the movement’s own journal, to the people who would bear it: guaranteed employment for the civil service of the state he had fought, a government of national unity with posts divided by share of the vote, and a front that dissolved itself into a table where the other side could say no. He was explicit that a leadership which hid the cost from its base would be accused of selling out, so he did not hide it.

Every one of those was expensive, and that is the whole point. They were not requests aimed at the National Party. They were prices the ANC paid, on its own, in advance, to make the other side’s consent possible. Nothing in current Irish nationalism resembles that, and the absence is not accidental.

What Would Have To Be Given

So, at the risk of doing the very thing I have spent seven sections describing, here is what a serious proposal would need to include. Not what Sinn Féin should do. What anyone serious would have to accept.

First, the recognition that this requires two strategies, not one, which is Fenton’s point and the most useful sentence written on this subject this month. Winning a referendum and getting one called are different problems that require different campaigns, and the movement has only ever built the first. What follows bears on both, but the second is the one that has never been attempted at all.

Preparation before the vote, not agitation for it, which means the costed prospectus nobody wants to write because writing it closes off arguments people would rather keep open.

Guarantees to unionism that unionism helps author, not guarantees presented to unionism by the party that opposed it. That means a table where the other side can say no, which is a real transfer of control and not a forum where one tradition speaks with one voice.

A movement broader than any single party or tendency, which means the people who presently own the unity question would have to give it away, and it is their most valuable asset.

And the social content set out in advance, which means telling people what sort of Ireland before asking them to vote for one, at the price of the coalition that vagueness protects.

Each of those costs somebody something. That is how you know they are remedies rather than asks. It is also exactly why none of them is on the table.

Including This

Which leads me to the part of this essay I would rather not write.

I have spent the spring & summer naming things. The party is constrained by the institutions it leads. The left will not shut the door that would create a bloc. The chairman’s forum is a front for one tradition. The commentariat produces indictments and asks. All of that, I think, is true, and some of it took real work to establish.

None of it cost me anything.

Naming is what this position rewards, and I have been collecting the reward. I have not proposed a single thing that would require the tradition I write from to surrender anything and truly mean it. I have described, with considerable precision, the price others would have to pay and paid none of it myself, and the essays have been better received the more accurately I have described it. The market for accurate diagnosis is excellent, and I am in it.

So the final movement is neither a demand nor a prophecy. It is an admission that the mechanism I have spent seven movements dissecting has its own author inside it, and that a body of work which only ever names things is not a way out of the bind. It is one of the more eloquent things happening within it.

And yet the essay’s own evidence contains its exception, and I have spent eight movements walking past it.

In August, over eight days, the costly act was carried out. It was neither merely suggested, nor priced, nor handed off to a commission for later. It was completed on a street by people with no office to defend and nothing personal to profit from the act. Inclusion came from inside instead of being an accommodation bestowed from outside, offered to a tradition under no duty to accept it, and nothing collapsed. Whatever remains uncertain, that no longer belongs to the realm of theory. It occurred in full view, and thousands witnessed it.

The gap between that and a settlement is genuine, and I have been straightforward about that: eight days do not make a document, and instincts cost nothing. Yet note how much narrower that gap is than the one outlined elsewhere in this essay. It does not call for Burnham to relocate, or for the Treasury to soften, or for a party to summon courage that its incentives discourage. What it does require is that someone put into writing what Belfast has already shown, and then place it on a table where the other side is free to refuse. The difficult part is the demonstration, and the demonstration has already taken place.

The gate is shut from outside, and Burnham has just shut it again. The door is held from inside, and O’Neill has just explained why she is holding it. Everything else, for now, including this, is commentary.

Further Reading

Everything below is worth your time, and most of it is better than the summary I have given it here. Read them in whatever order suits you, though the first two are what set this month’s argument going.

Declan Kearney, “Time for a new initiative on Irish unity”, An Phoblacht, 14th August 2026. The fullest statement of Sinn Féin’s current unity strategy, and the source of the proposal for a single forum of all strands of Irish national democratic opinion. Whatever you make of it, it is the party arguing its own case at length rather than through a press release.

Brian Feeney, Irish News, August 2026. Two columns worth reading together. The first proposes that Sinn Féin renew its mandate next May and then decline to form an executive until the British government publishes the criteria for calling a referendum. The second, “In case the proconsul hasn’t worked it out yet, the problem here is partition”, argues that the difficulty is partition and that the Secretary of State ought to say so to the Prime Minister. The distance between them is the subject of this essay. Feeney has been writing in that paper for thirty years and was an SDLP councillor before that, which is worth knowing when you read him on Sinn Féin.

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, “The Provo Paradox”, The Pensive Quill, August 2026. The strongest challenge to my own argument, written from inside the tradition by a man who gave it twenty years. His reading of the Fleadh is the part I have had to think hardest about, and his question about what kind of Ireland is being offered, and to whom, is one nobody has answered.

Siobhán Fenton, “Should nationalists boycott Stormont until the British government publishes the criteria for a border poll?”, 30th August 2026. The most practically useful piece written on this in a long time, because it works out who would actually have to carry the proposal and then argues honestly against its own case. Her point that winning a referendum and getting one called are two different campaigns is the one I keep returning to.

Colin Gannon, “Ireland’s Left Should Lead the Campaign for Irish Unity”, Jacobin, August 2026. Makes the case that a unity campaign built on material change in both jurisdictions could break the deadlock. Behind a free registration wall, which is a nuisance, but he has been asking the question about the social content of a new Ireland for years and deserves the credit for getting there early.

Safeguarding the Union, CP 1021, presented to Parliament January 2024. The command paper that bought the DUP’s return to Stormont. Read paragraph 64, which rules out joint authority as inconsistent with the Agreement, and paragraph 6, which states that making devolution work is the surest way to persuade people their future lies within the Union. It is a short read and it is more candid than anything said out loud since.

The ARINS / Irish Times North and South Survey. The most careful polling on constitutional attitudes on this island, and the source of most of the numbers people quote at each other without having looked at them. The material on unionist attitudes to holding a referendum, as distinct from winning one, is the part worth your attention.

Joe Slovo, “Negotiations: What room for compromise?”, The African Communist No.130, Third Quarter 1992. Available in full through the O’Malley archive at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The document that made the South African settlement possible, written by the man with the most to lose by writing it. It is short, it is unsentimental, and it is the clearest example I know of a leadership telling its own side what a settlement would cost before asking them to accept one.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.
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