As a young man living in Belfast, my father, born into the Church of Ireland, used to play the bagpipes in a “kiltie” band as well as the banjo in a local version of the Black and White Minstrels. Each year, he would take part as a piper in the Twelfth of July celebrations but he was never an Orangeman or in any sense a religious bigot. He got on with everybody, including Father Murphy, a Catholic priest he would meet for lunch every Saturday in the Tea Cosy Grill.
Which is not to say he wasn’t conflicted. During the Ulster Workers’ Strike in 1974, aimed at bringing down the original power-sharing executive at Stormont, he was simultaneously a member of the non-sectarian Alliance Party and a press officer for the strikers. When David Blundy, a journalist pal of mine (later shot dead in El Salvador) called him up during the stoppage in the hope of getting some inside information, he answered the phone with a cheery “Crazy Prices” – the name of the supermarket chain for which he was working at the time. Blundy had to remind him that he was currently promoting paramilitary insurrection, not cut-price groceries.
I rejected my dad’s Unionism when I was a teenager, becoming instead a passive supporter of Irish unity – something I never expected to see. Those who know me would point to my close friendship at school with my distant cousin Ronnie Bunting, the son of a British Army officer, who, years later, as head of the Irish National Liberation Army in Belfast, masterminded the assassination in the House of Commons of Airey Neave.
Ronnie’s dad, who tried and failed to teach me maths, was another man who didn’t quite know his own mind. At one point he was election agent for Gerry Fitt MP, a Republican Socialist and founder of the SDLP; later he became the Rev Ian Paisley’s principal enforcer, serving three months in jail for his part in a bloody attack on a civil rights march.
During our schooldays, Ronnie was a proto-Marxist, more interested in the wars in Angola and Mozambique than in the petty quarrels of Ireland. It took the Troubles to redirect his attention. In 1980, long after my friendship with him had ceased, he was shot dead by loyalists while Army Intelligence looked the other way. Mrs Thatcher, it was reported, had demanded her pound of flesh. I, meanwhile, had become a journalist, first for the Cork Examiner, then the Irish Times.
Guilt by association is not easily shaken off. Covering a peace conference in Darlington in 1972, I was arrested at a petrol station on suspicion of plotting to assassinate Willie Whitelaw, the NI Secretary of State. This was news to me. When it became obvious in the course of a lengthy interrogation by Special Branch that I was being held solely because of my link to Bunting, it was suggested instead that I had robbed the petrol station. Only when this, too, was exposed as absurd – there had been so such robbery – was I done for drunken driving and, after a farcical court appearance, fined £500, with a one-year suspension of my license.
In spite of everything, including my frustration over the UK’s reluctance to properly engage in what would become the European Union, I was never remotely anti-British. Indeed, I was at one point chief feature writer for the conservative Sunday Telegraph, and later (until sued by my own editor, Andrew Neil, over a profile of him published in the Telegraph two years previously) an executive and columnist for the Sunday Times. My son is English, living with his English wife in London, and my new-born grandson is English. Note, though, that I say “English,” not British.
Today, aged 70, having spent my later career in London, Europe and the U.S., I live in rural France, still earning a modest crust from writing. What has changed, along with my hair colour, is that the prospect of Irish unity has suddenly drawn closer, obliging me to confront the reality that it could, just possibly, happen in what remains of my lifetime.
Central to the speeding up of the timeline is – what else? – Brexit. The two-and-a-half years or so since the EU referendum have been notable for a number of glaring errors made by the British side. First, ministers thought that negotiating a departure from the EU would be easy, almost routine, and largely cost-free. They didn’t appreciate that the EU might have its own agenda and red lines. At the same time, they failed, totally and incomprehensibly, to foresee that the issue of the Irish border would be central to whatever agreement might be reached. Finally, they believed that signing up to the Irish backstop, as they did last December, was a small matter, which they could revoke at any time without consequences.
One has to ask, where did they get their information and who was advising them?
In Northern Ireland itself, the Democratic Unionists (DUP) are the ultimate Brexiteers, their self-belief bolstered by the fact that the Tories, until this week, depended on their ten votes to pass legislation in Parliament. To them, the roll-call of Derry, Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne – battles fought against the Jocobites by the forces of William of Orange – needs to be extended to include Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg.
They pretend that they are opposed to the EU for the same reasons as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage, namely that the UK must become once more a sovereign country with control of its borders. In fact, what they relish is the chance to reinforce the frontier between the Republic (traitors to the Crown!) and Northern Ireland (where Her Majesty is Defender of the Faith!), with the loyal citizens of Ulster as primus inter pares in the patriotic hierarchy.
DUP-ers have never had any great regard for England, which they view as ungodly, full of heathens and perverts. But in recent years, with the rise of the SNP, they have gone the extra mile and done what would once have been thought impossible by turning their backs on their kith and kin in Scotland as well. The Presbyterians among them have even broken with the Church of Scotland in protest at the latter’s support for same-sex marriage. In extremis, which is their default position, what they cling to is the monarchy and memories of past glories, usually associated with war and Empire. Just as the Anglo-Normans of the Pale in late medieval times ended up as Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis (more Irish than the Irish themselves), so the Democratic Unionists have come to think of themselves as more British than the British.
No one should take them seriously when they say that what they most want from Brexit is new trade deals with China and the U.S. and an end to the pernicious infuence of the European Court of Justice. What they actually want is the chance to reinforce the border with blood-red lines so that they can maintain the six counties it encloses as a 21st century version of the Orange State.
Never mind that the electorate of Northern Ireland will be 55 per cent Catholic and Nationalist within the next ten years. Never mind that Belfast, like Derry, is increasingly a Catholic city. And never mind that Sinn Fein is on the verge of becoming the province’s largest political party. These facts only intensify their refusal to give an inch. The DUP faithful, like the Boers of South Africa in the 1960s, will not waiver in their defence of the cause no matter the numbers or the logic. For while the rest of us are looking hopefully towards a better tomorrow, they are looking to build a time machine that will open a gateway into the past.
But, irony of ironies, what they have actually helped to construct is the mechanism that could ultimately propel them into a united Ireland. This serendipitous outcome could arise under either of the possible Brexit scenarios. If there is a No Deal Brexit, followed by a hard border, the Catholic/Nationalist population will look ever more determinedly to Dublin. And they won’t be the only ones. A sizeable chunk of young, liberally-minded Protestants already regard the DUP as a dead end and are starting to view the Republic – newly confirmed as one of the richest and most open EU member states – as the future.
If, on the other hand, Britain accepts a special status for Northern Ireland that keeps it effectively a protectorate within the single market and customs union, then the drift towards unity will already have begun. Brussels will make the rules and Dublin will oversee the practicalities. London will gradually withdraw behind the newly-drawn border down the Irish Sea.
But I would say that, wouldn’t I? I’m seeing only what I want to see. Perhaps. The point is that the only ones praying for another 50 years of British rule in Northern Ireland are the DUP and the loyalist bully-boys of the Ulster Defence Association who make up the province’s Sturmabteilung. Post-Brexit, the Tory Party, more pragmatic than loyal, will ditch Arlene Foster and her cohorts with scarcely a backwards glance. At which point the Union with Scotland will also come back into focus and even Welsh nationalists might, like Merlin, awaken from their ancient slumber.
Those who deny that this is the direction in which the arc of history is bending need to produce the evidence with which to back their case. It is not enough to insist that Brexit makes economic sense, or that not all Catholics are Republicans, or that Scotland made its choice in 2014 and cannot expect to vote again for at least 20 years. Chaos has been released into the UK’s bloodstream and there is no knowing where it will end up.
Those who called for the referendum in order to make Britain great again may, unwittingly, have created the conditions for an independent England, one quarter the size of France, with ten million fewer inhabitants. When you sow the wind, you must not be surprised if you reap the whirlwind.