A timely reminder of the Good Friday Agreement

Without a mechanism for a united Ireland, the IRA would not have signed up to the Good Friday Agreement, writes Brian Feeney (for the Irish News)

Leo Varadkar is now the most prominent and vocal campaigner for Irish unity from south of the border, not something you would have expected from a former leader of Fine Gael.

He repeated his commitment to unification on BBC’s The View last Thursday, and then on Friday spoke to a packed hall in St Mary’s University College at an event jointly hosted by Féile an Phobail and Ireland’s Future.

He was talking to Rev Karen Sethuraman, an Ireland’s Future board member, like yours truly.

Varadkar implicitly criticised the position of Micheál Martin, who has set his face against any preparations for an inevitable referendum on Irish reunification.

Varadkar has pointed out several times that we’re on a trajectory towards that referendum. On Friday he cited various factors including demography, election results and recent polling, all showing a sharp increase in the number of young people favouring Irish unity.

In this respect one of the most telling results came from the north’s Life & Times survey (NILT) in May.

This is a survey in which the NIO places great store and has often based planning on its results. It showed for the first time a greater number of young people support unity than don’t.

Furthermore, the gap between those advocating unity and those who support the union has halved in a year.

This finding is in line with other polls such as LucidTalk and the Irish Times/ARINS poll.

Another telling figure is the breakdown of the school population, now 25% Protestant, 49% Catholic, with 25% other/no religion.

Given the speed of change, Varadkar said action and planning were necessary. He warned against thinking “It’ll just happen by osmosis or by saying nothing”.

He also took a swipe at Micheál Martin’s emphasis on reconciliation, which by implication means doing nothing to advance the objective of unity as Varadkar characterises it, rather than a mere ‘aspiration’ as both Martin and Simon Harris prefer to describe it.

Varadkar said: “We can do two things… we can walk and chew gum.”

There’s no contradiction or clash in working to improve people’s lives in the here and now and planning for future events. That’s what all governments should be doing.

Curiously, Michelle O’Neill used exactly the same phrase at a press conference in Armagh on Friday afternoon after the North South Ministerial Council.

She was asked about what Martin called his “focus on reconciliation”, rather than planning for a referendum. “We can do both. We can walk and chew gum,” she replied.

At St Mary’s, Varadkar was at pains to emphasise the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, an important point because Martin has been trying, along with others, to rewrite the GFA.

Martin has asserted the GFA “was about reconciliation”. It absolutely wasn’t. It created political institutions to manage the relationships between the three components of the problem: within the north, north-south and east-west.

However, most importantly, it created the democratic mechanism for achieving Irish national self-determination.

Here’s what Varadkar had to say in that context. “The GFA was never the end game. I’ve spoken with many of those who negotiated it in 1998: John Hume, Seamus Mallon, Bertie Ahern, and it’s clear that there would not have been a GFA if there was not the provision for a united Ireland down the line.”

That is absolutely correct. What’s more, although Varadkar avoided mentioning it, if there had been no provision for a democratic mechanism for achieving a united Ireland, Irish self-determination, call it what you will, the IRA would not have agreed to the GFA and therefore neither would Sinn Féin. In short, the whole process would have collapsed in ruins.

In fact the IRA only agreed to enter the process after the Downing Street declaration in 1993 which contained the following crucial sentence: “The British Government agree that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, north and south, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish.”

As you know, that sentence is repeated in the GFA. If it hadn’t been in the 1993 declaration there’d have been no peace process, and if it hadn’t been in the GFA there’d have been no GFA.

It was a set of words John Hume and Gerry Adams hammered out in the Hume-Adams talks with Irish and British officials in 1993 and agreed with the IRA. Without them there wouldn’t have been an IRA ceasefire, let alone a Good Friday Agreement.

Varadkar does everyone a service by reminding people exactly what the GFA was actually about and also the hazards of trying to rewrite it.

Urgent Appeal