For those of us with a life-long fascination with the internal psychology of Fine Gael (pronounced, if you are a true blue-blood of Ministerial Calibre, as Finneh Ghwaaale, and if you are a bogman fit only for the backbenches as Fyne Gale), there is no issue more fascinating than watching the party wrestling with the notion of Irish Unity.
For years, Fine Gaelers have been unjustly and unfairly maligned on this topic.
Its opponents, first in Fianna Fáil and latterly in Sinn Fein, like to present the Fine Gaeler in his true form as a deeply Hiberno-hostile West Brit™, much more comfortable doffing his expensive cap to Dukes and Marquesses than he is at a game of hurling. For years, the accusation has been that Fine Gael does not want a United Ireland at all, or if it does, it would probably be one under the crown, and only then if Cromwell’s corpse could not be reanimated.
This has always been very unfair. In actual fact, hardly any party wants a United Ireland more than Fine Gael – with the unspoken proviso that it, and only it, should be the one to deliver it.
In this cause, Neale Richmond is, per the Irish Times, to give a speech somewhere at some stage this week reminding us all that Fine Gael’s largely forgotten secondary name is “The United Ireland Party”:
“In an address, to be delivered at a meeting on the theme of unity, he is expected to say the 1998 Belfast Agreement “explicitly” offers the possibility “one day” of a unification referendum being held.
“By the very nature of our political ethos [in Fine Gael], we have the responsibility to properly plan, prepare and articulate what a united Ireland, a unified island, a New Ireland, means to us and could mean to everyone on this island,” according to a draft speech seen by The Irish Times.
However, he notes that Fine Gael has responsibility to “carve out” a more nuanced, less emotive and balanced vision of unity that moves “away from the slogans, flag-waving and arbitrary timelines”.”
That’s the pure, distilled Fine Gael psyche right there: A better class of unity, from a better class of Party.
It should be, you might think, entirely impossible to have a United Ireland without slogans and flag-waving, those two things being entirely central to any nationalist project. As for arbitrary deadlines, the date of any border poll will definitionally be arbitrary – there could be one tomorrow if the UK Government wished it.
But the point is this: for Fine Gael, Irish Unity is not a nationalist project at all. Never has been. And the point of it is not really unity at all, but the final vindication of Fine Gael’s view of the world. That its approach, as distinct from that of Sinn Fein and Fianna Fáil, was both morally and strategically superior.
We can sum up the two versions of unity as they might be imagined in the Fine Gael mind crudely: In one – the bad version - a United Ireland is greeted by The Wolfe Tones blasting “A Nation Once Again” on loudspeakers to a sea of flying tricolours at a concert on the now vacated Shankill Road, the former residents having peaceably decided to move back to the other island in sullen defeat.
In the other, a Fine Gael Taoiseach cuts a ceremonial ribbon at the border while the ladies of the Church of Ireland Women’s Baking Institute politely applaud and two chaps in bowler hats and sashes reach across the border to shake hands for the world’s cameras with Fintan O’Toole and Miriam O’Callaghan, ahead of the all-Ireland Orange Parade through Dublin.
A better class of unity, from a better class of party. Irish Unity, but for the grown-ups.
Or perhaps more accurate again: A United Ireland, achieved free of nationalism.
This is the inherent problem for Fine Gael: It is a party that has, for most of its modern history, disdained flag-waving nationalism in all its forms, much preferring to be the movement that leads Ireland to its rightful place in the “international community”. It is – it says itself – the “party of Europe”.
Indeed, this is one of the reasons the party took Brexit so hard and why Leo Varadkar in particular appeared to be driven to the brink of madness by it: While Britain was in the EU, Irish Unity free of nationalism had functionally been achieved: Sure, weren’t we all part of the one union, anyway? One day, Britain would adopt the Euro, and all difference and distinction on the island would have been abolished, and the same flag would fly in Belfast and Dublin. Blue for Fine Gael and Europe, stars abounding.
That dream having rather abruptly died, the Fine Gael project now has required a reset on the unity question. You can trace the “greening” of the party directly to its reaction to Brexit: Irish Unity not so much as a boon for us, but as a justified consequence of and punishment for the nefarious British turning their backs on the EU project. Peaceably, the thinking goes, the populace of Northern Ireland will slowly turn away from Brexit Britain and embrace unity not out of nationalist sentiment, but out of a love for Europe which can only be requited by Dublin.
And so, we have Neale Richmond out this week: Wanting to move away from the slogans, and the flag waving, and the arbitrary deadlines, and towards a world where the rejected peoples of Northern Ireland will find love again, in the civilised arms of Fine Gael and the EU.
Irish Unity? Certainly. But none of that nationalism, thank you very much.
JMG
"pronounced, if you are a true blue-blood of Ministerial Calibre, as Finneh Ghwaaale, and if you are a bogman fit only for the backbenches as Fyne Gale"
Never have truer words been written!
I think McGuirk is being mischievous here. I rather suspect that a denationalised united Ireland is the one he aspires to. I hope so, at least, though I do agree about the feebleness of a sanitised, bureaucratic, brochures-and-clipboards unification.
But I think Fine Gael have drifted away from that. Brexit lit a nationalist fire within the party, most evidently in the reincarnation of Leo Varadkar as a vocal and mischievous advocate for unity. McGuirk and Varadkar overlapped at Trinity. In those days, Varadkar, like McGuirk, was a stereotypical Tory boy. You only need to compare the two men today to see how far Varadkar has drifted—from the furthest right in his party to the furthest left. I watched Varadkar, sitting prominently in shot, during Catherine Connolly’s inauguration speech. He sat rigid until she mentioned a united Ireland, at which point he nodded vigorously, like a bobble head. As Mary Lou McDonald said, he has found his inner Shinner.
Coveney was similar, radicalised by direct contact with the Saxon foe. Simon Harris and Helen McEntee are getting in on the action too, having been radicalised by Gaza. I have some insider dealings with the party at a local level. There is not a hint of West Britonism anymore. You would be amazed by how green some of the members are.
It isn’t altogether surprising—a post-Brexit Gaelic revival has swept up the country. But I never thought I’d see the day that a Fianna Fail leader is more sensible on the national question than Fine Gael.