Politics

Boris the United Irishman

With breathtaking duplicity, the self-styled minister for the Union has ended up playing the “Green Card” when it comes to Irish politics

June 23, 2021
Boris Johnson and Leo Varadkar. Photo: RollingNews.ie / Alamy Stock Photo
Boris Johnson and Leo Varadkar. Photo: RollingNews.ie / Alamy Stock Photo

Boris’s greatest legacy as prime minister could well be the unification of Ireland. He may achieve what defeated Gladstone, another Etonian prime minister but at the opposite end of the spectrum from him in seriousness: namely, the creation of a cross-communal parliament and government for the whole island of Ireland, with the consent of Ulster’s Protestants. 

If so, it will flow from an act of cynicism matching that of Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, who in 1886 successfully incited their ancestors to resist the Grand Old Man. In the language of the day, he “played the orange card.” “Please God it may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two,” was his prayer. 

Boris’s brazenly cynical ploy was to encourage Arlene Foster and the ruling Democratic Unionist Party of the late Reverend Ian Paisley to support Brexit in the 2016 referendum, with the unspoken understanding this would create cultural and political tension with the South without reaching explosive levels.

When, unexpectedly, Brexit won the referendum—although not in Northern Ireland, where a large majority voted against—the DUP would have done well to retreat in good order, to prevent the dangerous and unsustainable situation of Brexit imposing border controls either south to Ireland or east to Britain. At least under a hard Brexit, it had to be one or the other, and they were equally lethal to Unionism in the context of power-sharing with the Nationalists since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.  

However, in an even more cynical manoeuvre, Boris in 2017-18 successfully urged Foster and the DUP to continue supporting Brexit, while also holding out against Theresa May’s “backstop” in her draft Brexit deal, providing for east-west border controls if these were the only way of avoiding north-south border controls. Lord Randolph Johnson even turned up at a DUP conference and told them he could get a Brexit deal with no backstop, and no borders either. This, of course, was an impossibility. When he had seized the crown from May in 2019, he promptly betrayed the DUP, agreeing with Ireland to go straight to east-west border controls while leaving the province aligned with the Republic and the rest of Europe, in order to get a hard Brexit “done” for mainland Britain.

The most intelligent and least sectarian of the Republic of Ireland’s leading politicians—former and probably next taoiseach Leo Varadkar, the gay son of an Indian immigrant father who worked in England en route—suavely negotiated this “Northern Ireland Protocol” with Johnson in 2019. Surprise, surprise, Varadkar last week made the most serious and suggestive speech yet on how a united Ireland could now come about, in the week that the DUP lost their second leader in a month through the strain of Brexit. 

“The tectonic plates are shifting in Northern Ireland,” said Varadkar. “I believe in the unification of our island and I believe it can happen in our lifetime.”

Varadkar said his party, Fine Gael, the historically moderate force which backed the 1921 Treaty with Britain that had originally allowed Northern Ireland to opt out of the new Free State, would now start recruiting members in the North. It would promote shared infrastructure and cultural projects, like the Irish government’s shrewd move to continue paying for Northern Ireland students to enjoy the benefits of the Erasmus student exchange scheme within the EU.

But most strikingly he talked explicitly of “a new state designed together, a new constitution that reflects the diversity of a bi-national or multi-national state in which almost a million people are British. Like the new South Africa, a rainbow nation, not just orange and green.” He also invoked “a new and closer relationship with the United Kingdom”—a highly suggestive idea for any post-Johnson government anxious to stabilise relations not only in Ireland as a useful first step away from the costly hard Brexit of 2019-20.  

Meanwhile, the DUP isn’t just infighting. It is haemorrhaging support to another “Unionist” party and to the cross-community Alliance party, while Sinn Féin now has a decisive lead in the polls for next year’s elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly.

A predictable political storm greeted Varadkar’s speech. His response was to double down. “It will always be the wrong time,” he responded fluently. “It was the wrong time during the three years of Brexit because of those sensitive negotiations, it was the wrong time this week because of the difficulty the DUP is having. It will be the wrong time for the next few months because of the negotiations between the protocol and the marching season. It will be the wrong time next year because we'll be running into the assembly elections.”

The point, he said, is that the crisis has to be addressed in the name of the “growing middle ground” in the North of Ireland, saying that his party wants to speak with "young people in particular" about the possibility of unification.

Oh, and who would be among those supremely unconcerned if there were a United Ireland in our lifetime? Boris Johnson, of course, the self-appointed “minister for the Union.”