Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said he hopes to see a united Ireland “with cross-community support”.
The media has wondered if this comment will annoy unionists, although Varadkar seems be repeating remarks he made last year, which greatly annoyed nationalists.
In an October interview with the BBC, the taoiseach said: “I wouldn’t like us to get to the point whereby we are changing the constitutional position here in Northern Ireland on a 50 per cent plus one basis.”
He then implied the 70 per cent result for the Good Friday Agreement referendum would be his preferred threshold for passing a border poll.
Sinn Féin and the SDLP quite rightly pointed out this was tearing up the agreement in the guise of protecting it. Fifty per cent plus one is precisely the basis for changing the constitutional position of Northern Ireland.
Dublin’s attitude to the founding documents of the peace process is becoming increasingly cavalier.
Last week, tánaiste and minister for foreign affairs Simon Coveney said it was “not unreasonable” for the DUP to want a “more sustainable” Stormont - apparently suggesting a future Sinn Féin walk-out should not collapse the executive.
Like Varadkar’s comments on a border poll, this represents a fundamental, unilateral re-write of the Good Friday and St Andrews agreements.
Since November, the taoiseach and tánaiste have both made a series of confused and conflicting remarks on the role of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIGC), an institution of the Good Friday Agreement.
Varadkar initially said it would automatically take over the running of Northern Ireland should devolution not be restored, promising the ‘form of joint authority’ Sinn Féin has spoken of since bringing Stormont down. This interpretation of the agreement was as flat-out mistaken as Varadkar’s views on a border poll and he finally corrected himself two weeks ago, noting that BIIGC can only ever discuss non-devolved matters.
However, the mere fact the Irish government would engage in such public speculation is remarkable. Should thoughts on British-Irish cooperation not at least have been run past Britain?
It is clear Dublin feels licensed to think aloud by Brexit, which it considers to be a unilateral British tearing up of the peace process.
Again, this interpretation has no legal basis. The only mention of EU membership in the Good Friday Agreement is in the non-binding pre-amble. High Court and Supreme Court rulings have established that all other references to the EU are incidental - and the agreement contains no references whatsoever to trade, the common travel area or even the border itself, apart from mentioning the development of “border areas”.
But the Irish north and south have decided Brexit breaches the agreement in spirit, creating its own political reality.
The deadlock at Stormont is a similar argument on a smaller scale. Neither the DUP nor London have breached the letter of any agreement, let alone denied rights or equality, and it is telling that no attempt has been made to claim otherwise through the courts. But nationalists have declared a breach in spirit regardless.
Although it is grandiose to talk of cultural differences in Northern Ireland politics, it is tempting to fall into clichés about the legalistic British versus the romantic Irish - the former favouring letter over spirit and the latter vice versa.
If circumstances were reversed and the British felt the Irish had broken the spirit of the peace process, it is unlikely these clichés would hold.
In any case, the question is irrelevant. An agreement can only endure if both sides believe it is being observed in letter and spirit. That basic confidence must be re-established before any meaningful discussion can take place on individual aspects of the peace process.
The implication of the taoiseach and tanaiste’s recent remarks is a renegotiation of the Good Friday and St Andrews agreements - either by restoring devolution under significantly different rules, or by replacing it partly or wholly with British-Irish cooperation. A new understanding of a border poll also seems to be bubbling away at the back of Dublin’s mind.
This one-sided unpicking of the text cannot restore agreement - it can only destroy it.
Before attempting a new relationship, it would be better to try a restatement of vows. If there is to be a BIIGC summit its first order of business should be resolving the spirit versus letter divide between London and Dublin.
How otherwise can both governments hope to address the same divide between the DUP and Sinn Féin?
newton@irishnews.com
