The Southern Establishment's attitudes to unification must be challenged

Irish Times

29-04-2025

Sixty one years ago, The Irish Times published a radical challenge to the Establishment consensus on the future of
Ireland
from
John Hume
, the man who would later go on to lead the
SDLP
.
His 1964 articles in this paper drew on his experience as a young teacher from
Derry
, a pivotal figure in the early credit union movement and someone for whom poverty, homelessness and need were core motivators.
Over the last number of years, the New Ireland Commission run by the SDLP has been engaging with
communities across the island
and the full spectrum of attitudes to the future of our shared island.
That work has made it starkly clear to me that Southern establishment views on partition, the nature of reconciliation and the need to finally wage war on poverty and want, particularly in the North, require a new and radical challenge again.
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Foyle MP Colum Eastwood at a New Ireland Commission event. Photograph: Kelvin Boyes/Press Eye
The atrophied attitudes to life, community relations and the urgent need for change in Northern Ireland have become a barrier to a real national conversation about the future.
It has become comfortable to substitute slogans for the serious work required to fundamentally address the social and economic challenges that plague communities across Ireland. Challenges which, I believe, can only be resolved through the transformative impact of a New Ireland.
In particular, the creeping normalisation of the demand that reconciliation be a prerequisite for constitutional change needs to be addressed. Not least of all because that ask, which has come from a limited number of academics and an increasing number of political figures, is never mentioned as a precondition for maintaining the union.
It is too easy to wave away the legitimate demands of a generation of citizens in the North by requiring that we achieve the undefined conditions of reconciliation which have been asked of no one else.
More than that, it is offensive to say to my generation and others that we should be satisfied with peace but be denied a decent economy, better jobs, public services and opportunities because we have not achieved reconciliation. Especially when so many of us live all-island lives where we can see the benefits and the opportunities that our friends and neighbours a few miles away enjoy.
The hard truth that those establishment voices need to hear and to understand is that while reconciliation is a moral imperative for our society, it's hard for people to prioritise holding hands with their neighbours if they cannot feed their kids.
John Hume and Seamus Mallon shake hands at the end of the elections of Ministers to the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont. Photograph: Alan Betson
In those circumstances, which are real for working class communities across the North, it is an abdication of responsibility to tell people that change is on hold indefinitely.
Tackling poverty is an act of reconciliation. Addressing decades-long imbalances in investment and opportunity is an act of reconciliation. Showing people that a New Ireland is about raising living standards, transforming public services and improving the lives of everyone who shares this island is the most fundamental act of reconciliation that many of us could contribute to the future.
Shying away from the reality of life, living conditions and politics in Northern Ireland for a comfortable campaign of sloganeering is a failure to take the challenge of bringing people together in their substantial common interests seriously.
To that end there has, over the last number of years, been a trend of other people never involved in the SDLP telling us what the giants of our movement John Hume and Seamus Mallon thought about the future.
I do not think any rise to the level of taking their names in vain but I know they would have had a wry smile and a raised eyebrow at least at some of the commentary. Take it from me – neither believed that the unity of our people was at odds with the unity of our country.
Neither is a hostage to the other – they are complimentary. The Good Friday Agreement, easily and falsely interpreted as a full stop in conversations about the future, was in fact the beginning of the next paragraph in our island's story.
John and Seamus did not create institutions to contain or diminish the campaign to unite Ireland, they created them as a mechanism to advance our ambitions. Those of us who believe in a new future together should not lose sight of that.
We all have a responsibility to act in the interests of bringing people and communities together. My firm view is that the job of uniting our island and building a new Ireland can be a process of reconciliation. It gives us the opportunity to set aside the enmity and mistrust of the past and to genuinely work together to build a new future. That's the challenge and it's one that everyone in a position of leadership should be prepared to take on.
Colum Eastwood, MP for Foyle, was leader of the SDLP from 2015 to 2024