Will Brexit Unite Ireland?

The British decision to exit the Europe Union may end up dissolving the United Kingdom and uniting Ireland.

Northern Ireland may not be part of the UK for much longer. While the majority of English voters chose to leave the European Union, 56 of Northern Ireland’s want to remain. The (Protestant) Ulster Unionist Party and (Catholic) Sinn Fein both supported the Remain faction, only the second time in history they’ve stood on the same side of a big political question. They’ve been at each other’s throats for the most part, even before the island’s partition.

The Irish Free State declared its independence from Britain in 1919 and won it in 1922 at the conclusion of a three-year long war. Britain retained most of the northern province of Ulster, though, ostensibly to protect the Protestant majority there. Northern Ireland’s Catholic minority was not very happy about this, of course, and continued to view the British as a foreign occupation force.

War broke out in the 1960s when Catholic and Protestant nationalists battled it with each other, Middle Eastern style, in the streets. Gun battles, assassinations, car bombs, and kidnappings became numbingly routine for three decades. Hideous walls like those in Baghdad and between the West Bank and Israel still keep Catholic and Protestant neighbors away from each other.

More than 3,600 people were killed during the Troubles. It’s a trifling number compared with the civil wars in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, but it’s a huge number for Western Europe, and in any case it’s worth keeping in mind that Northern Ireland is miniscule compared with Yugoslavia, Syria and Colombia. Fewer than two million people live in the entire region. Belfast, the largest city, is home to barely 300,000 people. Metropolitan Boise is larger than metropolitan Belfast. With that in mind, the number of dead doesn’t look quite so small. If Northern Ireland were as large as Syria, for instance, the number killed would be close to 40,000.

It finally ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. There is no longer a hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the island. Citizens can carry British passports, Irish passports or both, regardless of their religion, nationalist identity or political affiliation.

Good Friday wouldn’t have happened without the European Union. Northern Ireland’s membership in the EU made its membership, so to speak, in the United Kingdom almost superfluous. Catholics and Protestants didn’t have to argue anymore about whether or not Dublin or London should be the capital since Brussels trumped both.

When the British partitioned Ireland, the north had a clear Protestant majority. It doesn’t anymore. According to the 2011 census, 42 percent identify as Protestant while 41 percent identify as Catholic. (17 percent don’t identify as either.) Catholics have a higher birthrate, so the Catholic minority may well be a slight majority now.

You might think this means the population has been more or less evenly split about remaining in the UK or uniting with Ireland, but no. The Good Friday Agreement worked so well for so many people that even most Northern Irish Catholics said never mind to a unified Ireland.

In 2013, 65 percent of poll respondents said they would vote to remain in the UK if a referendum were held. Only 17 percent said they wanted to unite with Ireland. Last year, only 25 percent of Northern Ireland’s Catholics said they wanted a united Ireland.

But what about now? A majority of Northern Ireland’s people want to remain in both the EU and the UK, but they can’t.

Northern Ireland (nor Scotland, for that matter) can remain in the EU if the UK leaves. “The EU rules are very clear,” says Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers. “Membership is at member state level, it’s a national question.”

The next question then is, which do these people want more? To be part of the UK or part of the EU? Will they be willing to ditch the UK for Ireland if it’s the only way to remain in the EU?

Maybe.

Northern Irish Catholics aren’t as willing to go along with the status quo as they were even a month ago. “Unionists would have to rely on Catholics not wanting to be part of a united Ireland,” says Peter Shirlow at the Institute of Irish Studies in the UK. “That has been the trend up to last Friday, but I think that trend is now changing.”

After Brexit, even many Protestants are applying for Irish passports, not because they identify more with Ireland than the UK but because they wish to remain citizens of Europe, and they can only do so now through the Republic of Ireland.

“Our political structures,” SDLP leader Colum Eastwood writes in the Irish Times, “were shaped in the context of European membership.” The SDLP is the mainstream Irish nationalist party in Northern Ireland. Unlike Sinn Fein during the Troubles, it disavowed the Irish Republican Army’s physical force republicanism. 

We have known and understood the positive impact of Europe. We have known and experienced the example of its architecture and its advocacy for co-operation and peace. We opted to stay true to that vision. We have not given any consent to change it. Unionists and nationalists alike backed that verdict.

The paradox therefore persists. The change chosen by the English people was not chosen by the Irish people. Nor was it chosen by the Scottish. The simplicity of those facts point to one reality: their future cannot now be our future.

The Northern Irish—along with everyone else in the rest of the UK and Ireland—will be doing a lot of soul-searching and arguing about this in the days ahead. Minds will change. Heels will dig in. New banners will fly. And votes will be cast.

Hopefully, bullets won’t fly.