Northern Ireland and Brexit: Three effects on ‘the border in the mind’

Introduction

One prominent (pro-Leave) journalist (Moore, 2016) wrote of the European Union (EU) referendum result that the question which should be asked of all aspiring political leaders is, ‘Who understands that everything has changed, changed utterly?’ Of one thing he was certain: ‘Brexit is not, primarily, a negotiation, but a new path’. The claim was a large one: that something substantial and important had taken place, that a shadow line had been crossed between one sensibility and another, and that the world felt different now. How was that change appreciated? It was understood broadly in two ways. For those who spoke on behalf of Leave, the result meant that people of the United Kingdom had taken back ‘control’ or had got their ‘own country back’. If the former was more frequently heard on the lips of Conservatives (Gove, 2016) and the latter more commonly proclaimed by members of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) (O’Flynn, 2016), the sense was more or less the same: the referendum result meant the recovery of national self-determination. On 24 June in Boston, Lincolnshire (which had recorded the strongest support for leave), a UKIP poster demanding ‘we want our country back’ was amended to read ‘we got our country back’ (Chakelian, 2016). For those who spoke on behalf of Remain, the meaning of the result was succinctly captured by one journalist (Freedland, 2016): they had ‘woken up in a different country. The Britain that existed until 23 June 2016 will not exist anymore’. This commonly expressed feeling conveyed a deep sense of personal as well as collective loss. As another journalist (Behr, 2016) put it, they now barely recognised their own country having become suddenly ‘the stateless tribe of Remainia’. In Twickenham (which recorded a Remain majority), someone was moved to write, ‘we are the 48% and we want our country back’ (Goss, 2016). Such declarations capture the drama of the moment but they also help to make the political ‘weather’.

Comparison with the previous referendum on Europe in 1975 reveals the extent to which things have changed. All regions and countries of the United Kingdom—with the exception of Shetlands and the Western Isles—voted to stay within the (then) European Economic Community (EEC). At the time, the concern in Westminster had been that Northern Ireland, along with Scotland, would be distinctive by voting against membership. Of course, this was the United Kingdom as the ‘Westminster model’. This United Kingdom certainly does not exist any longer and if a Leave vote was about recovering the old order, that model was not available. In 2016, not only is the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom modified by devolution but also attitudes towards the EU are fragmented regionally. Scotland and Northern Ireland now do take a different position from England and Wales. In all, 60% of voters in Scotland and 54% in Northern Ireland voted Remain. Brexit changes the context, not only in terms of relations between the EU and the United Kingdom but also relations between Scotland, Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. The people have voted. Yes, but who are the people? This article examines the case of Northern Ireland and considers three consequences of the referendum result. The first explores the matter of the border but does so in a distinctive way through the idea of the ‘border in the mind’. This idea establishes the context for reflecting on three related ‘effects’: identity effects, political effects and constitutional effects.

Border matters

The spectre haunting Brexit has a unique reference point in Northern Ireland: the border. The border was the speculative focus even though it figured little in the original calculation to hold a referendum (Douglas-Scott, 2015: 4). There are three aspects to the border question. During the referendum campaign, only two of them attracted much comment but the argument of this article is that the third is fundamental. The first concerns the ‘what’ of the border; the second concerns the ‘where’ of the border; and the third concerns what we call ‘the border in the mind’.

The question—what sort of border?—involves a simple option: will Brexit mean the continuation of a ‘soft’ border or will it mean the imposition of a ‘hard’ border between the two parts of the island? The trading openness of the north/south border—because of British and Irish membership of the EU single market, a British/Irish common travel area and the demilitarisation of the border following the end of the Troubles—meant that by June 2016, ‘the physical manifestation of the Irish border itself is hardly discernible and there is freedom of movement across it’ (eudebateni.org, 2016: 11). These developments had made the border—that central focus of Irish politics throughout the twentieth century—the softest of soft boundaries, more a crossing than a barrier. The Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom (Mulhall, 2016: 21) argued that common membership of the EU had been the framework within which border politics had been transformed. His shorthand for this change was the EU ‘context’. In sum, though the EU had been peripheral to the actual negotiation of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998, it was the larger context which facilitated the outworking of that Agreement, especially in and around the border itself. A dedicated North-South body—the Special European Union Programmes Body—implemented the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, allocating 2.3 billion euros of funding (Tonge, 2017). The fact that Brexit would obviously intimate physical controls at the border became a central plank of Remain’s campaign. Its Chair, Tom Kelly (2016), claimed that it stretched credulity to believe that there would be no disruption to trade and movement. The Irish ambassador (Mulhall, 2016: 24) explained to the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee the politics of ‘context’: ‘improved north-south relations, also facilitated by EU membership, were part of the overall fabric of the process in which both countries are successfully engaged and have been engaged now for more than 20 years’. Indeed, a very similar point was made by Mulhall’s counterpart, the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Ireland, who also warned of the practical effects of Brexit on relationships within Ireland and between Ireland and the United Kingdom (Chilcott, 2016). Brexit could involve either some customs controls, for example, on EU rules on the origin of products or formal passport controls compromising, and perhaps ending, the common travel area between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom.

One senior figure in the Leave campaign, Lord Lawson, did acknowledge this as a possibility (BBC News, 2016: 5). Mainly, however, a hard border has been rejected by Brexit supporters. For example, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers (2016), argued that there was ‘no reason why the UK’s only land border should be any less open after Brexit than it is today’. Democratic Unionist members of parliament (MPs) also took that line. Gavin Robinson (2016: 39) did not foresee any change to the border because the ‘UK and the Republic of Ireland already have border arrangements of co-operation because we both lie outside Schengen, so we both look after one another and co-operate quite closely outside of what is a unified European Union border process’. One post-referendum report (Polley and Hoey, 2017: 7) claimed that, because the British and Irish governments already collaborate extensively on immigration and other matters, ‘automated border clearance systems have made the need for disruptive customs checks redundant, even where so-called “hard borders” exist’. Indeed, the intention of Prime Minister May (Parker, 2017) is to have a ‘seamless’ or ‘frictionless’ border, a principle written into the United Kingdom’s letter to the President of the European Council triggering Article 50 (BBC News, 2017).

The second question concerns the ‘where’ of the border. When Brexit happens, where would the controls (of whatever kind) be? Would they be along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (as much of the debate assumed) or would they be between the island of Ireland as a whole and Great Britain? If keeping a ‘soft’ or ‘electronic’ border in Ireland between north and south was deemed important, imposing a ‘hard’ border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain might be necessary. The answer was important mainly (if not exclusively) for unionists who feared not only distinguishing Northern Ireland symbolically from the rest of the United Kingdom but also returning Northern Ireland to its quasi-quarantined status of the early Troubles. Indeed, the Chair of Stronger In thought that it was bizarre to watch and listen to ‘some of the most vociferous unionists from all parties taking cavalier risks with the Union they profess so much loyalty to’ (Belfast Telegraph, 2016a). The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader at the time, Mike Nesbitt (2016a: 3–4), designated the question a major ‘existential’ threat to the United Kingdom. His reasoning was that if the UK government’s emphasis was on a seamless border on the island, then the border ‘is more likely to be at Stranraer, Cairnryan, Heathrow, Gatwick, our ports and our airports’. Leave supporters proposed a double dismissal: dismissal of concerns about the ‘where’ of the border and dismissal of concerns about the ‘what’ of the border. Hard border or soft border, north/south or east/west, little or nothing would change. This proposition was curious since Leave also proposed that Brexit would change everything for the United Kingdom’s relations with the EU and the rest of the world.

The former UUP leader, David (Lord) Trimble, was confident that the question of the border was manageable (McBride, 2016). His argument was historical, noting that Northern Ireland had had for 50 years arrangements that would exist, post-Brexit: ‘from 1920 until we joined the European Union there was a border where there were [trade] tariffs there and people moved back [and forth] and there was never any serious problem’. Moreover, ‘there was a long time in which we were not in the European Union and there were different tariffs—in fact, largely imposed by Dublin—and that didn’t cause any problems’. Trimble was historically correct about a hard border between the island of Ireland and Great Britain during the Second World War. To remove it required compromise and agreement on immigration control between London and Dublin, which, after 1952, became known as the ‘common travel area’. This was a pragmatic approach by both states, which delivered effective management of immigration between them. However, as Ryan’s comprehensive review of the common travel area shows, its success is due to a combination of historical factors, which do not necessarily ensure its easy continuation. He concluded (Ryan, 2001: 874), ‘The apparent continuities in the history of the common travel area should not mask the extent to which it now faces a qualitatively new set of pressures’. One of them will be Brexit. The belief that we have been here before and that nothing is going to change glosses over not only the diplomatic and practical complexities but also the imaginative impact on different constituencies in Northern Ireland. This brings into play the third understanding of the border: ‘the border in the mind’.

The border in the mind

In 1966, the historian J. C. Beckett argued in the conclusion to his History of Modern Ireland that the real border in Ireland is not on the map ‘but in the minds of men’. The irony to which he was alluding was that partition in 1921 had actually provided a period of stability, which no one had expected, but which might contribute eventually towards removing that ‘border in the mind’. Beckett’s was not a call for Irish unity but an intimation of what John Hume was later to call an ‘agreed Ireland’. Ironically, the book was published just on the eve of the recent conflict in Northern Ireland, a 30-year period of instability which few had expected and which made the border in the mind deeper than before. The 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement was intended to institutionalise a new stability, to end political violence and, as many hoped, to ‘decommission the mind-set’ of division. In short, the hope invested in the Agreement was a wager on ‘taking the border out of Irish politics’. This hope did not mean unification but a progressive lowering of the political temperature in Northern Ireland and the fashioning of a new modus vivendi on the island. It meant shifting the focus away from the ‘ends’ of politics—removing the border or securing the border—to the ‘means’ of politics—not only what was known colloquially as ‘bread and butter’ issues of individual and collective welfare but also doing so under the governing principle of consent (Aughey, 2007). In short, here was the outline of that ‘agreed Ireland’.

One can legitimately criticise as dysfunctional the institutional arrangements and governing practices established in the two decades since 1998, but it is also possible to defend that (paradoxically) utilitarian dysfunction in the name of a higher function, namely, embedding the principle of consent in the political culture. Elsewhere, we have used the analogy of the ‘dry stone wall’ to illustrate this (Aughey and Gormley-Heenan, 2011: 10–12)—a craft of building walls using locally found stones that interlock and support each other without the use of mortar to bind them together. The purpose of the analogy is to point out that political arrangements are perhaps best understood not as grand architectural designs or blueprints but as dry stone walls, using the political building materials locally to hand in a rough and ready but nevertheless intelligently constructive manner. From this perspective, the eccentricities, irregularities, even the dysfunctional characteristics of the Agreement are actually necessary. They are not ‘set in stone’ and are open to change but care has to be taken about the arrangement of the political dry stone wall. This situation is starkly the case in Northern Ireland for there is no guarantee that the delicate structure will not fall apart. There is no ideological mortar—common national identity—holding things together. The dry stone wall analogy provides insight on how the elements contributing to Northern Ireland’s political stability ‘stand in relation’ to one another and is sensitive to their delicate assembly.

The first ‘standing in relation’ may be described as Lampedusa’s paradox. It can be stated thus. For unionists, if things are to stay the same (the Union continues and majority consent is affirmed), things will have to change (executive authority shared with nationalists and republicans as well as an all-Ireland dimension). For nationalists, if things are to change (a possible transition to Irish unity), then things will have to stay the same (unity can only be achieved on the basis of unionist consent which means continuity of Northern Ireland’s place within the Union). The essential point to note is that the principle of consent in this paradox involves mutuality. It means not only that nationalists consent to Northern Ireland remaining within the United Kingdom but also their consent is required for the sort of Northern Ireland that remains in the United Kingdom. This standing in relation is precarious but there was evidence that a new Beckett-like stability was beginning to emerge. For example, despite its difficult beginnings with frequent suspensions and snap elections, the Northern Ireland Assembly had served its first full term of office from 2011 to 2016 under the leadership of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin.

The second ‘standing in relation’ concerns institutional links on the island between north and south. The establishment of such links had been the fatal gift of all previous initiatives in recent Irish history, not only within unionism where they were considered to be a mechanism to promote Irish unity but also within republicanism where they were considered to be about ‘copper-fastening partition’. It has been one of the great transformations in modern Irish history: that, at least for a decade after the St Andrews Agreement of 2006, very few spoke of the border. In an irony of inversion, one could argue that north/south interactions in practical matters have helped to secure the Union if only because they demonstrated a lack of integrative ambition on the part of the Irish Government as well as any credible strategy for unity on the part of northern nationalists. Even though the DUP had denounced north-south institutions, the party used the St Andrews Agreement to legitimise its own adjustment to their continued operation. For unionists, the Agreement appeared to take the border out of politics—and to their advantage, just as Beckett had imagined in 1966. Equally for nationalists, the Agreement helped to take the border out of the island, allowing them to feel more comfortable within Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. Opinion polls suggested that northern nationalism did not accord unity any pressing significance, at least in the short term. For example, a 2015 attitudinal survey, jointly commissioned by the BBC Northern Ireland and the Irish State Broadcaster RTE, showed that a majority of Catholics (52%) backed short-term options which would see Northern Ireland remain as part of the United Kingdom, though 57% still hoped to see a united Ireland emerge within their lifetime (RTE, 2015).

However, a third standing in relation has been membership of the EU or the ‘context’ of which the Irish ambassador spoke. The EU context helped stabilise the topography for both of these other relationships. Even if people found it hard to love the EU in its bureaucratic manifestations, EU membership did help to contextualise being either British or Irish or both, mainly for nationalists but not only for them. In other words, it was yet another way of not talking about the border. As one commentator observed (Leahy, 2016), what has been central to the Northern Ireland peace process is ‘a slow but inexorable process of making the border less important’. However, the effect of Brexit means that it can only become more important. ‘That may not immediately threaten the peace process’, as Leahy observed, ‘but it certainly requires a resetting of the tri-partite relationships between Ireland, Britain and the North’. In other words, Brexit disturbs expectations which emerged over two decades about how the parts of the Agreement stand in relation. It shifts the foundation upon which things stood and raises questions about consent and political identity. Why might this be so?

Brexit has brought back the ‘border in the mind’ in quite dramatic fashion, for as the head of Vote Leave in Northern Ireland, Lee Reynolds, was willing to concede, it was not so much economic issues, but ‘values’ that move voters on the EU (McBride, 2016). And one of those values was the identity, as well as the utility, of being ‘European’. Hitherto the acknowledgement of multiple identities in Northern Ireland—Irish, British and European—at least permitted, if it did not ensure, a reasonably relaxed nationalist attitude about their standing in relation to unionists and vice versa. After the referendum, the old binary choice of British and—or versus—Irish (which had never gone away) has come back centrally into the frame of political reference. The strongest support for Leave came from within unionism, while the strongest support for Remain came from within nationalism and it is no surprise, therefore, that this result was bound to be taken as a victory for one community at the expense of the other. Post Brexit, the context will be modified yet again, raising the attendant question of consent. This question had been one subtext of the referendum campaign, and once Northern Ireland became a distinctive Remain region within the United Kingdom, it was naive to assume that there would not be corresponding pressures to acknowledge that position (as in Scotland). And so, in reflecting on the potential implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland, there are three related but distinct ‘effects’ which require examination: identity effects, (party) political effects and constitutional effects.

Identity effects

The disordering of expectations has been evident among nationalists, though it is not confined to them. The UUP had recommended its supporters ‘on balance’ to vote Remain. The argument (Nesbitt, 2016b) was made that a Remain vote was ‘not only the better option regarding the European Union, it also strengthens the future of the United Kingdom’. Nevertheless, ‘on balance’ provided a ‘conscience’ clause for members to take another view and provided voters, concerned about national sovereignty, with a licence to vote Leave. The leader of the DUP (Foster, 2016) had stated succinctly the party’s position: ‘Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom as a whole should take back control’. Although the DUP played an active role in the Leave campaign throughout the United Kingdom, Foster’s view was that ‘on balance’ Leave was the correct choice for Northern Ireland. Following the referendum result, there has been a recalibration to a common unionist position of ‘making the best’ of Brexit, despite variations in the unionist vote with 89% Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) voters pro-Brexit along with 70% of DUP voters in contrast to 54% of UUP voters (Garry and Coakley, 2016). Thus, the UUP (2016) declared that the days ‘of being a “Remainer” or a “Brexiteer” are over’, arguing that all parties ‘must come together and work collectively to identify and exploit the positive potential for Northern Ireland’. This shift can only happen ‘when we recognise our collective future in Northern Ireland is best served politically, economically and socially when we are secure within the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, albeit one with good relations with the Republic of Ireland. Equally, the DUP (2016) remains convinced that the decision to leave the EU is in the best interests of the United Kingdom but that it ‘is important to maximise our opportunities as well as overcoming the challenges unique to Northern Ireland’. Although there is no universal ‘effect’ among unionists that they have ‘got their country back’, the psychological effect of Brexit is not a discomforting one. This is certainly not the case on the nationalist side.

The leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), Colum Eastwood (2016), argued that ‘to take the common EU membership we had with the south of Ireland away—has a tremendous destabilising effect on the Northern nationalist psyche. I do not think that that can be overstated’. That potential for instability was accepted by the House of Lords European Union Committee (2016: 42), noting ‘the potential psychological impact of Brexit in undermining confidence in the Agreement and in subsequent agreements’. This new ‘mood’ has been captured by the author and journalist Malachi O’Doherty. O’Doherty (2016) argued that the effect of the 1998 Agreement had been to promote the assent of pragmatists within northern nationalism, content to live in the United Kingdom so long as their rights are respected and they have a secure sense of identity but with no emotional or sentimental attachment either to Britishness or to the political institutions of the United Kingdom. On the other hand, they are not ideologically republican or strongly nationalist in politics but feel quite strongly Irish. Instrumentally, there is willingness to rub along with those unionists who do have such emotional and sentimental attachment. Following the EU referendum, O’Doherty believed that nationalist pragmatists would have to re-evaluate when faced with the prospect of living in a United Kingdom ‘without the protections that come from Europe—and the underpinning of a common identity with the Irish that also comes from Europe’. Now that the ‘standing in relation’ within Northern Ireland, between north and south and between the United Kingdom and the EU, had been disturbed by the referendum result, the ‘context’ was less comfortable. O’Doherty speculated that it was possible again to envisage a change of mind among nominal nationalists, ‘who last week or even today would vote against Irish unity’ and he saw, as a consequence, renewed interest in a united Ireland. That description expressed well the mood of nationalists who felt that on 24 June 2016, they had ‘woken up in a different country’. It is difficult to quantify the depth rather than the extent of that mood among ‘nominal’ nationalists, but one would need to have a tin ear for the history of Irish politics to dismiss the possibility of this identity effect issuing in a challenge to the stability of Northern Ireland’s constitutional position, especially if it appears to have been a unionist victory. Such is the traditional political dynamic between the communities. Indeed, that renewed challenge can already been seen. For example, at the 2017 all-Ireland Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) annual congress, GAA President Aogan O Fearghail reiterated the GAA’s commitment to a united Ireland publicly at congress for the first time in 15 years (Boland, 2017).

A second, and related, identity effect concerns attitudes in the Republic of Ireland. If the ironic inversion of north-south institutional cooperation after 1998 was to remove the fear of such cooperation from unionist politics, it also helped to remove the issue from the agenda of Irish politics. The Brexit effect has been to compel engagement again, and those who may not have given serious attention to the affairs of Northern Ireland for some time now feel obliged to do so. Once again, it is difficult to quantify that mood, but there does appear to be a change in the political weather and in this case it is expressed not only, as one might expect, by traditional republicans but also by liberal secularists. One such is Fintan O’Toole (2016), an influential writer and journalist whose work is the epitome of moderate rationalism and one never given to nationalist enthusiasm. His starting point is that consent is the basic stabilising element in the dry stone wall of the peace process and that Northern Ireland has not consented to being ‘removed’ from the EU. Brexit, he claimed, is against not only the spirit of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in particular but it also threatens to undermine the consent principle. It challenges the hopes which nationalists invested in the EU ‘context’ as a way to remove the border. As a consequence, he thought, the exceptional status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom now requires an exceptional identity within the EU and it must come back onto the agenda of the Irish government. ‘Ireland must engage with the EU at every level to insist that Northern Ireland remains a part of the EU. This will be complex, but so is Northern Ireland’. And the reason he submits—as O’Toole has argued in a number of powerful articles—is that the referendum vote represents a distinct assertion of English nationalism (rather than unionism) which is at odds with the interests of everyone in Northern Ireland. At this point, the perspectives of both O’Doherty and O’Toole intersect with arguments of nationalists in Scotland. For many nationalists, north and south of the border, Northern Ireland—its web of relations, its strategic context and its self-understanding—has become a different country.

Party effects

In the EU referendum, the voters mainly followed party lines, the exception being UUP voters, but it was clearer within nationalism than unionism. In all, 86% of Sinn Féin and 92% of SDLP voters supported Remain; 70% of DUP and 54% of UUP voters supported Leave (Coakley and Garry, 2016). One can argue, of course, that the outcome of the referendum—either way—was never going to be decided by voters in Northern Ireland. It would be decided at a UK level, and mainly on the weight of voting choice in England. For unionists, who had little affection for the EU, there was nothing to lose in voting according to their instincts. Or, to put that another way, there was the possibility of a win/win. Maximising a unionist Leave vote might mean Northern Ireland confirming its British identity by being part of an overall UK Leave majority (though national and local opinion polls suggested that this would be unlikely). On the other hand, if Remain were to win, then it was a cost-free enterprise—rather like the result in 1975 in which the unionist parties campaigned against membership. For Leave to lose (as most pollsters expected) was not an immediate blow to local unionist politics: well, keep calm and carry on. However, for Sinn Féin (which looks upon the EU instrumentally), a Leave victory at UK level and a Remain victory at Northern Ireland level presented an opportunity for revisiting its manifesto demands for a poll on Irish unification. This scenario was another possible win/win situation.

Therefore, the outcome of the referendum has very practical consequences for British-Irish cooperation on Northern Ireland and intimates a rather obvious Catch-22. Both governments would like to see a ‘common voice’ emerging from politicians in Northern Ireland to achieve the best Brexit deal for Northern Ireland. For Secretary of State James Brokenshire (2016), the ‘decision has been taken across the UK for the UK including Northern Ireland to leave’, so the questions have become ‘how as Northern Ireland do we come together?’ and how collectively can the institutions meet the ‘challenges but also at the opportunities to make a success of Northern Ireland within the UK but outside of the EU, while still being sensitive to and reflective of the Belfast Agreement and the subsequent agreements’? Similarly, Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny (2016a) called upon Northern Ireland’s parties to formulate ‘a shared view of priorities, on a North-South as well as an East-West basis, in the context of forthcoming negotiations at EU level’. Unfortunately, the Brexit effect, while making that common position desirable, appears to have made it highly unlikely. For example, before stepping down as Deputy First Minister—and therefore dissolving the Assembly—Martin McGuinness demanded an all-Ireland perspective if only because Brexit would have ‘a massive impact on every one of Ireland’s 32 counties’. Any decisions that need to be taken should ‘be taken between our administration in the North and the government in Dublin’. The role of the British government was notable by its absence. Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams also argued—as first step—for a ‘designated special status for the North’ and the objective has been to intensify arguments about that ‘Irish dimension’ which the 1998 Agreement had appeared to put safely to bed. Both propositions intimated a definite upping of the political stakes. The reason is the result of the Assembly election on 2 March 2017. The results of this ‘snap’ election saw a sharp increase in the nationalist vote and brought Sinn Féin to a position of just one seat less than the DUP in the Assembly. Although the DUP still retained the title of the largest party in the Assembly, its share of first preference votes had decreased from 29.2% in 2016 to 28.1% in 2017. Unionism lost its majority status for the first time since the creation of the state in 1921 (Northern Ireland Assembly, 2017).

To what extent can this result be attributed to a Brexit effect? One should be careful not to pitch interpretation too high, for, as Michael Oakeshott (1962: 13) advised, it is usually wise to be sceptical of ‘the false emphasis which springs from being over-impressed by the moment of unmistakable emergence’. Yet the rise in the turn-out of nationalist voters is striking and it reversed a trend which had been detectable over a decade. While there were many factors which may explain this reversal, one element can be attributed to the identity effect of Brexit. Sinn Féin took an opportunity not only to attract younger nationalist voters but also to put Irish unity back onto the agenda. It judges that the space has opened up to mobilise that identity effect north and south of the border. To claim a Brexit effect on the unionist side is much more speculative. However, recent support for the Alliance Party—the only non-nationalist party supporting Remain—rose by 2% (from 7% to 9.1%) and this may in part be explained by a marginal shift by pro-Remain unionist voters. The shift in voting pattern—differential turn-out, vote transfer and shifts in party preferences—compounds the impact of identity and promotes constitutional effects.

Constitutional effects

The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of 1998 came to be known as the ‘only game in town’. Hitherto, alternatives from Irish unity to full integration into the United Kingdom had been canvassed but they were no longer considered realistic politics. After 1998, it appeared that there was no reason to speculate about constitutional futures because the painstaking negotiations of the Agreement had established the only conceivable, mutually acceptable, template. These arrangements were consolidated whenever the DUP promoted the modifications negotiated in the St Andrews Agreement of 2006. The (in effect) joint Executive of DUP and Sinn Féin survived in place—if not in harmony—for a further decade and, almost Beckett-like, provided an unexpected period of stability in Northern Ireland. Although the devolved institutions experienced regular crises of public confidence and periodic crises of incapacity, there was little public expectation that they would be brought down. However, the manner in which Brexit has modified the ‘dry stone wall’ of the Agreement has disturbed political expectations and brought back into play those constitutional options which formerly had been marginalised. An extended period of Direct Rule may now ensue, which some unionists have welcomed, and old ideas have resurfaced in nationalist politics, both north and south of the border.

For example, there have been arguments for EU special status for Northern Ireland, which also implies special constitutional status within the United Kingdom. Special status is an idea harking back to proposals made by the SDLP in the 1992 Mayhew Inter-Party Talks for a six-member Commission to govern Northern Ireland, with three members elected from local parties and three appointed by the British government, the Irish government and the European Community, respectively. Moreover, the academic Brendan O’Leary (2016) has proposed that England and Wales should be ‘externally associated’ with the EU, while Scotland and Northern Ireland should continue as members. The different country which emerged as a consequence of the referendum result was now a United Kingdom ‘composed of two unions—that of Great Britain, and that of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—and that in each of the two unions one partner has clearly expressed the desire to remain within the EU’. Scotland and Northern Ireland should retain their representation at the European Parliament, he argued, but not on the Council of Ministers, perhaps with a single shared commissioner. Although the Prime Minister’s intention is for a ‘clean Brexit’ and though the Northern Ireland Secretary has ruled out anything but a UK-wide process (Walker, 2017), the arguments for special status continue to be made and to find a sympathetic hearing (Irish Parliament Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, 2017). Indeed, the leader of the SDLP (The Irish Times, 2017) has raised again the option of ‘joint authority’ to allow a balance of voices between the two traditions on the island in the context of Brexit:

In the absence of an executive, British direct rule would mean we are at the mercy of a hard Brexit British government. Joint authority will mean we have a voice at the Brexit table, a voice that could stand against attempts to ignore the will of our people.

The argument for British/Irish joint authority has been made regularly in the last 25 years and the argument against it remains just as strong: that the United Kingdom would continue to bear the financial and political costs but without sovereign authority. For those who feel that Brexit has given them back their country, such agitation for constitutional exceptionalism—either special status or joint authority—constitutes not only ‘post referendum froth’ but also challenges the principle of consent. There is a weary recognition ‘of yet another scheme to ease the North out of the UK without democratic approval’ and, as in the past, that such moves should be opposed and defeated (Gudgin, 2016). The truth, according to this view, is that the facts of economic life favour the United Kingdom and, moreover, the truth of the EU is that it is an association of states, not regions with or without special status. That constitutional position relies heavily on utilitarian facts of economic and diplomatic life but it may not be attuned to changing pressures of identity and political effects. Thus, the 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly election result returned a majority to the Assembly who did explicitly favour constitutional exceptionalism and who campaigned during the election on that basis.

The Irish political parties have felt obliged to take their own initiatives. The leader of Fine Gael, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, suggested that some new all-Ireland forum was required to deal with the challenge of Brexit. His initiative is the All Island Civic Dialogue. At its first meeting, Kenny (2016b) acknowledged ‘the deep concern arising for many in Northern Ireland at the prospect of being outside of the EU project that has delivered so much for political stability, peace, reconciliation and economic prosperity’. None of the unionist parties attended this ‘Civic Dialogue’ because they argued it was beyond the remit of cross-border cooperation established by the Agreement and therefore lacked unionist consent. Fianna Fáil leader, Michael Martin, argued that the referendum result requires rethinking current arrangements. The most urgent thing ‘is an immediate end to the hands-off detachment of recent years’ (Belfast Telegraph, 2016b). Indeed, Fianna Fáil has gone further and has advocated the need to prepare for Irish unity, which, Martin speculated, was now possible within his lifetime (Kelly, 2017). The outline of this strategy is a familiar one: a united Ireland which would retain the structure of the 1998 Agreement but in which sovereignty would shift from London to Dublin. The standing in relation of the United Kingdom and Ireland would be fundamentally re-ordered and cross-border arrangements would be substantially developed. Harmonisation is the nationalist word—though unionists would probably call it annexation. It is assumed, of course, that the dry stone wall will stay standing—just as Montaigne held that some old buildings appear to live and support themselves by their own weight (much as Beckett assumed the enduring stability of politics in 1966). That expectation may be unfounded. Although Martin claimed that his idea should not be confused with ‘premature border polls’ advocated by Sinn Féin, there is no doubt that Brexit has heightened northern nationalist expectation that the combination of identity and political effects indicates a ‘tipping point’ for Irish unity (Meagher, 2016). And some, like Steven Agnew, leader of the Green Party in Northern Ireland, have claimed that not only nationalists ‘are saying for the first time in their life they would vote for united Ireland, having never contemplated it before’ (Humphries and Ferguson, 2016). How serious is that contemplation among unionists is very doubtful and the thought that unionism too has ‘tipped’ feeds rather dangerous nationalist speculation that unity is now inevitable (Pollak, 2017). In sum, the force of this particular constitutional effect cannot be other than destabilising for the arrangements put in place after 1998.

Conclusion

The implications of Brexit for the United Kingdom and the EU are momentous, but for Northern Ireland, they have a distinctive effect. It is here that the feelings of ‘waking up in a different country’ and ‘getting one’s country back’ have direct consequences for political stability. The Irish border featured only marginally in the UK campaign where it was unhelpfully framed in terms of a possible return to political violence, and during the campaign in Northern Ireland, the border was debated mainly in technical terms: what sort of border, hard or soft or electronic? There was also infrequent consideration given to where the border would be: in Ireland or between the island and Great Britain? These are not inconsiderable questions but we argue that the most important issue is ‘the border in the mind’ and the consequences of Brexit according to three effects: on identity, politics, the constitution and their combined impact on political stability.

There is an ironic but identifiable common understanding between those with feelings of ‘waking up in a different country’ and ‘getting one’s country back’. It is ironic because it repeats the judgement of Enoch Powell (1989: 24) 44 years ago: that the United Kingdom after joining the EEC was no longer the United Kingdom which existed before that date. This feeling is not confined to Northern Ireland, of course. People throughout the United Kingdom—and indeed the EU—have expressed similar sentiments (Garton-Ash, 2016). Nevertheless, the fact that it is now impossible to be in both unions—British and European—making ‘the various middle grounds and third ways that were previously canvassed more difficult’ (Keating, 2016), is a sentiment which has particular resonance in Northern Ireland, especially for nationalists. On the other hand, attempts to address nationalist discomfiture arouse an equal unionist concern about any qualification of the principle of consent. For the reasons we have outlined, this does not intimate a ‘frictionless’ outcome, rather a potential return to crisis politics. This article began with reference to Moore’s judgement that Brexit involves a ‘new path’ for the United Kingdom. His belief is that the path out of the EU is the right direction for the United Kingdom. Critics of Brexit assume it to be a primrose path, a great strategic error. Here is another interesting historical echo. Also 44 years ago, Andrew Schonfield (1973) described the United Kingdom’s entry to the EEC as ‘a journey to an unknown destination’. The United Kingdom’s exit from the EU is also such a journey. The referendum coincided with commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. To paraphrase the Bard, Northern Ireland—like the rest of the United Kingdom—is afloat on a full sea and where the present tide of affairs takes it, we fear we cannot tell.