This event also marked the launch of ARINS — Analysing and Researching Ireland, North and South, a joint project led by the Royal Irish Academy and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and introduced by Professor Cathy Gormley-Heenan. The ARINS project provides authoritative, independent and non-partisan research and analysis about constitutional, institutional and policy options for Ireland, North and South in a post-Brexit context.

Find out more at arinsproject.com

This discourse is sponsored by Mason Hayes & Curran LLP.

Speakers

Fintan O’Toole, MRIA is a columnist with The Irish Times, Leonard L. Milberg visiting lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He has won both the Orwell Prize for Journalism and the European Press Prize. His most book is The Politics of Pain: Post War England and the Rise of Nationalism (Liveright) and he is working on the official biography of Seamus Heaney.

Born in Dublin in 1958, he has been drama critic of In Dublin magazine, The Sunday Tribune, the New York Daily News, and The Irish Times and Literary Adviser to the Abbey Theatre. He edited Magill magazine and since 1988, has been a columnist with the Irish Times.

Other books include A History of Ireland in 100 Objects (2013). Enough is Enough (2010). Ship of Fools (2009), The Irish Times Book of the 1916 Rising (2006), White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (2005), After the Ball (2003), Shakespeare is Hard but so is Life (2002); The Irish Times Book of the Century (1999); A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1997); The Lie of the Land: Selected Essays (1997); The Ex-Isle of Erin (1996); Black Hole, Green Card (1994); Meanwhile Back at the Ranch (1995); A Mass for Jesse James (1990) and The Politics of Magic: The Work and times of Tom Murphy (1987).

William Crawley, MRIA is a journalist and broadcaster with the BBC presenting TV and radio programmes on subjects as varied as news and politics, arts and science, and religion and ethics. He hosts the daily radio current affairs programme Talkback for the BBC in Northern Ireland, Sunday on BBC Radio 4, and regularly writes and presents documentaries for Radio 3, Radio 4, and the BBC World Service. His television work — more than 40 documentaries and series — includes the landmark natural history series Blueprint, which now forms part of the Ulster Museum’s permanent collection; the interview series William Crawley Meets, in which he meets thought leaders from across the world; a three-part autobiographical series documenting life in Northern Ireland (Sorry For Your Trouble, Dying For A Drink, and Losing Our Religion); Independent People: The Story of Ulster’s Presbyterians; and the 15-part global history of Irish immigration Brave New World.

Educated at Queen’s University Belfast (BA, MPhil, PhD) and Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv), he served as a Presbyterian minister, university chaplain and lecturer in theology and philosophy before turning to a career in journalism and the media. He is a recipient of the Eisenhower Fellowship; in 2012 he received an honorary Doctor of Literature (D.Lit.) degree from his alma mater, Queen’s University Belfast, for services to broadcasting; and in 2019 was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

This new initiative brings together leading experts from all over Ireland and abroad to consider some of the most significant policy issues now being debated throughout the island of Ireland.

The acronym ARINS stands for Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South.

This new initiative is being launched against the backdrop of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. Brexit, of course, has created a sense of urgency when it comes to defining relationships within Ireland and between Ireland and the UK. It also creates an important opportunity to reimagine the nature of relationships on the island of Ireland, and between Ireland and the UK.

Research questions to be explored as part of the ARINS project range from constitutional and institutional issues, to options for economic, fiscal and social policy. Relations within Northern Ireland, across the island of Ireland and between Ireland and Britain will all be assessed.

Professor Gerry McKenna, Senior Vice-President of the Royal Irish Academy says ‘While the issue of a future referendum on the constitutional position of Ireland has been raised, holding a referendum in the absence of prior research and informed debate on the options and their consequences would be most unfortunate. The Academy recognises the sensitivities around the very process of conducting such research but believes that the need to ensure that all eventualities are anticipated and researched, and that the ensuing debate is informed and comprehensive, takes primacy’.

Professor Patrick Griffin of the University of Notre Dame says that ‘research on these matters is not intended to strengthen or weaken any particular aspiration, but rather to foster meaningful debate. Irrespective of how constitutional questions might develop, it is also essential to understand how the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement and its institutions might be affected by the uncertainties of this moment. As part of this exercise, it is critical to map interdependencies and connections within and between Northern Ireland, Ireland and the United Kingdom.’

Papers will be published monthly in the Irish Studies in International Affairs journal edited by Professor John Doyle. All articles will be free to access online at www.arinsproject.com. Each article published will be accompanied by at least one response, often from a different standpoint.

Forthcoming articles include Jennifer Todd on Unionism, Identity and Irish Unity; Deirdre Heenan on Cross-border Cooperation in Health in Ireland; Duncan Morrow on Unionist responses to the new debate on constitutional futures; Rory Montgomery on the Good Friday Agreement and a United Ireland; and Katy Hayward on Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol. Climate policy in the two jurisdictions has also been identified for detailed research and analysis.

Amongst the other experts contributing to the ARINS project are: Alan Barrett (ESRI); Marie Cowan (Geological Survey of Northern Ireland); Etain Tannam (Trinity College, Dublin); Cathy Gormley- Heenan (University of Ulster) and Christopher McCrudden (Queen’s University Belfast).

Today (11th January) Brendan O’Leary and Peter Shirlow have opposing opinion pieces in the Irish Times and Belfast Telegraph on the topic of whether we should prepare for a referendum on Irish unification.

Also at 7pm Fintan O’Toole and William Crawley will have an online public conversation on the theme: Northern Ireland after Brexit. Tickets are free of charge but booking is essential.

The Royal Irish Academy discourse programme is sponsored by Mason Hayes and Curran LLP.

In the debate about a possible united Ireland the Good Friday Agreement is a central point of reference.

It recognised the right of the Irish people to self-determination, but also that this right to bring about a united Ireland could be exercised only on the basis of consent of majorities north and south. As inheritors of the republican doctrine that the 1918 general election remained the sole legitimate act of national self-determination, Sinn Féin never clearly endorsed the new approach, but did not make it a deal-breaker.

Nor did the Ulster Unionist Party contest the existence of a ‘people of Ireland as a whole’ with the right to self-determination. Instead they stressed the achievement of changes to the Irish Constitution and the copper-fastening of the principle of consent—which is arguably no more robust than in the Sunningdale or Anglo-Irish Agreements. However, the Good Friday Agreement went further and accepted that Northern Ireland was now, on the basis of the consent principle as currently applied, legitimately a part of the UK. This did not require any adjudication on the original legitimacy of partition.

The Agreement contained the draft wording of the Irish Constitution’s new Articles 2 and 3, which defined Irish unity in terms of a peaceful and agreed coming together of its people. On the British side, a new Northern Ireland Act implemented a commitment to require a poll to be held on a united Ireland if it appeared likely to win a majority.

These constitutional elements were mostly based on earlier agreements between the governments, notably the Downing Street Declaration of 1993 and the Framework Documents of 1995. There was some hasty drafting to tie up some, but not all, loose ends. There was very little probing or discussion of the texts.

The final week of negotiations did not involve an orderly process of textual consolidation. The closer to an endpoint they came, and the higher the level at which they were conducted, the thicker the fog of war. Several other more urgent and concrete issues absorbed the attention of the negotiators.

In any event, it was, correctly, assumed that a vote on a united Ireland was a distant prospect.

Therefore it is not surprising that, other than on the trigger for a Northern Ireland poll, the Agreement is silent about many more issues than it covers. In most instances, this makes sense. It would have been presumptuous and pointless to try to settle matters which it was clear would not need to be addressed for many years.

A far from exhaustive list includes how the Secretary of State would make a determination of a likely majority for unity; what kind of process of negotiation on creating a united Ireland would follow; and how a final package would be politically agreed and then ratified.

There are, however, two points where greater clarity would have been desirable.

Neither in British legislation nor anywhere else was a role given to the Irish Government in the decision to hold a referendum. A Northern vote for a united Ireland would have seismic consequences for the south. The Irish government would be a central player in the subsequent process. Irrespective of the legal situation, politically the decision would have to be one for the two governments together. It would have been very desirable had this been spelled out.

The other major lacuna relates to southern consent to unity. There is no explicit reference to a referendum in the south; however, it is surely politically impossible that one would not be held, and changes to the Constitution would anyway require a referendum in due course. The Agreement does not say when the ‘concurrent’ consent of a majority in the south would need to be obtained. It was approved in simultaneous referendums north and south. However, some see room for flexibility. Others have suggested that an eventual referendum on constitutional change would suffice.

The fundamental issue is how to maximise the chances of a stable and peaceful united Ireland, one which the largest possible number felt to be their ‘shared home’. In the shorter term, what would best achieve unionist engagement before and after a referendum?

The Good Friday Agreement opened the way to a new era. It set out the fundamental principles of how a united Ireland could be achieved, but other than in establishing the legal framework for a Northern Ireland referendum it left major practical questions for another day. This was mostly inevitable and appropriate. However, it would have been very helpful had it better joined up the northern and southern halves of the equation. This is not to take away from the magnitude of the Agreement. But it is far from being a complete guide to future decisions.

Read the full article, ‘The Good Friday Agreement and a United Ireland ‘, as it appears in our journal Irish Studies in International Affairs.

Jennifer Todd MRIA, Research Director, Institute for British–Irish Studies, University College Dublin. Fellow at Geary Institute, UCD, and emeritus professor, School of Politics and International Relations, UCD

To those who grow up in conflict-riven and changing societies, as I did in 1960s, rural, mixed-religion Northern Ireland, it is evident that the conflicting ideals and contradictory social processes of the wider society are condensed as much in personal experience and everyday intuition as in political organisation and institutions. That insight, which goes back to Hegel, has informed a whole tradition of critical theory and sociology. My initial work in philosophy of perception and aesthetics quickly drew me to this perspective. Much later, as I began to work empirically on conflict processes, it was with the conviction that study of particular social situations and meaning-making within them reveals more about how general processes and logics function, and about what drives and hinders change, than does a distant generalising perspective. My first book with Joseph Ruane, Dynamics of conflict in Northern Ireland (Cambridge UP, 1996), showed how an early historical conjuncture locked in tendencies to inequality, groupness and conflict. It traced how this allowed ordinary citizens with ordinary economic and political motives, as well as political actors, to reproduce these tendencies through geo-political change, institutional reform, modernisation and political reconfigurations, so that conflict persisted—in different forms and intensities—up to the 1990s.

Change became more rapid in both parts of Ireland in the 2000s. At the same time, my own research was moving towards the micro-empirical—the experiences, reflections and intuitions of everyday, non-activist citizens—and I faced the challenge of developing comparatively valid explanations and general insights from this most particular of topics. [1] My book Identity change after conflict (Springer, 2018) develops this research, comparing modes of change in ethno-religious boundaries and national-communal identities in the two Irish jurisdictions. I analyse types of change, the logic and values guiding it, and traps of change, the obstacles met by respondents, which vary with type and with resources. I use a multiplicity of comparisons and a range of replicable qualitative methods: from counting ‘we’s to comparing the narratives of change and of obstacles to change experienced by very similar mixed couples in very different social contexts. By using micro-experiential narratives as key evidence in explaining macro-level outcomes, the book makes an original social scientific contribution to understanding the role of everyday meaning-making in social change. It raises the question how to make sense more generally of the role of identity change and reflexivity in social transformation.

My research on macro-level institutional processes led to a new book, co-authored with John Coakley, Negotiating a settlement in Northern Ireland 1969–2019 (Oxford UP, 2020), which traces how states change direction and provides very extensive primary evidence for each stage of the process. We reproduce segments of witness seminars and interviews organised by the Institute for British–Irish Studies (IBIS), UCD, and a multiplicity of drafts of intergovernmental agreements. We use these, and other data, to analyse the changing understandings of the elites involved in steering the ships of state in the UK and the Republic of Ireland towards a settlement in Northern Ireland. Our analysis reveals a process of layering of policy-concepts, as different elements are built one on another in a slowly converging understanding of what is necessary to end conflict. Only some of these policy-layers were legally and institutionally entrenched; others have recently been reversed. Our research also generated a much wider archive of elite interviews, which is a treasure trove that we hope will allow for future comparative analysis of the discourse, aims and understanding of state elites, and the policy paradigms that guide their action. [2] We are now involved with colleagues across these islands in a new study of the negotiation of Northern Ireland protocols and backstops in the Brexit talks.