Constitutional politics, complicated by the realpolitik of Brexit, prevented an all-island public health response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on the island of Ireland. There can be no doubt, as fellow ARINS author Deirdre Heenan suggests, that Brexit ‘politicised and toxified the British-Irish political landscape’, so much so that public health responses are automatically viewed as constitutional threats. From a purely public health perspective it is perfectly sensible to approach an island as a single epidemiological unit for disease control and population health. But whether we like it or not, two jurisdictions co-exist, sometimes uneasily, on the island of Ireland, preventing, in this case and at this time, an all-island response to outbreak management and containment of Covid-19.

Throughout the world, Covid-19 has highlighted the interdependence of the relationship between the science of public health and politics. It is well recognised that public health policy is formulated, contested, adopted and implemented by social and political processes. Indeed, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control acknowledges that public health measures need to be informed by evidence but ‘they will very rarely be purely evidence-based. Social and political considerations will also need to be taken into account.’

We have seen this complex interplay in action on both sides of the border over the last year, at times entangled in what the social research scientist on public health, Constance Nathanson calls the ‘cacophonic voices’ of differing social and political interests.

Much media commentary has concurred with Heenan’s analysis that both governments had continued to ‘plough their own furrow’ over the course of the first wave of the pandemic in Ireland, with, as she suggests, ‘little more than lip service paid to working collectively to fight this common scourge.’ Our comparative policy analysis, complemented by a stakeholder consultation found, however, that while less than perfect, there was broad alignment in public health and containment policy responses to Covid-19 in the republic of Ireland (RoI) and Northern Ireland (NI) including in the pace of their introduction. Content analysis of Hansard and health department minutes of meetings also revealed regular dialogue between the Public Health Agency in NI and the NPHET in the RoI including weekly conversations between the chief medical officers on a range of cross-border Covid-19-related matters.

Inter-jurisdictional alignment is evident in the joint cancellation of St Patrick’s Day parades on 9 March 2020; lockdown/shelter-in-place policies (23 March 2020) and restrictions on internal movement, public transport, social distancing measures (although NI made a brief deviation to one metre in June 2020 before reverting to two metres), and the mandatory wearing of face masks.

Some differences in the number of tests conducted in NI compared to the RoI point to more significant policy divergence at the point at which the first wave began to subside, but workplace closures, while defying direct comparison because each jurisdiction staggered the closure of different venues, closed all workplaces in the space of one week in early March. School closures certainly revealed a more cautious and conservative tendency in the RoI, with school closures announced contrary to guidance from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) at the time. This particular policy issue emphasised NI’s traditional fault-lines with some schools under Catholic-sector management closing their doors in response to RoI policy, while republican parties aligned their position with Dublin and unionist parties with London.

Similar if constitutionally different challenges were at play at the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. At that time, harm reduction approaches were promoted by some public health experts, including the provision of condoms to men who have sex with men, at a time when homosexual acts had only just been decriminalised in NI, but remained criminalised in the RoI and contraception, of any kind, was only available to married people on prescription. Then, as now, politics found a less than ideal and deeply unpopular solution in response to the needs of vulnerable populations at risk of AIDS. National and international case studies of HIV/AIDS, the Ebola and Zika viruses, and SARS-CoV-1, among many other infectious disease outbreaks across time and geographical distance, illustrate the ways in which political realities impact upon and impede the best intentions of public health experts. As such, while the historical and constitutional politics of the island of Ireland have been an obstacle to an all-island response to Covid-19, the framework provided by the Good Friday Agreement enabled public health policy alignment through ongoing dialogue and cooperation between the health administrations in each jurisdiction.

Read the full article by Ann Nolan et al., ‘Obstacles to Public Health that even Pandemics cannot Overcome: The Politics of Covid-19 on the Island of Ireland’, as it appears in our journal Irish Studies in International Affairs: ARINS.

Referendums are won (or lost) online. There needs to be a thorough regulation of social media during a campaign, an issue not addressed in a recent report.

‘Panic isn’t required; preparation for all eventualities is,’ wrote Alex Kane, a former Ulster Unionist Party communications director and now a columnist in the Belfast Telegraph’.

Since the 2016 Brexit referendum—in which a majority in Northern Ireland voted to stay in the European Union, while the overall majority of voters in the United Kingdom voted to leave—a poll by Lord Ashcroft found a small majority of 51 percent of the voters in Northern Ireland in favour of unification. Not a massive upsurge, but still an indication that all do well to plan for ‘all eventualities’. Mr Kane’s succinct assessment was cited in the modestly titled Interim Report of the equally inconspicuous sounding Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland.

Behind this inobtrusive title is a group of what can only be described as the good and the great of all academic discussion pertaining to Northern Ireland. As I write in my more highbrow analysis in the forthcoming issue of Irish Studies in International Affairs, special focus: ARINS, the authors touch upon all the relevant issues, except one: online campaigning.

This is rather odd. It is not that the issue is unknown. Keen students of such matters (and there are more of them than you think), will recall that the Irish Standards in Public Office Commission expressed concern that ‘Facebook campaigns are not regulated by this legislation—meaning individuals or groups from anywhere can pay for Facebook advertising targeting certain demographics of Irish voters’. And, as many would know, the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom was in part won because Dominic Cummings—the leader of Vote Leave—was able to harvest data from Facebook, and target the voters. The rest is history. The chronicle of how this happened is part of a book I have just published with two colleagues of mine, The referendum in Britain: a history.

If a possible referendum on unification of the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland is to be held—and that looks increasingly likely—online campaigning and social media must be regulated.

The pioneering experience of other countries serves as inspiration, for example, Estonia, Latvia, Iceland and Portugal.

It is well-known that Russia has on several occasions used cyber-warfare to interfere in domestic affairs in their small eastern neighbours. For this reason, Estonia (a particular target of Putin’s government) has been at the forefront of developing mechanisms to hinder interference. After a cyber-attack in 2007, the Riigikogu (the Estonian parliament) passed the Advertising Act, which bans political advertising on the internet, including ‘subliminal techniques’.

Other countries have followed suit. Neighbouring Latvia, for example, has prohibited ‘hidden campaigning’, and explicitly cites advertising on the ‘Internet’.

If the future referendum is to be fair, similar mechanisms must be introduced.

Some might argue that the Baltic nations are a special case. Perhaps so. But, it is not just in these former Soviet republics that social media in referendums is regulated. Our near neighbour Iceland is another country where online anonymous campaigning is restricted and regulated. In Iceland, political bodies (not just parties) are prohibited from financing or taking part in the publishing of any campaign-related material without making their affiliation public. And, just to show that this is not merely something that happens in colder countries, in Portugal there is legislation in place to ensure that social media is not abused. In cases of violation of these regulations, there is a sanctioning regime, according to which breach of rules pertaining to commercial advertising may result in fines of between €15,000 and €75,000.

It is difficult to see why similar regulations could not be introduced in Ireland and in the United Kingdom in future referendums on unification of the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland.

In the early 1990s winning elections was all a question of stressing economic arguments. It was for this reason that Bill Clinton’s staffers coined the phrase ‘it’s the economy stupid.’ Things have changed. Today, elections and referendums are above all about online campaigning. We need to update the slogan: ‘it’s the social-media, stupid’.

Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University. His most recent book The referendum in Britain was published by Oxford University Press. His book Death by a thousand cuts: the slow demise of democracy will be published in 2012 by De Gruyter.

Read the full article, ‘The Perils of Referendums: A Review’, as it appears in our journal Irish Studies in International Affairs.

In recent times factors including the shared island initiative and the debate on possible constitutional change have increased the focus on north-south issues on the island of Ireland. Yet little is known about how Northern Ireland and the republic actually compare in many areas. In our paper in ISIA we compare living standards across a broad number of dimensions including income, opportunities for life progression and general well-being so that any differences can be better understood. Overall, differences in living standards generally favour the republic of Ireland.

One measure used to assess living standards is household disposable (after-tax) income. Disposable household income was $4,600 higher in the republic than in Northern Ireland in 2017, equating to a gap of approximately 12% after accounting for differences in prices (i.e. adjusting for the different costs of buying similar goods and services) between both areas. This a reliable measure for use in standard of living comparisons. However, it ignores how income is distributed across the population and, probably more importantly, the risk of poverty. Households are considered to be at risk of poverty when their income is less than a particular threshold. Setting the threshold at 50% of the median income (mid-point in the scale of the highest to the lowest of all incomes), reveals that the proportion households at risk of poverty was 8.9% in the republic compared to 14.3% in Northern Ireland. Our analysis also suggests that the tax and welfare system in the republic tends to be much more progressive, and effective in mitigating household poverty risk, than that which prevails in Northern Ireland.

To capture opportunities for life progression we focus on education enrolment across the life-cycle. Access to and take-up of high-quality educational provision is the single-most important factor determining career success, wage growth and social progression and, therefore, can be interpreted as a key measure of opportunity in each region. Human capital development will also strongly determine regional macroeconomic outcomes, such as productivity levels and therefore ultimately, growth rates. Examining education enrolment rates by age reveals that across all ages enrolment rates are lower in Northern Ireland than in the republic. For example, the rate of young people (those aged 15–19) enrolled in post-compulsory programs is 93% in the republic compared to 74% in Northern Ireland. Rates of enrolment among 20–29-year olds in the republic are almost double that of Northern Ireland, indicating higher levels of participation in third-level education. It is unclear whether the difference in education enrolment rates is driven by access or take-up of education (or both).

Another indicator of life opportunity is the rate of early school leaving. Early school leaving is measured as the proportion of individuals aged 18 to 24 who have finished no more than a lower secondary education and are not involved in further education or training. According to OECD data, the rate of early school leaving in Northern Ireland is almost twice that of the republic; in 2018, 9.4% of young people in Northern Ireland were classified as early school leavers compared to 5.0% in the republic. Our analysis indicates that early school leaving is much more heavily concentrated in Northern Ireland among males and those with working class backgrounds compared to the republic. Overall, opportunities for individual progression afforded to individuals and/or the take-up of these opportunities through education provision appears to be more restricted in Northern Ireland than in the republic.

Differences in income, education as well as health and other factors will together generally determine life expectancy in a region. As such, life expectancy can be interpreted as a cumulative measure of differences in general welfare and living standards across regions and countries. In 2018, life expectancy at birth in the republic exceeded that of Northern Ireland by 1.4 years and while female life expectancy was above that of male life expectancy, as is common in many Western countries, the gap was marginally larger for females at 1.5 years compared to 1.4 years for males.

We hope this comparative work on living standards In the republic and Northern Ireland will inform policymakers, the business community and public debate on north-south issues and form part of the evidence base in discussions of these issues.

Read the full article, ‘Who is Better off? Measuring Cross-border Differences in Living Standards, Opportunities and Quality of Life on the Island of Ireland’, as it appears in our journal Irish Studies in International Affairs.

It has been widely claimed that the failure to adopt an all-island approach to the Covid-19 crisis presents a major threat to health and well-being on this island. From the earliest days of this pandemic the absence of an overall strategic approach has been identified as a major obstacle to dealing effectively with the global emergency. It has been asserted ad nauseam that ‘this virus doesn’t respect borders’ and ‘the disease does not discriminate’, but without meaningful political action. We share a single island, one epidemiological unit and therefore need coherence. Despite the broad acceptance that thinking in terms of narrow political allegiances or identities would only prolong this crisis and deepen the impact on every community, cooperation to date has been woefully inadequate. Both governments have continued to plough their own furrow with little more than lip service paid to working collectively to fight this common scourge.

In March, the first minister slammed the taoiseach for lack of cooperation with Stormont over coronavirus. She claimed that he did not brief the Northern Executive before announcing school closures and Belfast officials learnt of the new regulations through the media. The Irish government pointed the finger of blame at the Executive, suggesting some were more interested in slavishly replicating Westminster policy, rather than developing a bespoke all-island response. In April the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the north and the south was broadly welcomed and viewed as a significant step in the right direction. In the face of this existential threat, it appeared that constitutional politics would rightly play second fiddle to public health considerations. The Memorandum acknowledged a compelling case for strong cooperation, including information-sharing and, where appropriate, a common approach. In reality, this agreement appears to, at best, have made a marginal difference. Practically, it has translated to regular Zoom calls between the Chief Medical Officers and some sharing of data. Window dressing and a far cry from the integrated, single-epidemiological coherent response to Foot and Mouth Disease (affecting livestock). Substantial differences in regulations, restrictions, data analysis and messaging pose practical challenges, cause confusion and are completely illogical on an island the size of Ireland.

This debate on the divergent responses to coronavirus has pushed the wider issue of north-south cooperation in health and social care into the spotlight. Providing healthcare services commands the largest allocation of public funding on both sides of the Irish border and there are persistent concerns over the efficiency and effectiveness of these systems. Theoretically closer cooperation could deliver economies of scale, value for money, opportunities for clinical specialisation and facilitate the sharing of knowledge. Over the past two decades health has been identified as a key area for increased cross-border working. To date though, with the notable exceptions of the All-Island Congenital Heart Disease Network and the North West Cancer Centre at Altnagelvin, the approach has been minimalist and often project specific. Joint EU membership enabled cross-border healthcare activity in Ireland, Co-operation and Working Together (CAWT) was established in 1992, its mission ‘to improve the health and wellbeing of the border populations by working across boundaries and jurisdictions’. Through this vehicle significant work has been done to enhance cross-border collaboration in health service delivery. Indisputable benefits have been achieved, providing access to services for communities within the border region, largely on a south-to-north basis. However, in most instances in these initiatives funding has been time-limited, and services have not been mainstreamed.

The North South Ministerial Council (NSMC) established under the Good Friday Agreement agreed six formal areas of cooperation, for which common policies and approaches are agreed but implemented separately in each jurisdiction, including in health and accidents and planning for major emergencies. In response to the health emergency, the 24th plenary meeting NSMC was held in July 2020, the first since before the collapse of Stormont power-sharing in 2016. It gave a commitment to do ‘everything possible’ in coordination and collaboration to tackle the virus. It was agreed that an early meeting of the health sectoral group would be convened to review responses to the pandemic. At their meeting on 2 October, the sectoral group agreed to review their existing health work programme. No time frame nor objectives were agreed for this review. The health minister is legally required to provide a statement to the Assembly on this meeting, to update on progress and allow for scrutiny. To date no statement has been presented, nor is one scheduled in the Assembly business timetable. If this is how a priority is treated, one wonders how the government treats things that they don’t view as important. Just weeks ago, the deputy first minister suggested that ramping up cross-border health provision could help to reduce Northern Ireland’s ‘dire’ waiting lists. Whilst there can be no dispute that they are dire, this is empty rhetoric. Given that the Executive has yet to formulate a strategy for dealing with waiting lists which are currently 100 times that of England, this is a useful deflection. The regular and repeated calls for further collaboration and cooperation have not been accompanied by any detailed plans, cost-benefit analysis, feasibility studies or robust data to support an all-island approach.

Meaningful change in the all-island health agenda will not happen without a major policy imperative. There is an absence of any agreed strategic framework for health and social care systems to underpin cross-border cooperation, a situation exacerbated by the apparent lack of political will north and south to commit to cross-border cooperation on an agreed plan of work. The pandemic has raised difficult questions about the extent to which both governments have lived up to commitments to developing cooperation across the island. The new €500 million Shared Island Unit provides a unique opportunity to address the long-standing issues around cooperation in health and reflect on the Covid-19 response. A comprehensive programme of research and development could provide the evidence to identify interventions that would be to the ultimate benefit of all of the citizens on this island. Given the similar social, economic and political pressures faced by both health care systems coupled with a pandemic that has steamrolled the country, it is an opportunity that we can ill afford to miss.

Read the full article, ‘Cross-Border Cooperation Health in Ireland‘, as it appears in our journal Irish Studies in International Affairs.

After the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Irish unity was to depend only on a democratic vote in a referendum in each Irish jurisdiction. Can Irish unity offer to unionists the ‘effective political, symbolic and administrative expression of their identity, their ethos and their way of life’, which has been a principle of nationalist politics since the New Ireland Forum Report of 1984? Unionists don’t think so. Seamus Mallon hoped that nationalists out of generosity would wait until unionists were able to accept the idea of unity. The shared island project of the (2020–) Irish coalition government also wants to postpone discussion of unity until there is more agreement on it.

But what if unionist identity is dependent on British state belonging, such that it could never be accommodated or expressed in an independent united Ireland? Does that identity give unionists a moral veto on unity for ever? Since the 1980s, nationalist politics on the island has affirmed the Two Traditions Paradigm: the right of nationalists and unionists to effective expression of their identity. John Hume used it to help achieve equality in Northern Ireland, and it was taken up by successive power-sharing executives. Can it now be used to block an agreed pathway to a united Ireland?

In fact, the Two Traditions Paradigm was never fully coherent. Identity as perspective on the world is of irreducible value—it is personal and rooted and also reflexive and responsive to change in circumstances and relationships. Identity as groupness—group solidarity, belonging and ownership over institutions and states—does not carry such value. To paraphrase Hume, the Irish can stay Irish and the British British, but the group-based assumptions about what being Irish and British entail have to change if we are to reach a position of mutual respect.

An alternative New Ireland Paradigm recognises the dissonance between identity as perspective and identity as groupness. It sees the real task as being to create institutions where identity as perspective can be voiced and identity as groupness can evolve in ways that allow for future accommodation and mutual respect. This allows us to sift out the different aspects of unionists’ concerns.

Here I look solely at the concerns that touch on identity—security and economic prosperity, health and welfare need separate treatment. Unionists—for well over a century—have worried about their minority status in a united independent Ireland, their relationship with a nationalist majority, their place in an Irish political culture that downgrades their forms of (British) cultural capital, and, today, their role in a society where no-one appears much to want them. A united Ireland would have to ensure not only that their everyday practices and their long-standing linkages to Great Britain are legally protected but that their perspectives are no less valued and validated in politics, society and public culture than are those of nationalists.

Linkages with Great Britain and the cultural specificity of the north-east of Ulster would remain in all likely constitutional futures. Choices would arise about publicly-funded institutions of socialisation, from media to museums to compulsory education. From a Two Traditions perspective, the different education and other cultural institutions north and south would remain, with access and opt-ins to the southern system for those Northerners who so choose. From a New Ireland perspective, the ideal would be to generalise linkages and choice throughout the island, to create a complex cultural mosaic in which diverse cultural traditions would be present, intersecting and evolving in an all-island context without ownership by any national or local majority: in education, this would require reconfiguration of both northern and southern systems so that the same range of choices—from the Irish language to GCSE and the Leaving Certificate—were available to all. The most difficult issues centre on the political institutions that define the parameters of political culture and the constitution that codifies the rules of political valuation. On a Two Traditions Paradigm, an amended constitution would explicitly recognise the British (or perhaps better Protestant) people of the north-east of the island alongside the Irish nation; political autonomy for Northern Ireland would likely remain under Irish sovereignty; meanwhile national symbolism would be doubled, with British flags and British anthems alongside Irish, within the still distinct Northern Ireland. On a New Ireland Paradigm, the Irish Constitution would be rewritten to affirm an overarching and authoritative political community, made up of a diversity of national and religious peoples with due protection for minorities; possible forms of unitary state would be explored; and state symbolism would be reinvented. There are real choices to be made here, prior to any decision about a united Ireland, and discussion and deliberation are urgent.

The sticking point, however, lies in the intensity of some unionists’ reactions. They feel that their British identity and the meaning of their past would be obliterated in any united Ireland: they would be defined by their republican enemies, subjected to show-trials, their linkages to British kith and kin erased, their land confiscated, their home taken from them. This is ontological insecurity that cannot be assuaged by time, contact, or rational discussion. Taken literally, their fears are unrealistic. Taken symbolically, they are right that their group-construction of a state-centred Britishness would not survive in a united Ireland—it is already in trouble in post Good Friday Northern Ireland. Rather than sustain an already problematic group identity, the task is to facilitate an articulation of and respect for identity as perspective and a reconstruction of identity as groupness. Three guiding principles follow from the New Ireland Paradigm:

1. Group identity provides neither a moral trump-card nor a political veto-right. A move away from a Two Traditions Paradigm is overdue.
2. Open-ended deliberation on principles and institutions at once gives voice to identity-as-perspective and allows autonomous change in it. It should begin now.
3. Giving voice to a wide diversity of perspectives can break the image of southern nationalist consensus—it is time to move on from the consensual images of the corporate ‘green jersey’, the southern ‘we’ and RTÉ’s Angelus.

Read the full article, ‘Unionism, Identity and Irish Unity: Paradigms, Problems and Paradoxes‘, as it appears in our journal Irish Studies in International Affairs.