The DUP, who were especially enthusiastic for Brexit, were among those who shouted loudest. They even got a lot of money from somewhere to put a pro-Brexit ad in Metro, which some said was a tad fishy. The DUP pushed back: it was a UK-wide election so they were entitled to place ads in paper that’s not distributed in Northern Ireland. When asked, they refused to say where the money came from.

After the Brexiteers’ triumph, years of negotiation between the UK and EU revealed, as predicted, that a “new” border on the island of Ireland would be a bit of a problem. Reports of the endless wrangles clogged the airwaves and made not a few, certainly in England, just wish the Irish problem could be sorted, so the poor old UK, God bless her, could just move on! Ah, moving on: the catchphrase of those rank with self-pity when they have to deal with the consequences of their actions.

In Ireland we didn’t have that luxury. We knew the problem wouldn’t go away. Even members of the DUP knew that. Their solution — and once you know this was always their goal, then everything they’ve done vis-à-vis Brexit makes complete sense — was the restoration of the old border, the one established post-partition in 1922; the one that lasted until 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement stripped it of its check points and watchtowers.

This border was not a rip-roaring success, yet this was what the DUP and the European Research Group stalwarts wanted back. If you don’t believe me, check out Liam Fox on BBC R4 on 1 January 2022: in an interview he stated that Brexit restored the UK’s control over its borders and, as a newly sovereign state, the UK could and should re-establish the Irish border.

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Northern Ireland has little hope left

By Carlo Gebler

Not everyone here in Northern Ireland, of course, is singing from the DUP hymn sheet. For this is still nominally a democracy. And the Brexit vote was not a sectarian matter: a straightforward case of Unionists voting Leave and Nationalists voting Remain. Many progressive Unionists voted Remain because they saw their future in Europe. And there were certainly some Catholics and Nationalists who reckoned they were better off cleaving to the devil they knew, perfidious Albion, rather than throwing their lot in with the pesky Europeans.

But post-2016, as the wrangles rumbled on — as the bitterness between the UK and Europe deepened and hardened; as Mrs May’s government floundered; and as the DUP, boosted by supplying the Tories with a coalition of sorts after the disastrous 2017 election, strutted their stuff and talked up the hardest of Hard Brexits — one began to notice something unexpected in Ireland. Since the referendum, EU membership had become a sectarian matter. Generally speaking, Catholics, Republicans and Nationalists favoured Europe; Protestants, Unionists and Loyalists did not. This is the crucial context of the Stormont Assembly election, on Thursday.

Northern Ireland was designed so that there would always be a Unionist majority. But for various reasons, that majority has been declining. There are now more non-unionists than Unionists in Stormont. But the DUP is still the largest party, so it was from their ranks that the last First Minister came, while the deputy First Minister came from Sinn Fein’s ranks.

The roles of First and deputy First Minister have equal heft, but in the DUP’s eyes their candidate being the ‘First Minister’ re-asserts and anneals what they need to believe. They are the top dog: the natural party of government in Northern Ireland. But now, it appears (if the polls are to be trusted) that Sinn Fein are about to become the biggest party in Stormont. A Sinn Fein candidate (probably Michelle O’Neill) will likely be First Minister.

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And though that may be bad, a Sinner First Minister, what’s worse is what comes next. Sinn Fein obviously want a border poll: they are committed to Irish Unity and a border poll is the only way to make their wish come true. A poll is entirely in the Secretary of State’s gift; might the obdurate Tory Brandon Lewis grant Sinn Fein their wish, if they have a First Minister in place? The signals coming from the Tories suggest not, but we all know (the polls again confirm this) that many Tories would love to be free of the albatross of Ulster. And if the poll is granted — and it’s a big if — then the Brexit farrago really comes into own.

Those who don’t want unity will trot out the old arguments. Irish government bad, British government good; Irish health service bad, NHS good; Dáil Éireann bad, Westminster, the mother of Parliaments, good. They will also play the Brexit card: “Look at the division it’s caused, let’s not repeat the mistake.” Covid will be referenced, too. “Look how the four home nations stood shoulder to shoulder to defeat the coronavirus,” the Unionists will chorus.

And the pro-Irish Unity arguments? The unity case, traditionally, was always all about repairing an ancient wound, restoring a damaged island to its healthy whole. But post-Brexit, the argument Sinn Fein and the nationalists are going to mount won’t be the old one about gluing two bits of a broken place back together. They will dwell on the fact that, in the event of unity, Northern Ireland will be re-joining Europe. Remember: we voted by a clear majority to stay in Europe in the 2016 referendum.

Our politics may not be totally binary, yet, but as an argument to get people (especially the undecided and the unsure) to put their X beside “Yes” on a unity poll ballot paper, the idea that a United Ireland means forward into Europe looks pretty good. The other side’s vision of a future still shackled to the UK, and the Tories and Johnson, out of Europe, doesn’t look quite so hot. The Sinn Fein case certainly looks better to me, at least.

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Still, with Republicans (at this moment of writing) my conversations are muted, at least on their side. It is patently obvious they’re incredibly anxious not to be seen as being triumphalist. They are within touching distance of a border poll and must not let the opposition see how pleased they are.

But they are very pleased. Last time there was a border poll, in the Seventies, it was a boycotted by nationalists and Republicans, who argued there was no point participating in such a poll when Northern Ireland was an artificially created state with a Protestant majority. However, next time will be different. Next time there will be no boycott. Republican organisations will present a united front, working together to achieve their goal. And they have precedent here: when that side of the house pulls together, they can achieve miracles, like the election of Bobby Sands.

Everyone here knows that Blighty is a fickle lover — and that there is a strong constituency in Britain that would be more than happy to slough off Northern Ireland. It demoralises Unionists, and that therefore helps the United Irelanders in turn. But at the same time, counter-intuitively, the Tory government is introducing legislation that will reinforce the border and Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom: yes, coming down the track there is a new law that will require all EU citizens barring Irish ones to have an ESTA before they enter Northern Ireland from Ireland. If they enter Northern Ireland from Ireland without an ESTA and they are caught, the punishment is four years in jail. This, too, empowers Republicans.

When I talk to nationalists (some of whom, like me, are considering voting for the SDLP this Thursday) about the future and what might happen in the event of the unity poll, what I meet is concern. They are worried about how this is going to play with unionists and loyalists and Protestants. They want a united Ireland, yes, but they also want to find some way of doing this that will not terrify the people with whom they share this place. They want evolution rather than revolution.

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Seamus Mallon was one of the great articulators of this strand of thinking: his idea that one has to treat the “other” side with tact and care and sympathy has strong support. Those who vote for the Alliance Party (middle-class people like me; I have voted for them in the past) also believe in this idea strongly but are uncertain about how and if unity will work in practice. Alliance used to be a moderately unionist party, but now positions itself as on neither side of the fence. I don’t know if Alliance supports a United Ireland in theory and I live here and that’s the problem.

I don’t blame Alliance, though. A lot of progressive or liberal Unionists vote for them and too much talk of unity might put those people off. They might be driven into the arms of the Ulster Unionists or the DUP or the TUV, the really hardcore Unionist party who are busily stealing the DUPs clothes and snapping at the heels and fraying their vote.

When I talk to unionists and loyalists, especially of the pro-Brexit variety, what I meet is anxiety. They know the English, or the British, are not constant and committed. They know the Republicans have the capacity to mount an effective campaign in a unity poll, underpinned by a positive story about rejoining Europe and marching into a glorious future of lovely coffee houses and trams in every city centre.

What is notable, at least to me, is how their rhetoric has changed in step with changing circumstances. In the olden days, the pro-Union arguments relied on such old favourites as, for instance, the appalling roads in the south and the poor nature of Irish governance. In the 21st century, this won’t wash anymore. The roads in the south (largely thanks to EU money) are actually better and less potholed than roads in the North and Irish governance is formidable. The Irish health service didn’t do too badly during the Covid pandemic, which is something many in the North, where the NHS is a shibboleth, are chary of admitting.

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The new anti-unity rhetoric, which I hear coming from unionists and loyalists, is all about Europe. The EU is now categorised as an enemy who wants to swallow us up using the Irish Protocol (which allows Northern Ireland to remain in the single market though the UK is out of the EU) as it’s Trojan horse. When I hear this kind of talk I find myself wondering if I’m back in the 18th century, only instead of Louis XVI, the enemy is now Ursula von Der Leyen; but then as we often say in Ireland, “To hell with the future, let’s get on with the past.”

Unionists have another fear. Even if the Republicans lose the unity poll, should they get one, they will have no truck with the idea of it being a once-in-a-lifetime poll, just as Scottish Nationalists won’t accept that their 2014 referendum was a one-off. If there is an Irish unity poll and it is lost, it will be followed by another poll a few years later, and then another poll a few years later again, until the right result is delivered.

Yes, this is what those who wish to maintain the union believe is the future. They’re frightened, and frightened people are apt to agitate and push for things that are reckless. And so, among some unionists and most loyalists, there is fidelity to the crackpot idea that the United Kingdom should trigger Article 16 and junk the Irish Sea Protocol and just put the border back where it always was.

Even if the Tories secretly wish to jettison Northern Ireland, they might do this, if they thought it would be to their advantage. We do seem to live in an age when the world is upside down and in which rulers appear to have little or no compunction about upsetting the applecart and making a bad situation worse. Meaning that everyone in Ireland — from quietly confident republicans to extremely anxious unionists — is afraid that something is coming, after Thursday’s election, that they aren’t going to like.

The bandsmen and the Boyne — and this illogicality — ended up opening the book I was travelling to Northern Ireland to write. The Glass Curtain is about the Troubles. Not the Troubles of Belfast or Derry, but the Troubles of Fermanagh, a rectangular county with a national border on three sides, where the IRA and the British State were at war. We call it the Troubles but trust me, it was a nasty, dirty, vicious civil war.

But I was travelling to Ulster at the fin de siècle, the end of history. When our temporary home there became permanent, I believed the Gods were smiling on us, because I could see, with my own eyes, the place changing for the better. First the Single Market came. (The EU did nothing but good for Northern Ireland, which opted to Remain in 2016.) Then the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated. It was a fudge, but in Ulster we were disgusted and ashamed by all that had happened and all we had done; only the GFA would bring the prisoners home, and only their homecoming would end the war. Then, at last, the Police Service of Northern Ireland replaced the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a source of Republican rage for generations. Eventually, Sinn Féin supported the police.

With this drawn-out, painful process came the feeling that finally, finally the Irish question had been solved — and it had been solved because we’d plumped for the evolutionary rather than the revolutionary solution. Yes, the status quo would be maintained and Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom, but at the same time it would mutate into something else, a Hiberno-British hybrid that everyone knew was really Irish, really part of Ireland, but which had Royal Mail post boxes lying around. Partition would remain but it wouldn’t matter anymore. It only mattered that jaw-jaw had prevailed over war-war — and therefore everything was going to be grand.

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Ulster's lost boys turn violent

By Jenny McCartney

The day before St Patrick’s Day, last year, I left Dublin, where I work, and went home to Fermanagh. I stayed there, in lockdown, until St George’s Day this year, when I set off for Belfast. There had been several nights of rioting there, protests against Westminster’s Northern Ireland Protocol — which established the so-called Irish trade border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, following the UK’s departure from the EU. Loyalist fury was expressed with messages painted on walls and gable ends, on placards and posters. They were everywhere — on bridges, railings and lampposts. Some were complicated, like the politics: a lot of writing superimposed on a Union Flag; others were simple: “We’re British, NOT Irish.”

What the placards told me — what they’d tell anyone who bothered to pay attention — is that Loyalists and Unionists believe the Protocol is going to lever them out of the country in which they were born and shuffle them into a country where they do not want to live; it will transform them from being British subjects to being Irish citizens. “There cannot be a border down the Irish Sea,” said Arlene Foster in October 2018. “A differential between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK — the red line is blood red.”

“What did you expect?” I want to shout. “The Tories were always going to shaft you.” The Loyalists and Unionists, who are now complaining so loudly, helped Brexit along hugely. They thought if we left the EU, the border created 100 years ago between Ireland and the North would be meaningful again. Mrs Foster was one of the chief enablers of the hard Brexit. “There will be no border down the Irish Sea,” the Prime Minister promised her party, last August, “over my dead body.” The DUP were reassured, then betrayed. The Protocol has brought Ulster not further from the south, from Ireland, but further from the UK. The target of the party’s anger is Mrs Foster. As I write this, she is resigning as leader of the DUP.

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Meanwhile in the south, Sinn Féin are talking up a Border Poll. Whether the South would want us, if push came to shove, is unclear. A recent poll suggested 51% of people in the Republic favour ending partition — though there’s no plan in place, no data about costs, and the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, is cautious. Impediments abound. The North’s healthcare system is funded by the state; the south’s depends on insurance. And what will the status of the Irish language be? How will we iron out the differences in our school systems? It will be complicated and expensive, and yet: the possibility of a United Ireland is more interesting all of a sudden. And that is because the concern behind the words written on walls across Belfast is valid: the Protocol shows that we in the North are no longer wanted by the United Kingdom — or, at least, by its ruling party. We’re not liked, tolerated or understood, even vaguely.

A man who’d describe himself as a Unionist (old school), not a Loyalist, complained to me recently: “If I can’t jump in the car with the dog and go to Scotland to see the kids, without the dog having a rabies shot and a passport and a letter from the vet and whatever else they want … the kids might as well live in Spain.” As he sees it, the splintered and different nations of the United Kingdom are becoming foreign countries to each other, with not only friends but families divided. Unlike the majority in Northern Ireland, this old school Unionist voted for Brexit. He chose Britain over Europe, but Britain does not want him. When I asked who he blamed for this mess, he said, very quietly, “The British government.” Then he corrected himself. “I mean the English. This Protocol’s down to them.”

But “there is no ‘Irish Sea Border’,” tweeted Brandon Lewis, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Tory titan, on New Year’s Day. This is one strategy for overcoming the Protocol problem: pretending it doesn’t exist. Another is to say that the EU needs to be more flexible. “We are keen to see the EU engage further, which I hope it will do shortly to understand the needs and the flexibilities that are practical,” said Lewis last month. Why would the EU listen? Why would it do as it’s told?

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And why would Westminster want to be flexible while we’re on the subject? They’ve got away with it. Whoever is elected as the new leader of the DUP — and it’s unlikely to be a moderniser — will have to work with the Protocol, as Foster did. To placate the party, the Tories might throw money in our direction. (When Mrs May needed the party’s Westminster votes, she gave it a billion quid.) They might even start the bridge to Scotland. Stranger things have happened. The people behind the placards in Belfast are unlikely to be placated. But what can they do?

Whatever happens, as a citizen of this place, I no longer believe (as I did once) that we are evolving into a stable hybrid. We’re not going to be grand. We will stagger on — that’s all. And if, occasionally, we complain, England will object to the noise, and nothing — absolutely nothing — will change.

When lockdown began, I was running a weekly drama class in HMP Maghaberry, a Category A, high security prison south-west of Belfast. In a room with a set of narrow glass slits — referred to sometimes as ‘Judas windows’ — through which officers sitting outside would supervise, we read and ‘performed’ a vast array of plays, from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers and Jane Thornton’s Shakers (yes, the play about cocktail waitresses). In the background was the noise of the hundreds of starlings that make HMP Maghaberry their home. At the end of every session, I took home the stories and scripts the men had written, returning them at the start of the following week’s session, marked and subbed.

One man, I shall call him Adam, gave me a story every week. His great passions were Camus (no surprise there: in my experience almost all prisoners love Albert because of his subject, which is personal responsibility) and Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is best known for his mid-career metaphysical stories about circular closed worlds, but Adam venerated those early and late Borges tales shorn of political content and psychology. He was Irish Republican, militant and Left-wing, but this was the kind of fiction he wanted to write.

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When the course started, the amount of time devoted to prose was small: we focused on performing plays. But come January, as Covid-19 loomed into view, we began to spend more time on prose. This made sense: if I had to stop going in, there would be no more performances, and the men would have to make do for themselves. They wanted to bank as much input from me as they could get.

Halfway through March, Adam handed me four stories — perhaps 10,000 words of material in all. He’d always been a prolific writer, but even so — four was a lot. I promised him I would mark them up and return them to him the next Friday. But there was no next Friday, because over the following days lockdown put an end to the class.

But what should I do with his stories? I spoke to my employer. We agreed I must read them, sub them, mark them and return them.

And so, it came to pass, that a fortnight into self-isolation as per the Government’s instructions, I set about the task. I opened the buff Northern Ireland Prison Service folder the stories were in, pulled out the first and began to read.

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Prisoners, Adam began, typically don’t pay much attention to what day of the week it is and they certainly don’t pay any attention to the date. Instead, they live in an untethered present tense, the text continued; they are in prison, in time, yes, floating along, but exactly where they are they don’t bother themselves with, particularly. Well, what’s the point? It’s only going to draw attention to the immense distance between where they are and freedom (in prison even a day can seem immense).

But there is one date all prisoners can always, immediately, call to mind. Without it they can’t sustain the hope that keeps them buoyant — that date, of course, is when they will be released. Most know what day of the week the date falls on. Some even know the hour they will leave (for the hour of exit varies — sometimes they’re out at 8am; sometimes it’s 3am.) Yes, the day it all ends: this is concrete and recondite.

As fiction so often does, Adam’s opening paragraph arrived just when it was needed. Everything I had been used to — travelling to the prison to work, travelling to Trinity College to teach, staying in Dublin and seeing my friends — had finished abruptly. In their place had begun a curtailed eighteenth century sort of life during which I gardened, walked, worked from home and once a week went to the local supermarket in Enniskillen. I was lucky to be able to do all these things — many couldn’t, in lockdown — but when I looked down the track, I didn’t like what I could see: the contraction of the publishing industry and the possible end of university teaching as we know it. Every page in my diary, which stretched to the end of the year, was now blank.

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Adam’s paragraph arrived just as I was wondering how long lockdown (with all its attendant anxieties) was going to last. A few weeks? Three months? Six months? A year? Forever? I hadn’t thought about it consciously before but now I realised this imprecision was finagling and discombobulating and psychically destabilising. I should have known from my 30 years teaching in jails that when your freedoms are limited you must know when, no matter how far off, the key will turn. To be deprived of that sends the mind wild, as mine, I now saw, had been running.

And then — for this is how the mind works, how it helps us if we can only listen — into my mind came a memory, unbidden, of the room where I had taught those drama classes. Years ago, I sat at a computer with a man who’d been ‘imprisoned for public protection’. IPP sentences were scrapped in 2012, but they dictated that a prisoner would be jailed for no definite period of time. We were discussing Tim Lott’s The Scent of Dried Roses (a devastating account of the author’s near suicide and his mother’s suicide) and from that magnificent, melancholy text the IPP prisoner segued, inevitably I suppose, to his own infernal situation of absolute untetheredness. He found it intolerable, he said, but having lived with it for a number of years, he had learnt one thing that helped.

He had come to accept he had no power, he said, certainly not vis-à-vis the criminal justice system. He had no power over the regime either. His day was preordained — unlock, ablutions, education, lunch, and so on and so on forth, all at set, unvarying times; his day was all marked out. His autonomy was shot. But, he concluded, there was no point fighting or grumbling or complaining. It was what it was. He was this untethered thing — the analogy he used was a feather — and he blew here, and he blew there, and he lighted where he lighted; his task, as one thing after the next happened to him, was just to be.

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This memory of someone else’s epiphany meant a great deal to me. I have derived enormous advantages from the way society has organised itself over the past 40 years. I have been able to go where I want, do what I want, consume what I want. And then, it went — not all of it but most of it and what replaced it was a kind of ersatz incarceration, incarceration-lite if you prefer. My life in lockdown was a hell of a lot better than being in prison; but I have a better sense now of what IPP prisoners experienced than I did when I taught them. So there is another unexpected outcome of lockdown: it has the capacity to radically alter what you previously thought you understood.

Having remembered my conversation with that IPP prisoner, I went back to Adam’s story. I read it through. It was a good tale in the Kipling style, though being written by an Irish prisoner it didn’t have any of Kipling’s unattractive opinions. I marked the text and wrote my report. I felt lighter than when I started.

We have had weeks and weeks of sunshine and clear blue skies in Ireland and everything is thriving in my garden. The grass is a hallucinatory green, and all my fruit trees are in blossom. Their blossom, to quote Dennis Potter, is the blossomiest blossom I have ever seen. As I sit here, looking out, I think about Adam (who has no lush grasses or apple trees in blossom to gaze at). He will have his stories and my comments at some point. Perhaps they’ve already arrived and he’s in the education room, leafing through the pages, hearing the starlings twittering outside, indifferent, like the rest of nature, to our current plight. Perhaps he’s even thinking about Camus, who knew all about indifference and its bracing, searing, honesty.