The first question likely to occur to anyone picking up this hefty book is: Do I really want to read 500 pages on the current outlook for Irish unity?
The good news is it’s actually only 366 pages long. The remaining quarter of the book is made up of 96 pages of notes, a 33-page bibliography, and the index.
That might feel reassuring, because it must therefore be a trustworthy, authoritative tome; and indeed its author has more credentials to his name than the average Northerner has had hot Ulster Fry breakfasts.
Padraig O’Malley is professor of peace and reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts, and has written widely on conflict and divided societies as far apart as Palestine and South Africa.
As such, he would appear to be the ideal person to write the definitive summary of where we’re at on the road to a united Ireland.
The author also has the advantage of publishing it to mark next month’s 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement.
He begins, wisely, by posing a long list of questions which need to be answered should a referendum on Irish unity be held. Is 50pc plus one an adequate threshold to trigger unity? How much would unity cost? Would it spark renewed violence? How does the Republic of Ireland plan to accommodate unionists?
These, and the others he lists, are all perfectly good questions. What’s odd is that, having read all 366 pages of this book (for transparency’s sake, I must confess to skipping the notes), I feel no closer to answering them.
Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland. Photo: Padraig O'Malley
O’Malley’s approach is nothing if not painstaking. Whether discussing Brexit negotiations in one chapter, or the liberalisation of Irish society in another, he assiduously documents who said what and when; how it was received at the time; what happened next. As a historian, he appreciates the value of mapping every step which has gone before so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past. That is, of course, admirable.
But it’s frustratingly dull at times, like being told, in minute detail, the plot of a very long film, no matter how often you plead: “I know. I’ve seen it already.”
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It could be this was a deliberate effort to cool what has become a heated debate.
O’Malley notes how many of the conversations he had while researching this book were “intense and passionate over an event (a border referendum) that might not take place for another 10 years, perhaps longer”. He likewise recalls how some of those he spoke with seemed resistant to “evidence-based facts”.
Countering such giddiness is a worthy exercise. But while no one wants an overheated debate from people on competing sides of the argument who either think Irish unity is inevitable or will never happen (both equally suspect propositions), one does still want a book with a bit of life in it.
That’s the problem of inviting academics to write on subjects for a general audience. They tend to retreat into punctiliousness. On page 319, for example, O’Malley asks: “What is Britishness?” His reply begins: “It’s a question Joseph Ruane and David Butler pose in their study ‘Southern Irish Protestants: An Example Of De-Ethnicisation?’”.
Not words guaranteed to excite the average reader.
If O’Malley is aware of the internet’s existence, he doesn’t seem to consider it worth exploring
What we do know is there is an ongoing debate about the likelihood of a united Ireland in newspapers, on radio and TV, online on social media, and in society in general. Bizarrely, this wider conversation is barely reflected.
If O’Malley is aware of the internet’s existence, he doesn’t seem to consider it worth exploring. Instead he has interviewed 97 “political players, academics… grandees… and faith leaders”.
That’s quite a narrow focus. He hasn’t interviewed any of the wider voices either for or against unity. Where are the writers, artists, musicians, commentators?
Where are, for want of a better term, ordinary people?
A few themes do emerge. O’Malley repeatedly returns to the paradox of how far Sinn Féin itself has become an obstacle to unity, not least in its distorted veneration for the IRA campaign as an “heroic war fought against an imperial oppressor”.
He also points out that SF’s rise to power in Dublin will “usher in a new breed of elite” whose unappealing hubris will likely send the middle ground in the North, who might otherwise have been persuadable of the benefits of unity, back into the “pro-union fold”.
Throughout, he emphasises the key point there is no discernible appetite right now for a change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland.
The one thing on which all his interviewees agreed, he writes, is that any border polls “shape and form and as much detail as possible should be worked out beforehand, so that voters know exactly what they will be voting to replace the status quo”.
That’s all very well, but it does seem to ignore the insight with which he began his book, namely that “peering into the unknown… is a hazardous exercise”. The united Ireland whose details we prepare for today might look very different in a decade’s time.
One looks to the epilogue in the hope the author will draw all these threads together, only to find him going off on a totally different tangent in the last few lines, quoting former taoiseach Micheál Martin’s “achingly obvious” recent warning about the power-sharing arrangements enshrined in the 1998 Agreement being no longer “fit for purpose”.
That may well be the case, but there’s no room left to unpick it.
It’s all rather puzzling. There must be a market for these sorts of books because they keep being published. Lilliput Press can hardly be faulted for wishing to contribute to the discussion. Alas, no one yet seems to have found a way of writing them in an accessible and engaging way.
The hefty price tag suggests this is a book for libraries and academics rather than the general reader. It feels like a missed opportunity.
Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland by Padraig O’Malley, Lilliput Press, €40
