This Social Union, This Commonwealth

On reflection, perhaps I’ve been a little too quick to discount the historical significance of the Queen’s visit to Ireland this week. Like so much else, it’s a question of perspective. If you’re 80 years old and a citizen of the Irish Republic, perhaps the sight of the Irish President greeting and welcoming the British monarch on equal terms would seem quietly moving and even a cause of some pride. I might think that this was what it was all about and I might see the visit as another confirmation that the Irish state has taken its rightful place in the community of nations. That’s been true for many years, but this is still some hefty symbol.

Of course, I might also reflect that the economic travails of recent years have undermined that tenaciously-held view of a narrowly-defined idea of national sovereignty and this might occasion fresh pangs of regret and even, perhaps, a little bitterness too. Such are the swings and roundabouts of independence.

Yet in another sense, the visit is an example of what Alex Salmond means when he talks of the “social union” between Scotland and England that would survive even if Scotland were to sail off to independence. Because there is a social union across the Irish Sea too that joins Ireland with England as well as another reaching from Scotland to Ireland. (This latter is not just a matter of Ulster, though that’s there too and often complicates the picture).

Anyone visiting Dublin from Edinburgh or Glasgow will be struck by the familiarity of the scene just as surely as they may notice the surface differences amid all the trappings of Irish independence. Like the Scottish cities, Dublin looks to London too even as, especially since it joined the European Union, Irish eyes have been raised above and beyond the boat and road to London. Europe offered a chance to breathe and room to grow. (At a price for sure, but that’s another story.)

Nevertheless, culture matters and the peoples of these islands have more in common with one another than any of them do with any lands further afield, even the other English-speaking ones. Some of the cultural connections between Ireland and England are stronger than some of those that link Scotland with England. Ireland is different, but similar. But then so is Scotland. And England too.

Football is but one example of how east-west can be as strong a link as north-south. Most Irish people, like most English people, owe their primary allegiance to an English football team. Manchester United and Liverpool are part of the Anglo-Irish world in ways and to an extent they’re not quite part of the Anglo-Scottish experience. A similar claim could be made for horse-racing, both on the flat and, especially, over the fences. Nor does it end there: the Irish contribution to what for ease of shorthand we call “English literature” is so immense as to need no further comment save to observe that the theatrical bonds between London and Dublin are also stronger than those running from London to Scotland.

Add the number of Irish students at UK universities and, of course, the millions of British citizens with Irish ancestry and the still-large Irish populations in English and Scottish cities and you see why the idea that Ireland is some far-off foreign land must be considered very strange indeed. That’s even more so in a Ryanair Era that has made travel between the islands easier and cheaper than ever before. Here at least distance has been shrunk. One could, if needed, cite many more examples bolstering this case, including the fact that, correctly but also generously, Irish citizens living in Britain were able to vote in domestic elections long before the EU suggested such an idea could be either popular or profitable.

But, as I said earlier, Irish prosperity was a necessary ingredient for this social union to be celebrated fully and properly and, adjusted for population, on more or less equal terms. Without that and, yes, without the EU safety net (once psychological, now something different) the happiness would have been delayed. And so, perhaps, would peace (or a kind of peace) in Ulster.

There are many threads to all of this. For a long time the national question had been a matter of rhetorical aspiration, not a practical question. The longer the “Troubles” endured, however, the more the sense waned that you could offer even rhetorical or instinctive or cultural support for the Republican movement. Once upon a time you could sympathise with aims, though not methods but as the years passed and the killing continued that became an increasingly untenable position. When push came to vote, 95% of the Republic’s voters (of those who chose to vote) endorsed the Good Friday Agreement and approved a constitutional change to surrender the symbolic territorial claim to the six counties of Northern Ireland.

I think such a result could perhaps have been achieved earlier still but rising prosperity and confidence certainly helped. The national question was not quite irrelevant but it was an ugly reminder of an earlier, resentful age that bore little relation to the glad future the Republic saw for itself as a dynamic, young, international kind of place.

Still, the content of Articles Two and Three is a reminder of the symbols that have been cast aside and can no longer be used as excuses, however tissue-thin, to avoid growing-up. That means you, you so-called “dissident Republicans”.

All of which means that the centenary of the Rising, due to be celebrated in five years time, will be interesting. It will certainly be very different from the 50th anniversary celebrations in 1966. That was Dev’s Ireland still, a place that has long since vanished. The pride felt then was tinged with defiance of a kind that’s neither needed nor relevant today.

Irish history has also moved-on. I suspect that, amidst the commemorations, 2016 will see another argument about whether it was really worth it. Not, to be clear, whether independence was a valiant cause, but whether the blood-letting that stemmed from Easter 1916 could have been avoided without jeopardising the pursuit of Irish self-rule. Of course this and related questions have been around for years but it’s easier to talk about these things now. We’re a long way, mercifully, from Padraig Pearse.

Nevertheless, though he doesn’t talk about an “Arc of Prosperity” very much these days, Ireland remains Alex Salmond’s great example. If the social union between the English and the Irish can survive all that history and all those bombs and so much else besides then that between Scotland and England cannot be seriously threatened either. If culture doesn’t trump politics, it softens whatever blow politics may inflict.

It’s this shared inheritance and culture that provides Unionism with both its great strength and its weakness. The strength is evident: we share so much that independence might be thought unecessary. The weakness is evident too: if we share so much then much of it will survive intact, whatever constitutional arrangements are made in the future. If that’s so then it’s Unionism, at least as the term is commonly understood, that’s unecessary. That’s the theory.

So is this: The English are not an alien people. But then neither are the Scots. Nor the Irish either. They may do things differently in the different parts of this rainy archipelago but no part of it is truly “foreign” to any other. Whether we call it such or not it is – and will remain – a Commonwealth.

This may frustrate chauvinists in all quarters and if so then so much the better. There’s no need for virulent eruptions of Paddyism, nor for outbreaks of rampant Jockery or John Bull’s control-freakery. The histories of Scotland and Ireland are linked but very different and so are their relationships with elephantine England. But in neither instance are we trapped by history and nor must we be in thrall to grievance, both real or imagined. This, if you like, is where Alex Salmond’s brand of nationalism could take us and, by a rather different route, it’s where one aspect of mainstream Irish nationalism or identity or patriotism or whatever else you want to call it has ended too. Not subordinate to England but often in debt to it (figuratively as well as, for now, literally)  while also contributing mightily to our larger neighbour and, always, with more in common than whatever divides us. If you doubt this then check the view from somewhere that really is different.

But as John McTernan astutely observes in the Scotsman today, Salmond’s present course is fine for a confederal Britain but the so-called “independence-lite” option risks ridicule for offering the world while failing to acknowledge that there must be any costs or drawbacks associated with his neither-quite-one-thing-nor-the-other vision. The SNP’s present course leaves them a Scotland that’s somewhat less nominally independent than the Irish Republic, though that country’s independence is not what it once was either and would, I fear, be unrecognised by its founders.

Then again, that’s also a recognition that unravelling Scotland from England in a formal political and economic sense is even harder than unravelling Ireland ever was. The accumulated weight of history and culture see to that just as they have seen off attempts to sever Ireland from England. None of that makes Irish independence a “mistake”. Nor does it require one to think that Scottish independence (in whatever guise) must be a mortal error. But the SNP must fear that people may think that the “social Union” concept is overly-complicated and might sensibly be shortened to something a little snappier: The Union.