The city then was an exciting upgrade from the drab post-war austerity of the east Midlands, a far cry from Belfast today. For the five years he lived there, Larkin liked the city and how it made him feel, describing its “draughty streets” and “faint archaic smell of dockland” in his poem The Importance of Elsewhere. These were the kinds of things which “prove me separate”. 

Yet, while this separateness could make him feel far from home, it also made him feel at ease. In Belfast, he was an outsider, but accepted as such. “Strangeness made sense,” he wrote, “The salt rebuff of speech, insisting so on difference, made me welcome.” It was almost harder being back in England.

“Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.”

The poem captures something profound about the feelings of home and abroad which crash together in Northern Ireland. A friend of mine, an academic at Ulster University, told me that when he is in England, he feels much as Larkin did in Belfast: different but welcome. That contrasts starkly with how he feels when in the Republic of Ireland. While he is Irish and his grandfather was born in Dublin, he doesn’t feel at home there — its culture does not underwrite his existence. “England allows me to be Irish in my fashion,” he explained. “Ireland doesn’t. It wants to possess me, with no right to refuse.”

For many nationalists in Northern Ireland, the story is almost the opposite. For them, the Irishness of the south is their Irishness too, or at least something close to it. And it is not the Republic which seeks to possess them, but Britain. 

Visit Northern Ireland today and it is clear that it is not Irish nationalists going through an existential crisis about home and identity. It is Northern Ireland’s unionists who seem lost, trapped somewhere between elsewhere and home; nothing fixed, nothing secure, everything in flux. On one side, Irish nationalism is on the march, calm and confident, rich and secure, with a version of Irishness that isn’t theirs, singing “up the ‘Ra” as it goes; on the other, the Brits on the mainland seem ever willing to bargain away Northern Ireland as the price of the latest national project. The question unionism faces today is what to do about it.

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Larkin looms large in my mind when I visit Belfast. It’s just his kind of cold, grey and “draughty” day as I wander down the Newtownards Road, past abandoned concrete scrub, old docks and “peace walls” still standing, a quarter of a century after the peace. 

At the East Belfast Constitutional Club, I meet Jamie Bryson, the public face of loyalism in Northern Ireland these days, along with two of his associates who do not want to be named. Bryson is a controversial figure in Northern Ireland: a regular on the media and close to the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson but also regularly questioned about his links to the UVF — the banned paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force. Bryson rejects such links as “outrageous”, insisting the UVF speak for themselves. Either way, Bryson, it strikes me, is a loyalist for our social media age, fighting the old cause with new tools.

The three of us venture upstairs to a hall which played host to the first loyalist rally against Johnson’s proposed Protocol back in October 2019. Three and a half years later, and the raw anger remains, undiluted by Sunak’s new deal.

Bryson lets his two associates do much of the talking: a briefing from the loyalist grassroots. “If the DUP accept this, they’re finished,” says the older hardliner, who was interned at Long Kesh during the Troubles. He is dismissive of Rishi Sunak’s latest agreement with the EU, the so-called Windsor Framework which the Prime Minister has claimed will give Northern Ireland a uniquely beneficial position in both the UK and EU markets. “People in England just don’t seem to get it,” he says. “This is not about money. It’s about the constitution. It’s about how safe we are in the United Kingdom.”

This older loyalist spent his entire life fighting this battle, but risked the anger of his own community in 1998 to vocally campaign for the Good Friday Agreement — something he now regrets. “Hundreds of my friends died to stay British,” he says. “We wanted peace, but there has been far too much given away to Republicanism. It has been give, give, give, but now we’ve got nothing left to give — we can’t compromise any further.” Bryson agrees, insisting that the Good Friday Agreement had been a mistake, giving Irish nationalism the tools to achieve all it wanted: “Equality was just a staging post to supremacy,” he says. Bryson’s other friend was, if anything, even more depressed by the situation. “Britain has done what we never thought was possible. They’ve kicked us out.” 

For other unionists that I know, however, such moroseness has gone too far. “You didn’t think this would happen? I mean, what the fuck?” snapped one when I described the interaction. “The big surprise is not that we ended up in this situation after Brexit, but that there has been enough concern in the Conservative party for them to claw the situation back this far.”

Here then is the challenge for the DUP and unionism today: keep fighting for a cause, no matter how lost, or try to own whatever partial victory they force from London and the EU? Northern Ireland’s history, after all, is not simply one of loyal rebellion to protect its “cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom”, as the Ulster Covenant put it in 1912. It is also one of constant forced compromise. The original loyalist insurrectionists, remember, didn’t even want Northern Ireland to exist — they were Irish unionists opposed to Home Rule. They accepted partition and a parliament in Belfast as the least worst option. They accepted a place apart, with its own prime minister and House of Commons when no other part of the UK had such devolution.

Today’s crisis is just another chapter in this long story: of a loyal Ulster locked in a permanent battle to protect its status, only to be forced to accept special treatment when it has no other option. Sunak’s settlement with the EU is now the settled will in Westminster, backed by both the Tory and Labour parties. Further opposition in Northern Ireland could wrestle a few more concessions — but it is hard to see anything substantial.

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Unionists have every reason to feel aggrieved. Northern Ireland has been placed in a different legal and economic order from the rest of the United Kingdom. Northern Irish businesses must be “trusted” to be able to move goods freely back and forth from the mainland. And all so that there would not be any checks whatsoever on trade between the UK and Republic of Ireland. 

Among many loyalists there is also outrage. They’re angry that this has come about — in their view — because Republicans raised the threat of violence should there be any land border at all. That is mirrored in the posters cropping up across Belfast with the image of Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and his warning from 2018 that “the possibility of a return to violence is very real”. Behind this warning, the posters’ producers had placed an image of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings carried out by the UVF in 1974, which killed 33 people. The message is clear, and menacing.

This is the backdrop against which the DUP must make its decision. Do they back Sunak’s deal as a marked improvement on Johnson’s — or reject it as a marked deterioration on what existed before Brexit? If they choose the former, they risk legitimising the very division of the UK which they exist to oppose, alienating their electoral base in the process. But if they choose the latter, refusing to go back into government with Sinn Fein, they risk delegitimising the very state they wish to preserve.

Yet Bryson does not represent all of unionism, let alone Northern Ireland. He is one part of the mix. Other leading figures in the DUP spot an opportunity, however much they might dislike the British Government’s handling of events. If Sunak’s deal really does mean “the best of both worlds” — inside the UK and EU markets — it makes it harder for nationalism to argue in the future that Northern Ireland should give up one of these worlds. Bluntly, if Northern Ireland can find a reasonable settlement that all sides of its sectarian divide can live with, there will be many ordinary people who will be happy enough to leave it at that, able to be Irish and British as they please, moving between elsewhere and home as it suits them. Unionism’s tactical defeat, in other words, might prove to be its strategic masterstroke, securing the union for longer than might have otherwise been the case.

This argument works only up to a point, though. A special arrangement for Northern Ireland may well stabilise the union in one sense, with a new argument to persuade the agnostic middle classes to stick with the constitutional status quo. But there will be a cost. If Sunak’s agreement gives Northern Ireland the best of both worlds, then Scotland will want to know why it can’t have a similar arrangement. Then so will England. It could destabilise the whole of the UK. 

Northern Ireland, though, is not a nation like Scotland. It is something more ambiguous: part of a bigger nation, but set apart. It remains unique. It is the only place in the Western world with the guaranteed right to secede and join another state should a simple majority so wish. Baked into Northern Ireland’s very existence is a constitutional uncertainty. Even the process and act of Irish unification is uncertain and deliberately so. Would Northern Ireland exist after voting to secede — in a union with the Republic — or would it simply be subsumed? No one knows.

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Northern Ireland’s unionists do know, though, that the union they support is fragile, their constitutional rights only temporarily guaranteed, the existence of their nation up in the air. English people lecturing them should reflect that they have no such uncertainty. 

For now, unionism seems stuck. The DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson voiced his first criticisms of the Framework while in America this week, claiming it will “require further clarification, re-working and change”. But he has delayed making a decision, setting up a panel of grandees to report back on Sunak’s Windsor Framework by the end of the month — “organising the officer class before trying to get the soldiers in line”, as one observer put it to me. Donaldson has always been an arch devolutionist, unlike his one-time mentor Enoch Powell or other leading figures in the party in the Seventies and Eighties who believed Northern Ireland should lose its special status and simply be re-integrated back into the Westminster system. As a principle, in other words, Donaldson wants to see the restoration of the power-sharing institutions. His challenge, if he is minded to acquiesce to the arrangements now in place, is to find a way to bring unionism with him.

My trip to Northern Ireland suggests this will be almost impossible without a unionist split. The only question is how big that split will be.

This challenge is indicative of Northern Ireland’s very essence; one of constant uncertainty and ambiguity. The constitutional compromises required for stability only keep it in this state of instability, imposing upon those who want to keep it going a duty to find a way to make it work. Unionism’s fate, then, is to find itself bound in an endless struggle with a reality it doesn’t like, always seeking an unreachable settlement. 

Like Larkin on the deck of his ferry sailing to Belfast, Ulster unionism once again finds itself strapped to a boat travelling to unknown from lost. Its job is just to keep the ship floating on, guided by the light of that elsewhere, the only source of stability it has got.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Granted, opinion polls in Scotland show that voters there could favour independence in a referendum as early as autumn next year. However, Northern Ireland — geographically the furthest away of the UK’s wayward offspring — is likely to emerge from Britain’s ongoing political upheavals as the unloved child that clings with grim determination to its detached motherland.

Who, then, is to blame for this misleading narrative? Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of Sinn Féin, has called repeatedly for a border poll on the issue of a united Ireland. Tipped to be Ireland’s next Taoiseach, her success in the Republic of Ireland’s 2020 general election — in which her party won the popular vote — has brought the question of a referendum to the forefront of Irish politics.

Even so, a vote would be difficult to justify. Under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, a plebiscite can be called at the discretion of the Secretary of State when he or she believes that “a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland”. That day is unlikely to come soon: an overwhelming majority of opinion polls in Northern Ireland suggest that a referendum proposing a united Ireland today would be decisively defeated.

That there are now more Catholics than Protestants in the region won’t tip the balance. The old sectarian assumption that all Catholics would vote to end the border was discredited long ago: many Catholics are prospering in Northern Ireland and, for now, wish to retain the status quo. They may hold traditional, even tribal, views on the border, but the peace dividend — the improved economy — has benefited them.

McDonald senses hesitation from nationalists on both sides of the border, and has toned down her rhetoric as a result. After the 2020 election, she called for an urgent referendum from the British government. But her demands have since become more nuanced. At Sinn Féin’s recent Ard Fheis (annual conference) in Dublin earlier this month, she more modestly requested a “Citizens’ Assembly on Unity”. Now is the time, she bellowed, “to plan for constitutional change”. It was hardly a radical message: Citizens’ Assemblies are a handy way to delay decisions on politically-explosive issues. Her plan for the time being is to kick the holy grail down the road.

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Not only is McDonald dampening republican ambitions, but her conference speech had none of the inflammatory language of the past. Speaking to an audience that included many IRA veterans, including her predecessor Gerry Adams, she was remarkably restrained. For the first time in recent history, she failed to invoke the names of republican war heroes like Adams himself or the late IRA chief-of-staff Martin McGuinness, a time-honoured device guaranteed to set the all-Ireland crowd alight. The IRA rallying cry, “Tiocfaidh ár lá” — (Our Day will come) was noticeably absent.

McDonald knows that her electoral successes, in both North and South, are not due to her championing the cause of a border poll. The border issue, while firing up true believers, spooks many citizens in both jurisdictions: no advocate has ever convincingly explained how the economy or the health service will benefit from a united Ireland. Instead, McDonald’s live televised speech at conference, pitched to the people of Ireland, emphasised the chronic housing needs of Ireland’s youth, the cost-of-living crisis, and the continued health crisis. Similarly, in May’s Northern Ireland election, there was a shift away from the republican battle cries about the border towards identical bread-and-butter topics.

This suits McDonald just fine. Today, she wants conversation, not conflict: which a border poll would inevitably bring. Her plan is to keep the issue on the boil, but not to force it to a premature finale; to persuade Sinn Féin’s republican base that they are marching on the road to paradise, but not enough to scare off potential supporters with other priorities. The border poll is political titillation with consummation postponed.

McDonald’s greatest achievement has been to rid Sinn Féin of its pariah status and bring it into the political mainstream. Her tireless populism has almost eliminated rival opposition parties in the Republic, while sidelining the other nationalist flag bearer — the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) — in Northern Ireland. Although she never wore a balaclava, McDonald’s endless lip service to the “armed struggle” and “the patriot dead” reassured the IRA veterans during her charm offensive on the South. She has managed to persuade an initially-sceptical southern electorate that she is a modern constitutional reformer without paramilitary baggage — all the while maintaining the trust of Sinn Féin’s northern hardliners, who see her as their best hope for a united Ireland.

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McDonald is poised to gain power in both parts of Ireland; becoming Taoiseach is now almost a fait accompli. The next step is harder. She has understandably courted popularity by haranguing and harassing unionists and the British government, by skilfully painting them as intransigent villains of the piece. She picks her enemies carefully: convenient targets to unite her cocktail of followers.

However, McDonald, the master of the polemic, will soon be forced to adopt the politics of persuasion. Her victory in establishing Sinn Féin as the most powerful party on the entire island will be seen as an existential threat by those whom she has vilified. It will be hard for her suddenly to play the role of unifier: she is unlikely to be seen as a healing force.

With that in mind, expect the border poll to be mentioned frequently, but in a more muted voice. It will remain on the agenda: a useful symbol to dangle, a declaration of intent. But the reality is that few politicians holding significant political positions in Westminster or Leinster House want a border poll. It is a phantom political battleground. Far from providing a democratic decision, a referendum on the sectarian issue that has divided Northern Ireland since its foundation could mark the return of the old antagonists to the streets of Belfast and Derry; and to restore ebbing enmities in South Armagh and other border areas. No one wants that.

Perhaps the most lasting problem with the EU referendum was that the character of the withdrawal was not specified at the time, making further divisions inevitable. These might have been resolved had the Withdrawal Agreement not collided with an already existing treaty: the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which presupposes the participation of both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland in the structures of the European Union. From the start, the Irish government signalled the potential for friction. Its British counterpart, however, opted to postpone addressing the issue by maintaining there were no difficulties in sight.

As became swiftly clear, this was never going to work. The dilemmas divided every political party in the United Kingdom, both internally and externally. This first led to the collapse of Theresa May’s government. May’s successor, Boris Johnson, plotted a new course that would involve a more exacting Brexit. In the end, a way forward was carved out between the British and Irish premieres at Thornton Manor in 2019, leading to the drafting of the Protocol to the Withdrawal Agreement: a controversial regulatory “border” would run down the Irish sea, while checks on goods would be carried out at the entry points into Northern Ireland. According to Johnson, the new accord represented a “reasonable and fair” outcome for all parties.

And yet, before long, the Johnson government would jettison its own deal. From an Irish and European vantage, this retreat from an internationally binding treaty amounted to a flagrant exercise in bad faith.

The concrete manifestation of the British government’s repudiation of its obligations takes the form of a Bill introduced into the House of Commons in June to overrule the Protocol and thus a key part of the architecture of the Withdrawal Agreement itself. Currently, having passed its third reading in the Commons, the Protocol Bill is being scrutinised in the House of Lords. It seems likely it will be amended in the upper chamber and sent back to the lower house for consideration by MPs. In the meantime, it is possible that progress in negotiations with the EU will render the Bill superfluous, though Rishi Sunak’s new government still hopes the mere existence of the Bill could force the EU to back down.

As wrangling behind the scenes continues, there is general agreement that the Protocol has inhibited commerce in Northern Ireland. Already by July 2021, more than 40,000 documentary checks had been conducted on agri-foods destined for Northern Ireland’s retailers. From a British perspective, the legalistic mindset of European officials has prevailed over more flexible and pragmatic solutions.

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At the same time, the British response has been irascible and peremptory. Some of this is a function of fundamentalist attitudes that have captured the political establishment. For instance, prominent members of the intransigent European Research Group (ERG) — figures such as James Cleverly, Suella Braverman, Steve Baker and Chris Heaton-Harris — have increasingly shaped the culture of the executive. Under Sunak’s administration, Heaton-Harris has retained his role as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland while Steve Baker has kept his supporting role at the Northern Ireland Office. As the fortunes of committed members of the ERG have risen, an obstinate indifference to practical consequences has been spreading across multiple policy areas. While the Irish have stood aghast at old-style British imperiousness, ministers in Westminster have presumed to treat their nearest neighbour as an expendable irritant.

Doubtless all sides have contributed to the stand-off. On the British side, the problem has not been the Government’s legitimate impatience with the juridical mentality of the EU but the methods it has employed to express its exasperation, above all its contempt for mediation and due process. In any case, with Brussels, Washington and Dublin now ranged against London, it is hard to see how the British stance will not backfire. In the worst-case scenario, if a trade war were to ensue, Britain might starve Ireland of needed energy supplies, but its commerce with the EU would suffer gravely.

While the protagonists are aware of these dire consequences, the UK has tried to bolster its “legal” justification for frustrating the framework of lawful negotiations that it had previously agreed to. With the Protocol Bill hovering over talks with the EU, Britain is pleading its right to disavow the Withdrawal Agreement by appealing to the principle of “necessity”. This well-known tenet of international law permits the signatories to an agreement to release themselves from their commitments where they detect imminent danger to national security. However, to most sober commentators, the appeal looks utterly fanciful. The only peril confronting either Britain or Northern Ireland has been caused by home-grown politicians.

In pursuing this course, successive Westminster governments have been following the lead of the Democratic Unionist Party. Even though polls show that half of the population in Northern Ireland accept the Protocol, British governments have insisted on recycling DUP jeremiads about the scale of the menace posed. For instance, along with the DUP, the Government insists that the operation of the Protocol violates the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. But if this were true, the UK government would be the guilty party, having betrayed its earlier commitment when it signed the Withdrawal Agreement.

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Westminster also maintains, again in line with DUP arguments, that the Protocol is in breach of the principle of consent enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement. This principle imposes a requirement of cross-community consent for passing legislation in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and is rightly seen as a central plank of the 1998 Agreement. Crucially, however, there is no need for the parties in Stormont to consent to the policies of Westminster. If there were, the UK would be hostage to political forces in Northern Ireland.

The DUP, meanwhile, along with other unionist parties in Northern Ireland, believes that the Protocol undermines their position in the United Kingdom. Obviously this needs to be addressed. But the process should begin with recognition of the fact that devolution itself makes uniformity impossible. Correspondingly, across the UK, bespoke provisions have been adopted in every nation. Historically, and still today, Northern Ireland has had a plethora of exceptional arrangements including, until recently, its own abortion laws. Likewise, Scotland has its own legal and education systems. To insist on homogeneity against this background is clearly incongruous.

The only way forward is for Westminster to give up its strategy of negotiating in bad faith. If Sunak is to make any progress with the EU, his government needs to abandon its claim that the Good Friday Agreement is in peril just because a section of the population in Northern Ireland begrudges the Protocol. Similarly, invoking the threat to peace as a pretext for validating its extravagant approach won’t achieve anything other than increasing unionist alienation. And neither, I suspect, will another election in Northern Ireland.

All that will follow is stasis: further months of bitterness and wrangling filling a gap once occupied by political discussion. Sunak has made clear he hopes to secure a “negotiated settlement” with the EU and Belfast. That’s all very well, but until Westminster puts aside its disingenuous playbook, Northern Ireland’s future won’t be resolved.

Such provocative imagery may no longer exist, but today’s graffiti is just as revealing as ever. If you wander around the staunchly unionist areas of Belfast and Derry, you will note a few recurring phrases that express the extent of the opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol. “No Surrender”, which was once the common refrain, has been replaced by “No Irish Sea Border”. With Sinn Féin now the largest political party in the region, and the Catholic population outnumbering Protestants for the first time, whisperings of a united Ireland are growing in volume. Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill has already spoken of a “unity referendum”, and the DUP’s Philip Brett has cautioned against seeing the most recent census as “some sort of mini-referendum on the position of Northern Ireland in the UK”.

At the same time, the graffiti in unionist areas is whispering its own refrains, often more ominous in tone. Just before Christmas last year, the phrase “war is needed” appeared on a gable wall in Newtownards, while port staff in Larne and Belfast were branded “active targets” in graffiti close to the Mourneview Community Centre. Such appalling threats — although the work of dissidents with no mandate from the Protestant community — are the more extreme manifestation of a siege mentality that has persisted since the Troubles. In the Fountain estate, a Protestant area on the largely Catholic west side of Derry’s River Foyle, one mural has remained unaltered for decades. It bears the words “Londonderry West Bank Loyalists Still Under Siege”.

The ongoing political turmoil in Westminster has only exacerbated this sense of uncertainty. Rishi Sunak is said to favour a more conciliatory approach to the Protocol, and has expressed concerns about the “stability of the situation”. His reappointed Northern Ireland Secretary, Chris Heaton-Harris, is currently holding talks at Stormont in an effort to restore the executive before tomorrow’s deadline. If he fails and an election is called, as seems certain, the impasse will surely persist into the new year.

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Yet we should be wary of those with the tendency to catastrophise. For the past year, we have seen numerous commentators and politicians raising the spectre of a return to civil unrest. The late David Trimble wrote that the resentments generated by the Protocol could encourage “those who have engaged in past violence to take action again into their own hands”. More recently, Tony Blair has warned that “the issues at the heart of the Protocol have the capability of causing an enlarged trade conflict between the UK and the EU, or undermining the Good Friday Agreement — and quite possibly both”.

Such pessimism may be sincere, but it fails to consider that there are no straightforward solutions to this dispute. Like so many agreements relating to Northern Ireland, the Protocol was always a kind of fudge. Boris Johnson repeatedly used the phrase “over my dead body” when asked about the possibility of a border down the Irish Sea but, as Lord Frost has since admitted, the Government always knew the treaty was “far from perfect”.

Is a return to violence a genuine possibility? I’m inclined to believe that such talk is often politically motivated and needlessly alarmist. The conditions which gave rise to the Troubles in the late Sixties were incomparable with the tensions that exist today. And although threats from paramilitary dissident groups are not to be taken lightly, there is simply no desire among the general population for a return to those terrible years.

After all, the Troubles were not brought about solely due to grievances rooted in identity, but rather the tangible inequalities of a state that was built upon sectarianism. The Fourth Home Rule Bill, passed in 1920 and implemented the following year, saw Ireland partitioned in such a way that Protestant dominance could be guaranteed. Stormont was, as James Craig was later to assert, “a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people”.

By the Sixties, there had been decades of discrimination. Those with Catholic-sounding surnames were accustomed to having their job applications overlooked. Living conditions for Catholics were generally dire. Yet Westminster cared little for the injustices taking place on its doorstep. In his book Provos (1997), the journalist Peter Taylor estimates that the time spent discussing Northern Ireland in the House of Commons “averaged less than two hours a year”.

As the area with the highest Catholic population, Derry was always likely to be the location where civil unrest would first erupt. Resignation had given way to resentment, and the political gerrymandering was so egregious that it could not be ignored forever. The electoral lines had been rigged so that even though two-thirds of the city were Catholic, they could only elect eight out of the 20 councillors.

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Yet for all that, the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC) — a civil rights group that formed in 1968 — was explicitly non-sectarian. Although Catholics were disproportionately affected by poor housing conditions, the problems extended to members of the working-class Protestant community. With the support of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the DHAC scheduled a march on 5 October 1968 to protest against the unfair allocation of housing and jobs, and the injustices of electoral manipulation. The violence that ensued at this march is typically cited as the beginning of the Troubles.

Earlier this month, the surviving organisers gathered to commemorate their march at the location where it began: the Waterside railway station. A photograph of the key activists appeared in the Belfast Telegraph. It featured my uncle, Eamon Melaugh, along with Eamonn McCann and Dermie McClenaghan. Their march was not the first of its kind, but it was the first to be covered on TV, and therefore exposed the violence of the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) against the protesters. My uncle has explained to me that this was a deliberate tactic. He had contacted various journalists in the days leading up to the event, and from the outset he had seen it as an opportunity to lay bare the sectarianism of the state to an international audience.

In War and an Irish Town (1974), McCann describes how the organisers from the DHAC had relied on their new associates’ naivety to convince them to accept a route that would doubtless result in violent confrontation. He recalls a pep-talk my uncle had given to the DHAC members before meeting with the NICRA representatives in a room over a pub in William Street: “Remember — our main purpose here is to keep our grubby proletarian grip on this jamboree.”

“When I went out on the Saturday to march,” my uncle told me, “I knew what was coming. I had six white hankies in my pockets to act as bandages, and that’s exactly what they were used for. The police were all waiting for us with drawn batons. I selected that route to provoke them into violence. And I told the marchers: when our blood flows, Stormont goes.”

This was all a far cry from the circumstances of today. The unionist community is united in its condemnation of the Protocol, but would this threat to collective national identity be a justification for a return to violence? The possibility of terrorist activity is real and ongoing; only last month, there were flagrantly sectarian attacks on four Catholic homes in the village of Culnady. But at the risk of tempting fate, widespread civil unrest on the scale of the Troubles seems unimaginable.

That said, our political class would be advised to be more sensitive to the concerns of unionists who increasingly feel as though they are being sidelined. This isn’t simply a question of Northern Ireland’s businesses being subject to EU regulations, or even the economic impact of the Protocol; the constitutional implications are far more concerning.

Those familiar with Northern Ireland’s history will know that the prospect of a united Ireland has always provoked resistance in the form of direct action. The Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 was brought down by the Ulster Workers’ Council strike and terrorist attacks by the UDA and UVF. The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, which gave the Irish government a role in the affairs of Northern Ireland, was greeted with mass strikes, rallies and civil disobedience from unionists. An effigy of Margaret Thatcher was burned outside Belfast City Hall.

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This is the context in which Michelle O’Neill’s reference to a prospective “unity referendum” should be understood. Some unionists have vowed to leave Northern Ireland should a majority vote for unification, but violent reprisals from a sizeable minority would also be expected. A political solution is necessary, albeit difficult to envisage in the current circumstances.

The DUP’s position — that the Protocol is fundamentally incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement — is non-negotiable, which rules out the prospect of a unity government. Former first minister Paul Givan has said it will take a “miracle” for a new executive to come to fruition before tomorrow’s deadline. Even with hopes resting on a December election, the current stalemate seems indefinite.

Yet the history of Northern Irish politics is a series of broken deadlocks. In the Sixties, few could imagine a life beyond the inherent inequalities of a state founded on sectarian principles. In the Nineties, the tortuous negotiations from the Downing Street Declaration to the Good Friday Agreement made it seem as though the peace process was forever on the verge of collapse. It may take a miracle to restore Stormont in its current form, but that doesn’t mean that we should assume the worst for an uncertain future.

The export of cattle was crucial to the Irish economy, then almost entirely agricultural, and its main market was England. Can the king, Finch continued, the “common father of the people… ruin the younger brother only  to comply with the impatient unmindness of the older?” Charles, less powerful than his predecessors, was utterly opposed to the bill, but he needed the money that Parliament could deny him if he thwarted it, not least to continue his expensive war with the Dutch.

But it wasn’t Irish beef that had weakened England’s economy. As Finch pointed out: “to believe that the very passing of this Bill will raise your rents in spite of plague or war hath in it many errors”. But MPs were in no mood to listen, having convinced themselves of the logic of this economic non sequitur. This belief, though, that Irish cattle could be a decisive factor in English rental rates, when it was such a small part of the economy “could only be based on emotion”, says the historian Carolyn Edie. and emotion is never far from the surface in Anglo-Irish relations, even now, as the bitterness and suspicion aroused by Brexit demonstrates. The cool heads and shared humility that made the Good Friday Agreement possible are rare exceptions in a troubled, assymetric history.

In 1666, after the Great Fire, Parliament returned to Westminster. Charles needed more money than ever to rebuild his capital and to carry on the war. He received from Parliament on 12 October, a very generous financial settlement of £1.8million, but there would be a price to pay. The import of Irish cattle earned the epithet of a “common and public nuisance”, a legal term, which limited the king’s options to oppose. The Irish Cattle Bill went to the Lords.

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What England owes the Irish

By Tom Holland

A bitter debate followed. The Duke of Buckingham, newly energised — previously he had been in the habit of rising at 11 — led the support, backed by the former Cromwellian, Lord Ashley, whose hostility to the Irish was well known. It’s easy to assume that the English Protestant Parliament’s antagonism to Ireland was, in great part, due to its population’s Catholicism. This was, after all, the age of the Clarendon Code (a misnomer if ever there was one), and the Popish Plot. Catholics had been widely blamed for the Great Fire of 1666. And yet much of Irish agriculture, trade and manufacture was in the hands of Protestants, and Anglican ones at that, English settlers who had sought to spread English civilisation.

On the the 100th anniversary of Partition, we may still ask who the English think the Irish are — and discover that the answer has more to do with the Irish Sea than any land border or cultural heritage or religious persuasion. A part of the UK remains, for many in England’s governing class, inseparably Irish, by virtue of merely being part of an island too often ignored or taken for granted.

Opposite Ashley was the Earl of Ossory, the hot-headed son of Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant, the Marquis of Ormonde. Formerly imprisoned by Cromwell, the Earl became the king’s youthful voice on the matter in the Lords, even challenging Buckingham to a duel when it was claimed that the Bill’s only opponents had either “Irish estates or Irish understandings”. But despite strong arguments opposing it, the Act against Importing Cattell from Ireland and other parts beyond the Seas became law on 2 February 1667.

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How modernity erupted from a volcano

By Paul Lay

The Irish economy was expected to collapse. Inevitably, an illegal trade in cattle continued, despite the efforts of customs officials; there was, after all, no law in Ireland that forbade export to England. But there was to be a twist in the tale. Ormonde — close to Charles, having endured years of exile with him — persuaded the king to allow the Irish to trade with mainland European states. At first, the concession offered little comfort. Some Irish cattle ships sailed to Rotterdam, but the expense proved extortionate, with costs tripled. But necessity begets invention, and the opportunity to sell to Europe proved a gamechanger — a liberation for England’s bullied younger brother.

With the trade in live cattle unfeasible, Ireland was forced to diversify. England’s self-inflicted difficulty became Ireland’s opportunity. Irish cattle had gained a poor reputation: its meat was considered “thin, light and moist”, hides were “thin and lank” and even the butter was “better on the top and bottom of the barrel”. But Irish farmers and manufacturers produced something of a miracle, enhancing their produce, with their barrelled beef to the fore, at half the price of its English competitor. Irish merchant ships were seen in Ostend, Dunkirk, Nantes, and in Spain and Portugal. Throughout Europe the vessels of Cork, Kinsale and Waterford were “loaded with leather, butter, cheese, tallow and salt meat”. By 1671, Irish revenue from Europe had risen by £40,000, a significant sum. Ireland was fostering a new, more independent relationship with Europe, from which it benefited enormously. After Brexit, Ireland has sought to establish more direct transport links with the EU, particularly via sea routes, with both sides bypassing Britain — though not Northern Ireland. Concerns have been raised about Britain missing out on Irish trade, even enabling a potential competitor. These echo the warnings of previous centuries.

England’s trade with Ireland, after the Cattle Bill, fell precipitously. Its barrelled beef industry, once a lynchpin of the economy of the south-east, lost out to its Irish rivals. Potentially of even greater hazard to England’s interests was Ireland’s increasingly close trading relationship with the Dutch, and, God forbid, the French: it was largely Irish provisions that sustained Louis XIV’s navy in the 1670s.

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How the Irish became white

By Razib Khan

Despite appeals to embrace free trade by English political economists such as Roger Coke, English MPs doubled down, embracing irrational emotion rather than economic logic. In 1674, they debated whether French goods, such as wine, brandy and silk, should also be declared “nuisances”. Whether there was any English wine, brandy or silk manufacturing that might benefit was a question that seemed to elude them. Meanwhile, Irish land values continued to rise while English rents fell. As one commentator observed: “Prohibiting Irish cattle, French goods, etc … do but make things worse, and to stop one hole make three.”

At Charles II’s third parliament, in April 1679, Thomas Papillon, a City merchant who sat for Dover, spoke calmly but eloquently against the policy of protection that had failed, failed utterly.

“The state of the question is … to make Ireland serviceable and advantageous to England, and not to set up Ireland in competition with England … If all the commodities of Ireland must pass thro’ England, then all foreign commodities that Ireland wants would be supplied the same way, which would be of great advantage to England.”

For now, more than 50% of Irish beef still goes to British markets, where it is regarded rather more highly than it was in the 1660s. Under the Protocol, it remains tariff free. But the roles are now reversed — and to whose advantage, it’s not clear. Ireland, within the EU, is now the protectionist; if Britain strikes trade agreements with major beef exporters outside the bloc, the younger brother may suffer. But with Britain now the EU’s junior partner, the older sibling will need to be as fleet of foot in its enterprises as the Irish were in the wake of the Cattle Act.

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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Pity the prisoners who remain locked up

By Carlo Gebler

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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Can Ireland survive the new cultural revolution?

By Angela Nagle

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.