A united Ireland: for and against
If you want to know what it's all about, these two are the ones to ask
I don’t know about you, but I find a lot of books that have been hyped in the media turn out to be disappointing when you get much beyond page five – and sometimes not that far in. One recent exception was the uninspiringly named What This Comedian Said Will Shock You by the American satirist and talk-show host Bill Maher. If you want to know how and why the United States has turned into Bandit Country over the last ten years, this is the one for you. Very funny and full of hard-wired wisdom.
But I digress. Already. The book I am actually punting here, with its equally unprepossesing title, is For and Against a United Ireland by the journalists Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride, to be published in October by the not even slightly British Royal Irish Academy.
According to the news release, O’Toole and McBride set out to examine the strongest arguments for and against unity – an issue endlessly discussed since partition in 1922. “What do the words 'united Ireland' even mean?” they ask. “Would it be better for Northern Ireland? Would it improve lives in the Republic of Ireland? And could it be brought about without bloodshed?” These are indeed the big questions and my plan is to get as far beyond page five as possible in the hope of finding the answers.
O’Toole, a veteran columnist for the Irish Times, is exceptionally good at what he does, which embraces literature, politics, the arts and sundry societal quirks. But his reputation is not confined to the country of his birth, extending as it does to the United States and Europe – possibly even Australia. A fine writer and public intellectual à la française, he retains the common touch, laced with humour and invective, as he dissects the biggest issues of the day.
Just this week, he weighed in on artificial intelligence, sharing with us that, according to IT, he has been married more times than Henry VIII (including to the 93-year-old actress Siân Phillips), has a myriad of children and is in all likelihood a sibling of the late movie star Peter O’Toole. He concludes that since ChatGPT appears to absorb and distort most of what he writes, his rebuttal of its claims “will now loop back into its ravenous maw as verified truth”.
So that’s him. Or not.
Sam McBride, who has also been tradjuced by IT, has a way to go before his reputation catches up with O’Toole’s. But then he’s twenty years younger, so don’t rule it out. As things stand, he’s the national editor of the Belfast Telegraph while also editing the coverage of Northern Ireland for the Dublin-based Sunday Independent. A few years back, he wrote Burned, an acclaimed and corruscating account of how the local political Establishment and their pals cashed in on a government scheme designed to encourage the use of renewable energy. Heads rolled (though not as many as should have been the case) and the scam was hastily wound up at a cost to the public purse of some five-hundred million pounds. Since then, McBride has gone on to hold Stormont to account on an almost daily basis – so much so that the mere mention of his name arouses fear and loathing among those who who suspect he might have them in his sights.
To give you an idea of the sort of investigative journalism in which he deals, here is a headline from a piece by him in this week’s Belfast Telegraph concerning the dubious business and financial practises of a former Westminster MP, Ian Paisley Jr (yes, him, son of the preacher man): “The mystery of Ian Paisley Jr’s office – unpaid rates, red letters and court action (Part 1).
”Rates,” I should point out, are local taxes. If you were Paisley, you wouldn’t be looking forward to Part 2.
The “bould” Fintan (as Seamus Heaney once described him to me) is, I think I’m right in saying, a lapsed Catholic, from Dublin by way of County Clare. Working class by origin, he grew up in a city marked by slums, but ended up celebrated in the US and UK for his skill as a critic and commentator on the oddities and contradictions of modern life. The Ireland he lives in today is rich and self-assured (too self-assured some would day), a phenomenon that gave rise to his last book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, that made waves in Dublin and was rated (not taxed) by the New York Times as one of its books of the year.
McBride comes from a very different place. A Northern Protestant of sorts – Presbyterian by the look of him – his background bridges town and country. If the Troubles had never happened, his career would likely have taken a very different course. He would, I suspect, have been a classic liberal Unionist, sceptical of Stormont, enjoying weekend trips to Dublin, opposed to Brexit. But the Troubles did happen and Sam – too young to have witnessed the horrors first-hand – found himself immersed in an uncertain iteration of his birthplace that could well find itself part of a born-again Irish Republic before he collects his state pension (British or Irish?) sometime in the 2050s.
Amusingly, while O’Toole looks like a properly sardonic Samuel Beckett, McBride these days could be mistaken for the younger Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners. They are both, in their fashion, quintessentially Irish, which means that neither would be out of place in Belfast, Dublin, London, New York or Paris. Intellectually, both are sceptics, ready to listen but not easily taken in, which has surely benefited them as, in turn, they each argue for and against Irish unity. Later in the year, they will embark on a book tour that so far is slated to include Belfast and Dublin but, I predict, could well extend to England and America. As I say, I look forward to it. Ireland would be a better place if these two were in charge.
Artificial Intelligence was not used in the construction of this article, which could explain any inaccuracies that may have occurred.
I too look forward to reading this. The sad fact is that before Brexit there was relatively little talk about a United Ireland. The border was invisible, relations between UK and Ireland were so smooth I began to think the trajectory was towards closer union between the UK and Ireland, even a federal UK/Ireland under the benign umbrella of the EU, and taking a leadership role in the latter. The DUP dream of restoring a land border in Ireland made them cheerleaders for Brexit, which has weakened the UK and the EU, and been a victory for Putin. So sad.