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The
release of the census results today will come as a
disappointment only to those in the nationalist community
who have managed to drown out the sound of reason
with the thud of the tribal bodhran. The message pounding
out from it alongside the smoke signals from nationalist
discourse combined to tell the unionists ‘we
are breathing down your neck’. Jude Collins was
conjuring up tidal waves of Catholic majorities coming
out of the schools, while Mitchel McLaughlin as lately
as a couple of days ago was assuring us that ‘the
census will confirm the pro-union population is shrinking
to the extent that for the first time it will represent
less than 50%.’ Consequently, unionists should
take the bull by the horns and engage in ‘discussion
and debate on how a united Ireland would guarantee
equality and human rights for all traditions.’
On the basis of such expectations Gearoid O Caireallain
was calling for a referendum to be held next May.
In the wake of today’s results he will still
be making the same demand in 2032. Given the view
of Professor Bob Osborne that ‘in the future,
as fertility rates become similar, the main determinate
of population changes will probably be decided by
migrants’, Gearoid O Caireallain and myself will
both live out our years in a British run Northern
Ireland.
I
refuse to delude myself on the matter nor am I enamoured
to the idea of swapping my critical faculties - limited
as they may be they are my own - for a cult-like intellect
which will induce me into chanting loudly along with
the rest of them so that I too may fall victim to
the comfortable but anaesthetising nonsense that has
come to characterise republican discourse since the
emergence of the peace process. For quite some time
I have learned to put up with the fact that no matter
how long I manage to live I will never see a united
Ireland or a British withdrawal. I told the Guardian
as much in the days after the 1994 ceasefire was called,
contradicting the view of Martin McGuinness expressed
in the Sunday Business Post of the same year
that Ireland would most likely see the back of the
British in seven years time.
Nationalist
number crunchers have been frustrated on two major
counts. Firstly, the share of the nationalists fell
considerably short of the anticipated 46%. Secondly,
the unionists were more than 3% over the predicted
minus-50%. Their psychological doomsday simply failed
to approach the green horizon. The big mistake of
the nationalist hopefuls may have lain in paying too
much attention to those writers who predicted the
end of a unionist majority as a mere means of creating
a comfortable discursive environment for Sinn Fein
once the party had surrendered on the question of
the consent principle.
Sinn
Fein of course will hear none of it. Just as they
would hear none of it when some of us stated there
would be a return to Stormont, a Sunningdale type
arrangement, decommissioning, acceptance of the consent
principle and embracing the RUC. The party leaders
know that so long as they continue to lie about their
strategy taking us inevitably to a united Ireland,
and as long as we pretend to believe them, then they
will always have a role to play in our lives and we
will continue to think we still need them. The result
- their political careers will remain secure.
The
pre-census nationalist hype demonstrates that the
one success of the Sinn Fein strategy lies in being
able to unnerve and panic the unionists on the strength
of mere penumbra and absolutely no substance. And
such unease has led to some Unionist politicians like
Jeffrey Donaldson looking unsteady on their feet and
making ridiculous demands that the unionists should
have some new veto over unity even if they were to
become a minority in the North. The post-census reality
has produced a different response. Gone is the triumphalism
of Mitchel McLaughlin. And in a rare display of unity
The DUP's Sammy Wilson and Jeffrey Donaldson of the
UUP said the figures would be a “devastating"
blow to republicans. The latter claimed; ‘a united
Ireland is not even a remote possibility and it's
time for republicans to accept that’. How a couple
of days works wonders for the confidence.
Ultimately,
republicans will have to face up to the nonsense of
demographics as a strategy. Last year the Sinn Fein
president in a rare moment of candour stated that
out breeding the unionists, while an enjoyable pastime
for those who have the energy, hardly amounts to a
strategy.
Yet
the lie of the peace process must continue. There
are no circumstances in which Sinn Fein is prepared
to say that the present strategy is not a continuation
of the republican struggle but is in fact the confirmation
of its defeat. The Sinn Fein leadership will continue
to disguise the defeat inflicted on republicanism
- and which they helped secure in their acceptance
of the Good Friday Agreement - by riding the crest
of a demographic wave (which they will infer they,
rather than nature created) in the hope that their
followers will be mesmerised to the point of not asking
questions as to what the war was about in the first
place if demographics was the way to go. The unpalatable
intellectual morsel to be chewed upon and digested
by those who think about the matter is that the very
purpose of the IRA’s armed struggle and its stated
goal of a British declaration of intent to withdraw
was to bypass and repudiate the demographic argument
- the latter being a British term for withdrawal.
From long war to long wait, we may be excused for musing
that with better leadership the war may have been
bypassed as far back as 1974.
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