Conal McDevitt MLA, SDLP

Taken from http://oconallstreet.com/tag/london-irish-unity-conference/

The Good Friday Agreement changes the debate about unity in a fundamental way.The question goes from being whether there will be a united Ireland to when and how Ireland will be united. The referendums on the Agreement were also a full exercise in national self determination by the people of Ireland.

I believe Irish Nationalism, including provisional republicanism, has not even begun to debate the type of Ireland we wish to build.

Will this new country be built on the very thing that has made it possible — the Good Friday Agreement — or will it be cast in the image of the 1937 constitution. In other words do we want to build a Catholic and Gaelic Ireland or somewhere more representative of the true diversity on our island?

It’s a great pleasure to be in a Labour building; a place where social justice and equality are more than just slogans. Where working men and women are given a voice and where politics is about the interests of the many not the vested interest of the few.

One of the great tragedies of 20th century Ireland is that this politics took a back seat to national struggle. Partition and the emergence of the southern state set the cause of equality and social justice back a hundred years. It did not just divide our island but smothered any debate that sought to move beyond the national question.

It gave rise to a tokenistic neutrality and protectionist economics; to armed republicanism and ultimately a dirty and futile war.

The question today is surely not whether we wish to simply reintegrate the national territory in the image of the Irish state but whether Irish men and women, Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter wish a New Ireland to emerge. An Ireland that reflects our diversity, built on good government and that places equality, prosperity and justice at the heart of everything it does. My generation has been handed the keys to that Ireland. We are the inheritors of peace not the perpetuators of conflict. We can open the door in front of us and with courage recast all about us or we can look back and repeat the mistakes of the past.

It is a tragedy that some young committed and passionate Irishmen and women are in a danger of throwing their lives away because they still cannot see the futility of armed struggle. Our generation must prove through results that violence always fails, that another generation must not repeat the mistakes of the last and that it is persuasion not conflict which will bring about change.

The great poet John Hewitt was a proud Protestant, a proud Ulsterman and proud Irishman in a letter to his friend John Montague in 1964, he observed:

“By trying to waken folk to the concept of the Region, it seemed to me the necessary step to prize Ulster loose from the British anchorage: then and only then, when free in ideology, the unity with the other part of our island could be realised and established.

“The North cannot be invaded, and taken by force in the Republic: if simply outvoted by a nationalist majority resentment would remain, but, realising themselves for what they are for the first time, not Britain’s pensioners or stranded Englishmen and Scots, being instead a group living long enough in Ireland to have the air in their blood, the landscape in their bones, and the history in their hearts, and so, a special kind of Irish themselves, they could with grace make the transition to federal unity.

“I always maintained that our loyalties had an order to Ulster, to Ireland, to the British Archipelago, to Europe; and that anyone who skipped a step or missed a link falsified the total. The Unionists missed out Ireland: the Northern Nationalists (The Green Tories) couldn’t see the Ulster under their feet; the Republicans missed out both Ulster and the Archipelago; and none gave any heed to Europe at all. Now, perhaps, willy nilly bundled in the European rump of the Common Market, clearer ideas of our regional and national allegiances and responsibilities may emerge.”

You may like his words or loathe them but after 3,594 dead, 36,293 shootings, 16,209 bombing and attempted bombings and 70 years of old unionist discrimination they have a ring of logic to them.

They are the philosophy on which the Good Friday Agreement is built. That Ireland and its people have allegiance to region, to nation, to these islands and to this great continent. When I talk to young northerners I meet people who embody Hewitt’s dream; proudly Northern and proudly Irish. Many are proudly British too and most happy to be Europeans. The truth is the people of our region are not as divided as our politics suggests.

Irish nationalism can take the old road of a one size fits all future or it can walk a new one in which unity is neither a unionist nightmare nor a nationalist pipedream. But to do that it must change and change radically.

First the very issue of unity needs to be elevated above politics. That’s why the SDLP has recommended the reconvening of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation to discuss unity. We owe it to ourselves as a nation to debate and agree a model of a united Ireland and to do so before 2016. We cannot be complete as a nation without a shared vision of our future. North needs south but south will need the North if a new Ireland is to emerge and the absolute potential of our island is to be fulfilled.

Secondly we need to make the North work. Ignoring the opportunity of regional government is to ignore the common ground on which a new Ireland will be built. That means maximum devolution but also imaginative regional solutions to local problems. Its means real power sharing that is capable of building the best education system in Ireland, defending the NHS – a British institution made Irish in Northern Ireland. It also means getting serious about the economy because we will never build a strong all Ireland economy if we have a weak northern one. We need to make the North a place where sectarianism is the real enemy and government leads the fight against it.

A strong North means a strong Ireland. A weak, underperforming and politically dysfunctional one means a weaker Ireland. Our home is a region of Ireland. Our dream is for it to flourish under the flag of our nation. Others hope it will remain a region of the UK. But we all surely agree that it is our region and needs governed for the benefit of all our people. That is the as yet unfulfilled opportunity of the Good Friday Agreement. To build a great region on Irish soil, united in a common desire to see their neighbours flourish. Where culture is shared; where the GAA is honoured and celebrated, never politicised and denigrated. Where the weave of diversity is strong and common ground is worked. Where endeavour and enterprise are promoted and where prejudice is rejected.

The old Ireland aspired to a separate but equal relationship with others. It adopted an old fashioned conservative and British view of equality. It cast progressive and labour politics aside in favour of a great nationalism that could bind a nation in a common struggle but was incapable of accommodating those who did not fit with its sense of identity.

The New Ireland must honour those who believed in their cause whether we agree with it or not, but it must not repeat the mistakes of their past.

James Connolly’s assertion that “The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour” can become the words on which a new Ireland is borne and when we remember the centenary of his death in 2016 we do so having agreed as Irishmen and women what a new united and free Ireland will look like. We will honour his dream by ensuring that in the twenty first century labour need not wait. That progressive national politics is a possibility. That two centuries and ten years after Tone professed the unity of the people of this island, his dream can finally become a reality.