If there were to be a United Ireland it is obvious that there would then be a significant minority in the country who would find themselves in a state to which they do not wish to belong. The unhappy experience of the nationalist minority in Northern Ireland is often used as a framework for thinking about possible outcomes, but the parallel is not really relevant, though tempting. The big external systemic drivers that a post-unification society would face, such as climate change, mass migration, the energy transition, the place of Ireland in Europe and the world, are very different from those of the aftermath of the First World War. Even more importantly the Republic of Ireland is in no way a good parallel for the Northern Ireland state of the 1920s. Even in the unlikely event of the most inflexible incorporating union with no acknowledgement of the constitutional history of Northern Ireland, Northern Unionists would still enjoy all the rights and protections of citizens of a state within the European Union.
I was reminded that this very experience happened to my family, when I was at a dinner in Derry recently. I was swapping stories with my dinner companion and she remarked that if my great-grandfather had gone on the beach in Belfast rather than Cork I'd be Johnny Adair. That is taking it too far (though both he and I are bald, were born in 1963 and have houses in Scotland), but the key point, that if my Royal Navy great-grandfather from Salford had fallen in with a friends from Portsmouth or Chatham, or any of the other Dockyards other than Haulbowline, then I wouldn't be Irish. The Donovans he had met in Essex (and whose daughter Alice he married in 1884), and the Andrews and the Flynns he had sailed with gave him more reason to come ashore in Cork harbour than to return to the basement in Sandywell Street in which he had been born in 1860. Mortimer Cuffe's reasons for coming from St Pancras in London are less clear, but that move is another contingency.
Not long after having that conversation an old school friend who I hadn't seen for a while called and I mentioned the conversation to him and also remarked that in ancestry I was more English than Irish, to which he replied that all my schoolmates knew that about me (this was news). That conversation in Derry crystallised some ideas and stories that I had always been aware of, but never really connected.
I've always understood that the family is fundamentally Atlantic working class and naval. My maternal grandmother was born in 1913 in Hell's Kitchen to her Irish mother, an O'Brien, and James Carter who we think was from Glasgow, and who had helped found the Marine, Port and General Workers Union in Cork. That last nugget only came to light when the new Connolly Hall invited my grandmother to an opening and her sense of family history overcame her conservatism. Everyone on my father's side was involved with the sea, mostly in unions and navies. There are still Liveseys in the US Navy; a cousin just graduated from Missou as a Naval Doctor., and her father was an official in the Boilermakers, having served himself, as had his father. One of the pleasures of historical scholarship for me in the past decades has been reading the work of colleagues like Rediker and Frykman which has given me a much deeper understanding of the long history of that maritime community.
What I never really thought through in any depth though was how British the family was. The evidence was always out in plain sight. Both my mother and father's sides of the family were English immigrants in the late nineteenth century, working and lower middle class Protestants initially, then the families became Catholic through intermarriage, but they remained fundamentally Unionist. Family lore has it that my great-grandfather, Samuel Livesey had a bust of the old Queen and crossed Union flags in the porch of his house up to his death in 1933. My maternal uncle was born on the day of George VI's coronation and so was named for him. Two of his uncles, Willie and Ernie Cuffe, went off to war in 1939 and never again set foot in Ireland. Ernie never recovered from being shelled in Caen in 1944 and died in the Chelsea Royal Hospital. For the Liveseys especially, Irish independence was challenging not for political reasons, but because the Naval Dockyard closed, which was the main source of employment in the village. By 1928 five members of the Livesey/Russell/Flynn connection were in the Bronx.
The British and Unionist elements of my family and my experience had always been present without me being totally aware of them. Much of it was offhand comment that I only realised the import of many years later. I remember my father discussing the murder of Admiral Boyle Sommerville. This was not current affairs (it happened in 1936), but he was still really cross about it in the mid-70s. He explained to me that Boyle Sommerville helped local Cork men to find jobs in the Navy, which was a Godsend in the depression. He thought the people who had killed him were more stupid than evil, as anyone who was on the coast understood how naval recruitment worked and his recommendation was necessary. Interestingly this was exactly the view Edith Sommerville took at the time, in a letter to an American friend. Paul Durcan has a great poem that expresses how that death remained a wound, precisely because of that stupidity, "I knew then that only the sky had a roof".
There were other pieces of that heritage lying around. A friend of my father fascinated me as a child with stories of serving with Mountbatten in the Kelly on the Malta convoys in 1941. My grandmother discussing the burning of Cork was always more disappointed than incensed. Fifty years later she still took personally that the government, as it then was from her point of view, turned the Tans on the population. When times were very tough after the closure of the naval dockyard my grandfather worked and lived on the Newnham Estate at Coolmore. And these signs extended out from the family. In the music corridor of my school the photograph of the successful candidates for the Indian Civil Service in 1937 hung very close to that of the last hurling team the school put out before the ban.
There are many continuities from this history to the contemporary experience of my family. However for all practical purposes it had no impact on my life or anyone else's whatsoever. There were some obvious signs of that heritage, like the photo of Major Cuffe in the front room, and some more subtle ones, like the absence of any religious or farmers in the family, but it never dawned on me, or on anyone else, that it mattered, even during the worst years of the Troubles. My father, whose love of hurling knew no bounds, as a member of the Cork county board worked openly to change the GAA rule demanding that members boycott foreign games without ever worrying for an instant that anyone would take any interest in his background. In some way that escapes ethnicity, culture, or heritage we, that is the family, had become Irish.
There is a lot to say about the changes in Irish public culture in the twentieth century, and Diarmuid Ferriter's work is not a bad place to start to explore work in this area. I've always been struck by Sean Ó'Faoláin's observation in the biography of De Valera he wrote when he returned from the US in the 1940s that there was a new kind of demotic spirit about, and that even though the outcomes of the Revolution were not what he had hoped for, they were positive and interesting. I think that is right, and that social and cultural moment was the condition for the economic change that has driven the history of Ireland since the mid 1950s. It is an interesting question to work out why between my great-grandfather's death in 1933, or my grand-uncle's rally to the colours, and my birth thirty years later, what had previously been important, became less so. However for the purposes of thinking about the Unionist community in Northern Ireland, the important fact is not why that happened, but that it did.
Very often, when articulating anxiety about the prospect of constitutional change, identity becomes the matrix through which that anxiety finds expression. No-one is denying the importance of identity, but it is hard to see a post-unification Ireland putting any constraints on expressions of British identity. One of the most obvious features of the last hundred years in Ireland has been the developing acceptance of the complexity of the cultural identities in the population. One of the reasons that immigration has, so far, not been challenging in the Republic was that ethnicity, citizenship, and identity have been disarticulated. This was not at all clear during the period of dominance by the Catholic Church of course, but more recently expressions of integral nationalism by people like John Waters just end up sounding odd. Politics in the Republic is not conducted through cultural mobilisation or negative ideation around an imagined "other". Of course there is at least some chance that misguided goodwill might import consociation, and "Ulsterise" Irish politics, but the likelihood of that has to be low. The chances are that identity issues in a United Ireland would not be particularly difficult to resolve.
Of course none of this is compelling to Unionist opinion, for whom the constitutional link to the United Kingdom is intrinsically valuable, not a best option among many. Even if that community were convinced that every practice they hold dear would be cherished and protected that would not be reason for them to accept a United Ireland. Unionist opinion has a reasoned intuition that the end of Northern Ireland will bring an end to a political and social world they have known. This is often articulated as the view that Irish identity is substantially constructed through anti-Britishness. That seems to me empirically wrong and a projection of Ulster's politics onto Ireland. But if the process of unification is to go well, it has to be acknowledged that the fear of change is not irrational. Once the structures change that will initiate a cascade effect and entirely new and unpredictable dynamics will emerge.
What I think our experience at least suggests, is that Unionism as currently constituted and understood will not survive a United Ireland. However there is no reason to fear some kind of terrible assimilation and elimination of historical memory. There has not been, and will not be, an imposition of a unitary imagined past. However for families like mine, working class with their roots in Protestantism, the prospect of release from the narrow ground and from political conservatism will, I think, create the space for change. I think we can predict with some certainty that the Northern Irish Unionist and Loyalist working class will not continue their historic pattern of voting with and for parties that are conservative. Similarly it is hard to see them adhering to nationalist parties. What I hope for is that they can recover their roots in the British radical tradition, many of the best elements of which already embedded in Irish constitutional practice.
The Republic of Ireland owns the historic achievement of having separated citizenship from ethnicity and identity, without creating an arid public culture. If - and it can only be if - there is a United Ireland, then I have great hopes that a Second Republic will extend this experiment in positive ways. I look forward to the insight and understanding that the British citizens of Ireland will contribute to us remaining a free people, in the face of the challenges all peoples face.
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