The Double Bind

In their strikingly perfunctory ‘discussion document,’ Sinn Féin depict Northern Ireland as the site of a perennially under-achieving economy characterised by relatively poorly paid and insecure employment, as well as high levels of worklessness. While the description of this unfortunate economic state of affairs would be hard to contest, the explanation tendered by republicans proves rather more problematic.

The authors of the document insist that the origins of Northern Ireland’s economic under-development should be traced back to – wait for it – the partition settlement of a century ago. Apparently all the woes of the region’s economy are to be sourced to events that none of us can remember rather than events that many of us of are still struggling to forget.

That a former industrial powerhouse has become a post-industrial laggard has, seemingly, nothing to do with a conflict spanning three decades that deprived the region of critical overseas investment for a generation or more. That Belfast has been eclipsed for so long by Dublin has, it would appear, no connection to a shameful, indiscriminate bombing campaign that in short order saw the city lose a quarter of its commercial floor space.[2] That so many people are unavailable to seek work has, we are to believe, no causal association with the trans-generational trauma of a squalid little war which served no discernible purpose other than to send almost four thousand souls prematurely to their graves.[3]

The Sinn Féin strategy paper also contains the more specific claim that partition has led directly to the under-development of Northern Ireland precisely because it has deprived the region of those key economic policy powers monopolised by a London government that exercises them ‘in its own interests.’ This characterisation of the relationship between Stormont and Westminster has, of course, more than a ring of truth to it. Such imbalances between the regions are, however, rather less exceptional than republicans would have us believe.

In the Sinn Féin strategy paper, the political life of the Irish Republic approaches something of a modern day agora in which the residents of Limerick and Donegal have ample opportunities to participate in public life and to hold the metropolitan authorities to account. That is a characterisation few people living beyond The Pale would recognise. The reality is that the Irish Republic is blighted by spatial disparities of wealth and influence just as stark – perhaps even more so - as those that obtain in the United Kingdom. While the economic output of the South-East of England is 1.44 times greater than that of Northern Ireland, that of the Southern and Eastern region of the Irish Republic is more than twice the level of the rest of the state.[4]

These material disparities have been crucial in fostering a sense of grievance towards the authorities in Dublin that has spawned several influential, and occasionally exotic, political dynasties and coalitions. In the current Dáil, for instance, there is a ‘regional’ group of nine TDs whose principal claim is to speak for ‘rural Ireland’ in the face of presumed metropolitan indifference.

The shortcomings of republican political economy come into even bolder relief when we turn to the vexed issue of the annual fiscal subsidy that the UK extends to one of its poorer regions. The unwillingness of republicans to acknowledge the existence, let along the legitimacy, of Northern Ireland is, needless to say, reflected in their reluctance to even give breath to its name. That reticence is, of course, their entitlement and, in any case, serves little real purpose. Even the most ardent Foucauldian would scarcely insist that the refusal to speak of Northern Ireland in its own terms means it ceases to exist in its own terms. Or, to put the matter more plainly, and invoke a phrase beloved of a previous generation, sticks and stones and all that.

While republicans habitually refuse to acknowledge even the existence of Northern Ireland, that ceases to be true when discussion turns to the matter of the ‘subvention.’ In those debates, the region is not only taken to exist but, ironically, conferred with what is conventionally deemed the highest form of political legitimacy, that of statehood. That the UK government needs to provide an annual subsidy to public expenditure of around £10 billion has at times been seized upon by republicans as evidence that Northern Ireland is – to borrow a famous phrase from a famous fellow traveller – ‘a failed political entity.’ However, that convenient interpretation rests upon the assumption that Northern Ireland should be judged on the same terms as a sovereign state rather than as merely a region of one.

The admittedly vast sums that the British Exchequer directs towards the six counties are not the equivalent of ‘overseas development assistance.’ Nor indeed are they comparable to the emergency liquidity that the institutions of global finance extended to the Irish Republic in 2010.

The annual ‘subvention’ needs to be acknowledged as something rather different: not as an exceptional transfer of resources towards a state but rather as the routine transfer of resources within a state. When seen in this light, the financial subsidies provided to Northern Ireland come to appear less as a metric of failure and might even be read as an emblem of an unlikely kind of success. The annual ‘subvention’ might, in other words, be taken as a sign that, even after all these decades of reversal, some of the social democratic impulses of the UK state remain intact. What the dulling abstraction of the ‘subvention’ conceals is that the vast resources transferred to Northern Ireland have bestowed considerable public wealth on that region of the UK. They have, among so many other things, sustained free universal public healthcare and allowed the largest social housing programme seen anywhere on these islands over the last four decades. A little more recognition of the social progress facilitated by the UK ‘subvention’ might add some light to the often heated debates on Northern Ireland’s past, present, and future.

The enormous subsidies required to sustain public provision in Northern Ireland have often featured prominently in the republican argument that partition is simply unsustainable. While republicans, at times, see the ‘subvention’ as a potential trump card, they are evidently aware that it might also prove to be their Achilles heel. 

Mindful that southern Irish voters are unlikely to be willing to pay the taxes required to sustain public services north of the border, Sinn Féin have begun to change tack and suggest that the scale of the subsidies usually assumed to be paid by the British Exchequer is, in fact, a ‘myth.’

Some distinctly creative accountancy sees several items of public expenditure – that would, no doubt, be retained if circumstances dictated - removed from the calculations and, as if by magic, the ‘subvention’ begins to shrink and, in one version of reality, settles at the rather less princely sum of £2.5 billion. While those feats of actuarial acrobatics solve one set of problems, they immediately produce another to take its place. If an annual subsidy of little more than £1000 per capita is really all that is required to sustain Northern Ireland then perhaps the region is not quite the failed economic entity that the case for Irish unification requires.

 So republicans find themselves in something of a double bind here. If the subvention is as big as most people believe, a united Ireland may not be possible. And if it is as small as republicans would have most people believe, a united Ireland may not be necessary.

 While the publication of Economic Benefits of a United Ireland was intended to showcase the strengths of a republican political economy, it has had, therefore, precisely the opposite effect. The shortcomings in the republican perspective so apparent in how they approach Northern Ireland are even more evident in how they talk about its nearest neighbour. In the next two articles, we will consider some of the contradictions and omissions that define republican discourse on the actually existing Irish Republic.

Notes

[1] Sinn Féin, 2020, Economic Benefits of a United Ireland, Dublin: Sinn Féin.

[2] Andreas Cebulla and Jim Smyth, 1995, ‘Industrial Collapse and Post-Fordist Overdetermination of Belfast’, in Peter Shirlow (ed.) Development Ireland, (London: Pluto Press), p. 86.

[3] Mike Tomlinson, 2016, “Risking peace in the ‘war against the poor’? Social exclusion and the legacies of the Northern Ireland conflict,” Critical Social Policy 36(1): 104–123.

[4] Seamus McGuinness and Adele Bergin, 2019, The Political Economy of a Northern Ireland Border Poll (Bonn: Institute of Labor Economics), p. 6.