Stephen O’Neill writes: In one of many memorable beginnings to a Charles Dickens novel, Hard Times (1854) starts with the schoolroom demand of Thomas Gradgrind: ‘Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts … You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.’ Gradgrind’s pathological thirst for the factual and his accompanying belief in utilitarianism are the defining aspects of his character. In the immediately following passage, he puts these beliefs into practice as he delivers a further ultimatum to a cowering schoolgirl, Cecelia Jupe: ‘You are never to fancy … you are not … to do anything of that kind.’ Typically, however, the chief lesson of the novel ends up being learned rather than given by Gradgrind, as his attempt to reform fancy into ‘Facts! Facts! Facts!’ is waylaid by a series of bitter disappointments. Near the end of the novel he despairs that ‘[t]he ground on which I stand has ceased to be solid under my feet’. Facts, as Hard Times attests to, can only get you so far.
Something of Gradgrind’s ultimatums, and not little of his failures, came to mind when reading Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride’s For and Against A United Ireland (2025), a book which was certainly written under shifting grounds. The introduction sets out a thoroughly Gradgrindian premise from which to imagine the prospect of the island’s constitutional futures: ‘For any society to advance, it needs honestly to confront reality. Irrespective of how difficult that reality might be, the alternative is make-believe. Comforting as ignorance may be in the short term, it ultimately can’t supplant facts.’ Included too is a further health warning about how much the debate has already been dominated by those who have already made up their mind. Yet as this introduction intimates, For and Against A United Ireland is predicated on the same structures that it attempts to critique.
As a disclaimer, the same introduction makes clear that this book has not been written for the likes of me, as an ideologue who is not and has never been a reasoning animal. I have very much made up my mind, having done so ever since I learned the words ‘United’ and ‘Ireland’. If partition is Christ, give me Barrabas. Before I go any further though, I do not want to suggest that this book is not of any value, since even for such a partisan as myself it helpfully glosses some of the analyses and surveys carried out by the University of Notre Dame and the Royal Irish Academy’s ARINS Project (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South), of which it is a product. But what I do want to directly state is that, to me at least, this book is not either primarily factual or indeed really anything new. In ‘fact’, my first impression is that I am much surer about who this book has not been written for than I am about who it has been.
A lively and engaging part of Fintan O’Toole’s opening arguments against a united Ireland deconstructs the definition of ‘the people’ as it is used in political rhetoric of all shades. The book is repeatedly guilty of the same sin, however, in being aimed at what it reconstructs as the dispassionate ‘middle ground’, the ones who haven’t made up their mind, those who can reason beyond their emotional attachments. While there is an occasional reliance on and reference to the ‘facts’, for those expecting conviction rather than speculation, there is little to be had here. Instead, we are repeatedly told about a ‘reality’ that is tenuous at best. And yet this paradoxically speculative appeal to ‘reason’, ‘fact’, and ‘reality’ rather than emotion is hardly new – it’s at least as old as Dickens. There are moments, particularly in the postscript, when the book even acknowledges the right of people to have allegiances and aspirations beyond ‘reason’, suggesting that these convictions ‘don’t have to be viewed as backward or sectarian’. Yet the arguments repeatedly lean on clichés such as ‘tribalism’ and ‘the bloody enmity of the past’, all the while being propped up by what Richard Kirkland calls in his Identity Parades (2002) ‘the non-negotiable, always objective “reality”’. Whatever this ‘reality’ is, it is more various and less ‘tribal’ than this book suggests.
Despite its eye-catchingly yellow cover, For and Against A United Ireland hardly addresses a gap in a cottage industry of writing about a United Ireland either. As its own very curated bibliography shows, so much energy has already been dedicated to imagining a united Ireland, which has been a prominent topic of interest before partition was even formally established. A recent and non-exhaustive list of publications by commentators, journalists, and academics includes The Irish Unity Dividend (2025) by Ben Collins, Can Ireland Be One? (2022) by Malachi O’Doherty, Making Sense of a United Ireland: Should it Happen? How Might it Happen? (2022) by Brendan O’Leary, and The Last Irish Question: Will six into twenty-six ever go? (2021) by Glenn Patterson. Even a cursory glance at these titles demonstrates that the conversation has been dominated by white men from what are constructed as the ‘two traditions’ on the island. The similarly white, male authors of this yellow book are, of course, aware of this. They explicitly position themselves in relation to all this noise, even including the admission that their worldviews have been ‘conditioned by experiences and assumptions that a majority of the population does not share’. For and Against A United Ireland does attempt to separate itself from the madding tribes by having both authors argue the sides for and against. But this fundamentally revisionist quest for what Seamus Deane once called the ‘never-never land of objectivity’ is even less credible than the most dogmatic visions of us dangerous ideologues.
The credibility of these authors relies upon their previous ‘experiences’, moulded as they have been by the two dominant identities in each jurisdiction on the island, with each of course writing for many of its most prominent newspapers and frequently appearing on its television and radio stations. As Polly Devlin wrote of Irish republicans in her All of Us There in 1983, ‘those who speak so continuously of a United Ireland in [a] semi-religious way believe they can overturn the society in which they live without overturning themselves’. For and Against A United Ireland is predicated on the idea that both authors do exactly this – overturn their own opinions in service of a ‘rational’ and ‘factual’ debate where they argue both sides, and even with themselves. Even as they revel in contradiction, the book’s textual authority is obviously derived from the reputation of both authors, prolific commentators who are well enough known for a photograph of them to serve as the reverse cover page. As a collaboration, the structure of the book – where two men from the dominant ‘traditions’ in their state are at the centre of the argument – replicates the structure of partition, a fact that is acknowledged as early as the sixth sentence of the introduction: ‘We grew up in different generations, one of us in Northern Ireland in a broadly unionist environment, the other in the Republic of Ireland in a broadly nationalist one.’ Such a formulaic approach means that the ways in which they imagine the future are always already orange and green, chained to the majority dispositions that have existed in these territories since the beginning of partition. Yet as they say next, ‘we are emphatically not writing as representatives of those perspectives’. I certainly believe Fintan O’Toole when he says that he is not writing as a representative of Irish nationalism. But, as a whole, the book is clearly biased towards the status quo of partition.
Such supposed open-mindedness might appeal to the fictive middle ground more than an actual exposition of either contributor’s personal political positions. But in trying to have their cake and eating it, there is little deviation from their own modes of production as opinion columnists. While it is hard to blame either of them for this, it is impossible to disremember the ‘fact’ that both men have offered opinions on everything and anything over the past few decades. This established and, indeed, liberal establishment authority is particularly difficult to ignore in the case of O’Toole: you can draw a straight line from his arguments here to what he has previously written on the International Monetary Fund (bad) to The Wolfe Tones (worse). His standard rhetorical position is also to be self-effacing, as he constantly configures his own journey as a twenty-six county bildungsroman, the state moving like him from the dogma of republicanism to a more pragmatic, ‘reasonable’ realism. Such realism is especially heightened when it comes to a United Ireland: this particular road to Damascus is his morning commute. As he wrote when warning of the prospect of a narrowly-successful border poll in 2017, ‘To put it bluntly (as no one ever does), Southerners have no interest in inheriting a political wreck, or becoming direct participants in a gory sequel, Troubles III: the Orange Strikes Back’. This suggests partition as a problem for the six counties alone, as if they are merely an inanimate possession passed down in a will. Yet it’s hard to believe that such a comment passed either for insight or for humour. Thankfully, there is no Star Wars fan fiction in For and Against a United Ireland. But plenty of this ‘bluntness’ is in evidence across the course of the current book, however, where the word ‘reality’ and its synonyms do an Atlas worth of lifting. The euphemistic shadow of this imagined violent backlash lurks over much of the arguments too, with ‘violence’ a prominent entry in the index.
If there is no fan fiction, there is still plenty of fiction. McBride is mercifully not as over-polished a writer as his co-author, and has been considered an authority on the society and politics of the six counties since at least his book on the “Cash for Ash” scandal and his stints as a Newsletter, i., and Belfast Telegraph columnist. Here, he tries to stick to an à la carte version of the ‘facts’ mixed with the kind of hyperbole that can only be borne out of never having experienced what you are actually describing: ‘The Republic in 2025 is one of the greatest places there has ever been to live in the history of the world.’ The question that would immediately strike anyone who lived there in 2025 is for whom? But what is also conspicuous about the lack of clarity in these arguments is that so many of the claims made, even the most ludicrously hyperbolic, could easily be cut and pasted into the ‘opposing’ chapter.
This collage of perspectives makes neither for a coherent read nor a believable argument. At an early juncture in the chapter arguing ‘against’ a united Ireland, for example, O’Toole claims that ‘the Union’ survived ‘two world wars’ along with the Cold War and the rise and fall of the Empire. This is the kind of thing you’d expect to read in a Guardian article about the constitutional future of Britain, followed up with a later correction and point of clarification that, of course, mileage may vary on the neighbouring island. I may be splitting hairs rather than landmasses here, but given the subject of the book it does seem quite strange to omit the fact that it ‘survived’ the aftermath of the first of these world wars by the introduction of partition in Ireland. This is especially relevant since the British state has a longer history both than the anti-democratic arrival of partition and the Union’s own anti-democratic arrival in Ireland in 1800. It could just as easily be claimed that the ‘Union’ is a highly adaptable and even ambiguous political formula that can clearly be preserved in the event of a united Ireland. But in any case, to again quote Seamus Deane, ‘the only grounds on which partition can be legitimized are the same as those which it can be refused’.
Speaking as someone with more than a passing interest in the subject, I find these cartoon histories also to be deeply concerning, as it is only a certain kind of history that is counted as relevant to constructing an argument against Irish unity. While O’Toole finds room for mentioning twenty-six county censorship – long a favourite target of Irish liberals – the Special Powers Act is not mentioned even once. It is odd to think that a book which would probably have been banned under the same Act would completely ignore it. Yet this is a feature rather than an isolated flaw of these arguments. Writing about the history of the six-county state without referring to the violence that established it, or to the pernicious and systematic practice of religious and political discrimination that maintained it, is a bit like writing about the Titanic without mentioning the iceberg. I say ‘a bit like’ this, because this is exactly what O’Toole also does when he lists the launch of the ill-fated White Star Line ship as an example of Belfast’s economic superiority to ‘the south’, without revealing anything relevant that might have occurred to the same ship afterwards (I think I saw a film about this once). In his ‘against’ chapter O’Toole quotes Marx’s ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ in one passage: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.’ Yet whether they are writing ‘for’ or ‘against’, history is being made to order by both O’Toole and McBride, in a manner that makes even the Titanic look like a success story.
More striking still are the ways that ‘facts’ are constructed to the point that population charts of the six counties are dated from 1861, which completely omits the defining ‘demographic’ moment of Ireland’s nineteenth century: the Great Famine. We are often told here – even in the chapters arguing ‘for’ unity – that partition was a realistic development, that it worked (again, for whom?), and that almost anyone who has a conviction to the contrary is ‘historically ignorant’. It is not the establishment of partition that is being quarrelled with, but the wrong turns taken by each state in spite of it. So the rhetorical calling card of For and Against Irish Unity is indistinguishable from most ‘realist’ arguments towards retaining partition: the deconstruction of an opposing argument rather than the construction of a positive one. This is all propelled by a selective view of history which is always vague on what the formation of partition in Ireland did to northern nationalists and republicans, who are largely taken for granted in these debates aside from the customary passing swipes at Gerry Adams and Éamon de Valera. Conversely, even in the chapters arguing for unity there are several unionists like Brian Magennis and Basil Brooke summoned to prove variously tendentious and obviously ideological claims about the realistic origins of partition as a ‘boundary of the mind’. This warm embrace of historical revisionism, reasoned largely through reasserting unionism as a once realistic ideology, finds its futurist counterpart in McBride’s claim that ‘there is every reason to believe that Northern Ireland could continue after Irish unity’, by way of Stormont, the PSNI, the civil service, and the soccer team. This is not so much a utopia as the emperor’s new unity.
For all that this vision is unenticing, it is also a symptom of a fundamental problem that goes deeper than the book’s reliance upon long-tired clichés of orange and green, nationalist and unionist, Catholic and Protestant. In its worst form, this leads McBride to make claims in his ‘against’ chapter that are so ahistorical as to be utterly farcical: ‘From its inception, Northern Ireland has been a place of inbuilt compromise.’ Forgive me if I’m shouting too loudly, but I think I read somewhere once (though certainly not in this book) that the establishment of partition in Ireland was an act of colossal disenfranchisement, leaving hundreds of thousands of nationalists – among others – without a future in the six counties, trapped in a repressive regime of political censorship, job and housing discrimination, and electoral gerrymandering both in terms of constituencies and the boundaries of the state itself. This history should matter not only as an object lesson for imagining the fate of the ‘losers’ in a unity referendum, but also for deciding who actually gets a voice in considering what the end of that partition might look like. The relative absence of republicans in these pages and in the wider debates around unity is certainly suspect. If there is any lesson to be gleaned from partition – other than that it needs to end – it is that the majorities which it empowered in each state can no longer be considered as the only voices that count. As the postscript of For and Against a United Ireland convincingly reminds the reader, neither the majorities nor minorities that were established with partition are the only significant dwellers on the island. But it is bizarre that the same book would then be authored by two men from what they expressly identify as the majority in jurisdictions created to cater to their traditions and idiosyncrasies, in arguments more inclined to quote Prince Hamlet than an Irish republican.
For and Against a United Ireland is specific about what is rotten in both states, superlative about their individual achievements, and yet often ambiguous about the possibility of correcting these faults or retaining these positives in a future settlement. Perhaps this is a linguistic problem rather than a political one, but even when a path towards unity is mentioned, it is almost always as an extension of the Republic of Ireland or the retention of the six-county administration rather than as a radically new political system. O’Toole himself even suggests as much when he claims that most southerners see unity as ‘an extension of the state they live in’. Yet in its own direction towards this essentially fictive constituency of these ‘moderates’, a United Ireland is imagined by the authors in its most conservative and thus least appealing form, merely an extension of the status quo that they live in. This speaks to a wider problem with how debates around Irish unity have been organised, both in terms of what academics have contributed to these discussions and to such journalistic glosses of these debates. ‘The ARINS Project’ and ‘Ireland’s Future’, to take two of the more prominent examples, are both self-professed efforts to further inform or inspire conversations about this Ireland yet to be, and they have clearly created spaces for these discussions. But for many of the people who have been platformed by these organisations, it seems as if this future is going to be as comfortable for them as the present is.
Maybe realpolitik, after all, is what is needed to win a referendum, but it strikes me that this just makes any conversation about the future trivial if not totally soporific. Are we still never to fancy? What is stopping a conversation about a United Ireland which doesn’t knowingly inhabit the same structures that it seeks to replace, or repeat the same cliches and reinscribe the same privileges that those structures have perpetuated? There is certainly even room for more than white men in this conversation, and we can leave some space for facts, although we would probably need to ration the word ‘reality’. The recent appearance of the Irish language scholar Róisín Nic Liam on the podcast ‘How to Gael’, in which she called for a ‘free, united, decolonial republic of equals’, demonstrated the value of bringing diversity and conviction to the table. Indeed McBride himself appeared on the same podcast in a dialogue that was far more open and generous than much of For and Against a United Ireland. In any case, as a matter of urgency, we need more and different voices from the ones that are currently loudest, not least because the future has always been more urgent for some of us than for others. But if we continue to talk about ‘reality’ only, and if our imaginations are still going to be hostage to all that is orange and green, north and south, then I fear that all that we will be dreaming of is a different partition under the same flag. Or, worse yet, the same partition under a different one.