Why Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth

Why Ireland should rejoin the Commonwealth
By Conn Corrigan, from Ireland and the Commonwelath
The biggest mistake Irish republicans ever made says former Irish rugby star Trevor Ringland, was that "they never asked." Ringland, the sports spokesman for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), likes saying this to his southern Irish friends to explain unionist objections to a united Ireland. And worse than not asking, Ringland says, is that the "only method used to persuade unionists of the benefits of a united Ireland was violence."
Northern Ireland, despite enjoying almost a decade of relative peace, remains a fractured society, and Ringland, as chairman of the One Small Step Campaign (a cross community organisation that tries to integrate the two communities) is doing more than his bit to correct this. The point he makes, I believe, neatly encapsulates the two major flaws in Irish republicanism: the assumption that unionism could not be a deeply held belief, and the connected assumption that Northern Protestants could be forced into a united Ireland through the barrel of a gun.
The first draft of the 1987 Sinn Féin policy document Scenario for Peace betrays the former flaw. While assuring Protestants that their rights would be protected in a united Ireland, Sinn Féin kindly offered to give grants to any Protestant who wished to be repatriated to Britain. The presumption was that the day a united Ireland arrived unionists would either snap out of their false consciousness and realise that they have been Irish all along, or have to go back to where they came from.
This republican view, strongly streaked in socialism, was that the British were using Protestants as a ‘pretext' to remain in Northern Ireland. But with the end of the Cold War, the IRA's self-image - an anti-imperialist organisation involved in a war of liberation against a colonial power - became increasingly impossible to sustain. Republicans soon realised that partition existed not because of British interests, but because of unionists' desire to remain part of the United Kingdom. "In a way," said Sinn Féin strategist Tom Hartley, "we made them a non-people...We didn't even see them as part of the problem, never mind as being part of the solution."
The use of violence, as Trevor Ringland points out, was one very obvious way in which republicans made the possibility of a united Ireland all the more unlikely. But republicans did further damage to their cause by the way in which they set out their vision of what a united Ireland would look like: Catholic, Gaelic and monolithic. Unionists could argue, with considerable justification, that their British culture, their British identity, would be obliterated in a country like this.
In 1998, Fianna Fáil TD (MP) Eamon O'Cuiv, the grandson of Eamon De Valera, said that while he was a "committed republican" he would see no problem with rejoining the commonwealth if it would reach out to unionists.
In April 2006, Jeffrey Donaldson also said: "We have made clear we would like to see a deepening and strengthening of the east-west frameworks. We would like to see the Irish Republic join the Commonwealth." In May, during a debate on the Northern Ireland Assembly's reapplication to membership of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association,
Donaldson and Alliance Party's MLA Sean Neeson both said that they thought it would be a good idea for the republic to rejoin the commonwealth. Sinn Féin's Mitchel McLaughlin also said, interestingly, that "while this is not, as you would understand, a primary matter of interest for us, neither should we create any obstacles to those who feel it reflects their particular cultural, political and social affinity."
Support for this idea also emanates from outside Ireland: in May, the secretary general of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) Dr William Shija, called for Ireland to rejoin the commonwealth, 58 years after it had left. And in July, Labour MP Andrew Mackinlay told the House of Commons that it was time to issue an invitation to Ireland to rejoin so as to "take its natural place" in the commonwealth.
This would not be a surrender to an imperial past. It would not mean that the Queen would be the head of state, which is the case only for the 16 states of the commonwealth realm. There are 54 countries in the commonwealth, 33 of which are republics, and many of which, like Ireland, had to fight for their independence. Instead, it would be a gesture - that a Northern Unionist identity could survive - even flourish - as part of a united Ireland.
There is no reason why today, with the redefinition of what it means to be Irish, Irishness shouldn't be absolutely compatible with being British. And for republicans to ever succeed, the two cannot be considered mutually exclusive concepts. Were Ireland to rejoin the commonwealth, it would send out a message to Northern Protestants not simply that their Britishness would be tolerated (which implies a kind of reluctant acceptance) - but would be actively promoted in a united Ireland. Which is why Gerry Adams and Co. should be reaching for the commonwealth application forms.

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