Times Change

Home                                                           Back to Contents 

The Irish diaspora and devolved democracy in the British-Irish islands

The Belfast Agreement provides all of us - particularly those of us on the democratic left of politics - with an opportunity to resolve the national question in our islands for good.  

 I want to explore two themes which I believe can be of help in the process of democratic and progressive political renewal. The first is to challenge the assumption that Britishness and Irishness, at least socio-culturally, are as sharply different as they often appear when Northern Ireland, or even Ireland, is examined in isolation from Britain; the second is to examine the implementation of the new political paradigm of devolved democracy (or in European parlance 'subsidiarity') and to point to the new political spaces and forms which are opening up, in Britain as well as in Ireland and between our islands. It is my belief that absolutist ideas of 'sovereignty' are increasingly bankrupt in our fast evolving world: a world in which the letters 'www' (world wide web) take on ever-increasing reality. 

So, how distinct are the British and Irish? In 1992 I met Richard Kearney in Dublin, arising from our common interest in a 'Europe of the regions'. He gave me a copy of the book he had edited, Across the Frontiers - Ireland in the 1990s (1988). I was astonished to find in it a figure which suggested that out of an estimated world-wide Irish diaspora of some 70 million, 13 million resided in Britain. That would be 23 per cent of the population, now around 57 million. Many more Irish people now seemed to live in the British state than in Ireland, and this seemed to me to bring into question a whole series of antagonistic assumptions. 

Kearney's figures seemed to be based on partly anecdotal evidence and I had to wait until 1994 for a study by another Irishman, James O'Connell - British Attitudes to Ireland and the Irish: A Special Relationship, carried out in 1994 by the Department of Peace Studies, Bradford University - for a scientific approach to the issue. The survey covered 1,400 people throughout Britain and was conducted by the independent polling organisation ICM Research. Among many other interesting things, it revealed:  

• Seven per cent of people born in Britain have at least one Irish parent - that is, nearly 4,000,000 people qualify automatically as Irish citizens. In addition, the 1991 UK census showed there were 830,500 Irish-born people living in Britain (174,000 from Northern Ireland, 11 per cent of population) and 656,500 from the Republic (18 per cent of population) - giving a total of nearly five million potential Irish citizens.
• One quarter of Britons have an Irish relative; 60 per cent have Irish friends, acquaintances or fellow workers. These latter two figures, taken with the first, confirms an estimate of those of Irish origin around seven to eight million. 

• Only six per cent of the British consider those who come to Britain from Ireland to be 'foreigners'. The great majority say they have more in common with the Irish than with Americans or Continentals. Only 14 per cent of the children or grandchildren of Irish immigrants felt they had a 'strong' Irish dimension to their identity; 45 per cent felt there was no Irish dimension. Only little more than half identified themselves as Catholics.
• The social class profiles of the Irish were almost identical to their British counterparts. More recent research has shown that, if anything, the Irish in Britain, like the Asian-British, outperform their British counterparts. 

The social and cultural effects of these close links were explored further in an interesting essay by Garret Fitzgerald and Paul Gillespie in Prospect (October 1996). They pointed out that the 'extent of direct human and family ties is probably unprecedented between two independent states.' They linked this to large-scale emigration from Ireland to England which peaked in the 1950s due to the depressed state of the southern Irish economy. (Though it was already very substantial during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century to Britain's then industrialising cities, particularly London, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. Marx and Engels were very aware of this in The Condition of the Working Class in England, estimating that more than one million Irish had already come, largely due to the introduction of capital-intensive farming forcing out small and peasant farmers, with 50,000 more coming each year. Irish emigration to Britain is no new phenomenon.) 

This presence generates an enormous human traffic of its own: one million visits each year by Irish immigrants in Britain to Ireland and 750,000 visits by relatives in Ireland to Britain. In addition about 1.5 million British tourists visit Ireland every year. On average that is nearly 9,000 trips a day across the Irish Sea.  

Fitzgerald and Gillespie point out that when these direct human contacts are added to the impact of British TV, the increasing circulation of the British press in Ireland (the NUJ organises across both islands, as do some other unions), common literature and sporting interests, then it is 'evident that to most Irish people, Britain and the British are not abstract political concepts to which they react with historically-conditioned hostility, but rather a place and a people with which most of them are familiar, even intimate.' And as Professor O'Connell's study revealed, those feelings are mirrored on the British side even though naturally their experience is more of the Irish in Britain than in Ireland - every other pub in London now seems to be Irish-themed. 

Further contemporary evidence for the mixing-up of peoples on these islands can be drawn from the UK censuses of 1971, 1981 and 1991. This revealed some startling features which do not often seem to enter the debate about current 'national' identities in our islands and challenge many popular perceptions about immigration. The disposition of the various nationalities (now including non-European) of these islands and their movements, has been rigorously mapped by Daniel Dorling in his comprehensive A New Social Atlas of Britain (1995). This draws on census material down to the ward level (the smallest unit of local government) which is then re-aggregated using a variety of criteria (eg place of birth, age, unemployment etc) and mapped through new computer-generated 'cartograms', so providing visible patterns of the disposition under investigation. 

A notable feature from the census findings over the 20 years from 1971-91 was the movement of people born in England to Wales and Scotland. Nearly 20 per cent of the current population of Wales and nearly 8 per cent of the population of Scotland was born in England, the movement in these instances being from urban England to rural Wales and Scotland: a rise of 40 per cent since 1971.  

In the other direction, according to the 1991 census, England had some 743,000 Scottish-born residents, equal to nearly 16 per cent of the Scottish-born living in Scotland (4.7 million of 5.1 million). There were some 545,000 Welsh-born residents, equal to nearly a quarter of Welsh-born people in Wales (2.3 million out of 2.9 million).  

Further information from the London Research Centre, again based on the 1991 census, showed that London is easily the most cosmopolitan city in Europe. One fifth of its population (1.4 million) belongs to ethnic minorities, a figure estimated to rise to 30 per cent by 2011. Of these some 250,000 are estimated to be Irish-born (north and south). Five per cent of Ireland's population lives in London! 

This analysis of internal migration within the British-Irish islands suggests that their peoples have been, and are, more mobile than has commonly been supposed or reported. The underlying conclusion to be drawn from this is that migration within these islands far outweighs recent immigration, which now numbers some three million (including descendants) from the new Commonwealth, and 30-40,000 asylum seekers in the Republic. It confirms our varied nature. Certainly in Britain we cannot assume that peoples' sense of identity is simply defined by their place of residence. As Jack O'Sullivan, an English-born 'Irish' journalist on the Independent put it in an article, 'After the peace deal, what is it to be Irish? ...If the traditions of Britishness and Irishness can be reconciled in Ulster, then surely we, the diaspora scattered about this country, can acknowledge what we are: both British and Irish.'  

Having examined the evidently increasing intermingling of Irishness and Britishness, I would now like to turn to the rapidly evolving political landscape in our islands and see how both phenomena might complement each other. 
 The Belfast Agreement has given us at least three new political institutions: 

• A trans-islands British-Irish Council (BIC), with ministerial and parliamentary aspects - the latter building on the existing British/ Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body
• A North/South Ministerial Council which may also develop a joint parliamentary aspect
• A 108-seat cross-community Northern Ireland Assembly with a consultative Civic Forum.

England will soon have eight Regional Development Agencies (RDA), each to be accompanied by a 'regional chamber' to be made up of representatives from relevant local authorities and other regional partners. The intention is that over the next few years - but for practical reasons, after the next election - the development agencies/chambers will have the capacity to evolve into Regional Assemblies of their own. There is already a vigorous campaign in the North East as they follow the example of their cousins in Scotland. (The Borders and Edinburgh were once part of the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria. The description of Scotland as a 'Celtic fringe' to England is mistaken - the Orkneys, Shetlands and the north east are heavily Scandinavian influenced.) 

Seven million Londoners will be getting a new Authority comprised of a directly-elected Mayor and 25 Assemblypeople. Nobody knows how the unprecedented Mayor/Assembly combination will work, but it is possible that in three or four years' time the Mayor of London could have a higher political profile than the Taoiseach or Prime Minister. Could this be a cue for a directly-elected Mayor in Dublin? 

In a few years' time, all being well, we can look forward to a total of 16 parliaments and assemblies in these islands, including the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Talk of a United Kingdom or united Ireland is already taking on a distinctly anachronistic flavour - and Paul Gillespie suggested in the Irish Times that the Republic might itself be regionalised. What I think we are witnessing is the managed disaggregation, not necessarily 'break-up' as nationalists would have it, of the traditional nation-state in Europe. When I went to hear Richard Caborn (John Prescott's Minister for the English regions) explain their rationale, he was quite explicit that they had been designed with Europe in mind. As the White Paper put it, 'the RDAs will have a strong European dimension ...in particular working with the Committee of the Regions' (this Committee represents the interests of Europe's regions, localities and cities to the Commission and the European Parliament). 

I would now like to take a closer look at Wales. It has been described by Roger Warren Evans (a Swanseaman with whom I have worked on city regional and community council ideas) as a 'constitutional laboratory' - and it is my view that the Welsh have been unjustly neglected in the history of the evolution of these islands. The Welsh were the original Britons (as was Saint Patrick, originally plucked from North Wales by an Irish raiding party, such warfare being typical of its time). Indeed, the word British is derived from the British Celtic Prydein. And it was the Welsh, still inspired by the Britain-wide Arthurian legend, who convinced the Anglo-Norman elite after the accession of Henry VII Tudor that they could think of themselves in a wider context as British.  

Once the 60-seat Welsh Assembly is up and running in a couple of years, the Welsh will have the densest system of elected democratic government in our islands. The internal heterogeneity of Wales (no less true of Ireland, England and Scotland) will be reflected in the Assembly itself. It will have five or so 'regional committees', with Assembly members doubling up at both regional and national level. Beneath the 'regions' are 22 unitary local authorities which the Tories established in their last term, electing more than 1,000 district councillors. Then come 700 elected community councils out of 850 designated 'community areas' (a local referendum in a community area is needed to give the green light to a community council) creating more than 5,000 voluntary community councillors who deal with strictly local matters - scrutinising planning applications and caring for the local environment, running small open spaces, community halls, swimming pools, playing fields etc, while raising small sums of money as part of the district council tax. 

A nation of less than three million people will shortly have a total of in excess of 6,000 directly elected representatives - which is probably what is needed to make a multi-level democracy work. And it is at the very local level that many citizens first have the opportunity to learn the etiquette and rules of democracy - where dialogue, argument and the ballot box is all. Keep a close eye on nearby Wales would be my advice to those in Ireland seeking to reform and deepen democracy. 

The democracy of the future, in my view, will be multi-tiered and multi-dimensional. Seamus Heaney once perceptively invited us to be 'two-minded' - straddling the British-Irish divide - but I think we are going to have to be something more like five-, six-, or seven-minded. And I think where a lot of this interchange could fruitfully take place is under the aegis of the proposed BIC. 

The membership of the BIC will comprise representatives of the Dail and Westminster, along with members from devolved bodies in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Channel Islands, and possibly elsewhere in the UK. If it is to be truly inclusive, I would strongly urge representation from the Greater London Authority and the Regional Chambers of the RDAs of England, the latter if only as observers until they become fully-fledged assemblies. 

Nor do I see why there should not be a 'civic' dimension to the work of the BIC. One of the disappointments of the Agreement is that no mention is made of the British-Irish Encounter organisation which was established by Thatcher and Fitzgerald in 1981 to organise high-level, non-governmental conferences. Even though the body has been under-resourced and the conferences pretty invisible, it has done some valuable work bringing people, particularly younger people, together across the islands. 

The BIC will meet twice a year at summit level (more often in sectoral meetings or bilaterally) and it seems to me that in this new 'political space' the nations, regions and localities of these islands will be able, amicably and equitably, to appreciate their differences while recognising the many attributes they have in common due to their geographical proximity, mingled histories, common institutions and ethnic and cultural mixing. 

In conclusion, let me turn to some inspiration from the radical, dissenting poet John Hewitt. What comes through again and again to me is not his so-called Ulster Protestantness, but his extraordinary sense of place and feeling for nature. This seems to me more Zen-like than Christian European and, like another great free-thinking poet, William Blake, he has that unusual capacity to see 'the whole world in a grain of sand'. The particular and the expansive are beautifully captured for me in his lines:  

 When the first white flakes 
 fall out of the black Antrim sky 
 I toboggan across Alaska.

On all sides the siren calls of ethno-nationalism have deformed the politics of our islands for far too long. Our new politics will need to be informed by a localness which is at the same time cosmopolitan. It can be coloured by the differing national backgrounds from which we spring - if we still feel we do - but cannot be dictated by them. The issue of national identity must now be joined by other senses of place and identity, and by the need for just and sustainable access to resources for all. 
 
 

Simon Partridge is a political consultant 
 

This is an edited version of a paper delivered to a Democratic Left seminar, National Identities in Ireland: Towards a New Understanding, in Dublin in 1998. 
 

Contact Times Change 
Revised: 15/03/99