{"id":444495,"date":"2026-05-12T06:04:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T06:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/444495\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T06:04:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T06:04:07","slug":"nigel-farages-success-gives-ireland-an-urgent-deadline-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/444495\/","title":{"rendered":"Nigel Farage\u2019s success gives Ireland an urgent deadline \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a British government-sponsored TV ad in the 1990s which people my age often remember, with amusement but also nostalgia. Two boys get to know each other, playing football and generally messing about. It emerges \u2013 as if it wasn\u2019t obvious already \u2013 that they are from different sides of the North<\/a>\u2019s divide when, respectively, a GAA<\/a> medal and an Orange Order<\/a> badge fall out of their pockets. A Van Morrison song plays amiably in the background and the whole thing concludes with him saying, in his unmistakable drawl: \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be great if it was like all the time?\u201d<\/p>\n

It speaks to a yearning for the sense \u2013 widespread in the 1990s \u2013 of hope for an emerging peace and potential reconciliation to follow. Both hopes were fulfilled; sadly the latter much less so than the former. Nostalgia is a fact of life, but it has become too much a fact of politics. And not just in Trump\u2019s America or Brexit Britain. In parts of establishment Ireland, there is a marked tendency to hark back to the 1990s when the question of this island\u2019s constitutional future is raised. <\/p>\n

Put more directly, there is a tendency by Irish ministers to deflect any and all questions about planning for constitutional change with a general, sometimes impatient entreaty to get more out of the Belfast Agreement<\/a> institutions as created in 1998. This desire is noble and right: every day as leader of the official opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly<\/a>, my party and I are trying to force improvements in the North\u2019s challenged political institutions.<\/p>\n

The fact that it is hard to predict how Farage would act in office is its own argument for proper planning for all scenarios<\/p>\n

But after last week\u2019s election results in Britain, continuing to avoid serious engagement with how change in England, Scotland and Wales could precipitate change on the island of Ireland starts to look like negligence rather than just nostalgia. Political reporting runs on hyperbole, but it is no exaggeration to say the results have fundamentally altered the political shape of Britain.<\/p>\n

The Irish Government<\/a> has been rightly keen to emphasise the repointing of an Anglo-Irish relationship weakened by the Brexit years. There have been cordial summits and joint press conferences that really have seemed like a 1990s revival. But the election results indicate that the Brexit years haven\u2019t really passed at all. Britain, particularly England, is still defined by profound divisions and anger to which no government appears able to adequately respond. Certainly not Keir Starmer<\/a>\u2019s. <\/p>\n

Starmer may be replaced as leader by despairing Labour MPs, but if he is not, the next most likely prime minister is certain to have a radically different approach to Northern Ireland and British-Irish relations. That is of course Nigel Farage<\/a>, a man who cares so deeply about sensitive questions in Northern Ireland that he performed an \u201cUp the Ra\u201d salutation in a Cameo video for a small fee. His party\u2019s Brexit spokesperson, Danny Kruger, told the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice<\/a> conference that the party would complete the so-called \u201cunfinished business\u201d of Brexit by reopening EU<\/a>–UK<\/a> agreement on the Irish Border. They take a predictably trenchant line on protecting British veterans from accountability over unlawful Troubles killings.<\/p>\n

All this is merely to list the various profound policy challenges a Reform<\/a>-led government would present for the North and British-Irish relations. But there is a deeper question: at what point are citizens in the North entitled to say they do not want to live in a country run by Farage? That question goes far beyond the constituency traditionally defined as nationalist, and includes many people \u2013 and many in my constituency from unionist backgrounds \u2013 who are horrified at the prospect of a UK run by and for the coterie of charlatans and spivs that surround Farage.<\/p>\n

These are the kinds of people whose Irish passport forms I sign regularly. Whatever view they have on our constitutional future \u2013 and there is a fascinating spectrum of views far beyond the traditional binary \u2013 many have been encouraged to think of the Irish State in new ways in recent years. They haven\u2019t just applied for passports to avoid queues on their summer holidays, they have seen the investments of the Shared Island Fund<\/a> as an alternative to the sclerosis at Stormont<\/a>. And seen the relative sanity of politics in Dublin, notwithstanding all its challenges, as an alternative to the sometimes literal insanity of the last decade in British politics.<\/p>\n

Rather than seeing it as an aggressive destabilisation of the North, people like this \u2013 many of them now Irish citizens \u2013 might want and expect a responsible Irish Government to be planning for change on this island that may be forced by events on the one next door.<\/p>\n

Sam McBride and Fintan O\u2019Toole\u2019s landmark book, For and Against a United Ireland, posits potential scenarios in which a Farage-led government chooses for reasons of its own to force the question of a Border poll. The fact that it is hard to predict how Farage would act in office is its own argument for proper planning for all scenarios. And even if Reform is not put in government, the elections have underlined that the UK is a fundamentally more unstable and unpredictable entity than it was in 1998, even if we would wish it otherwise. And it is much poorer, with Brexit costing at least \u00a3100 billion a year in lost economic activity \u2013 a gap which is exacerbating pressure on public services, including north of the Border.<\/p>\n

While it is misguided and even irresponsible to arbitrarily name dates for a referendum \u2013 something Sinn F\u00e9in<\/a> has made a habit of \u2013 it is its own form of irresponsibility to act as if we can forever delay practical preparation.<\/p>\n

My sister in law, a highly effective campaigning lawyer, enjoys keeping old episodes of Friends on in the background at home. Some nice, harmless \u201990s nostalgia does no harm \u2013 but nostalgia cannot be a substitute for facing the world as it is, or taking responsibility for the future we want.<\/p>\n

Matthew O\u2019Toole MLA is leader of the Opposition in the NI Assembly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was a British government-sponsored TV ad in the 1990s which people my age often remember, with amusement…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444496,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24987,4183,61,60,1194,43,6236,2443,103173,18254,17144,98224,3415,26190,26191,303],"class_list":["post-444495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-belfast-agreement","tag-gaa","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-keir-starmer","tag-news","tag-nigel-farage","tag-northern-ireland","tag-northern-ireland-assembly","tag-orange-order","tag-reform-uk","tag-shared-island","tag-sinn-fein","tag-stormont-assembly","tag-traditional-unionist-voice","tag-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}