Visions of Ireland, North and South
The spring 2025 Studies is a special issue to mark the centenary of the Irish Boundary Commission, with a set of reflections on the history of Irish partition and on its present-day political, economic, and cultural dimensions.
In the opening essay, An Taoiseach Micheál Martin remembers Seamus Mallon, just months before his death, saying, ‘When are we going to realise we have to learn to share this place?’ It was Martin’s reflections on this question that led to the Shared Island initiative, which he launched in 2020 in order ‘to enhance co-operation, connection and mutual understanding on the island of Ireland’ and ‘to engage with all communities and traditions to build consensus around a shared future’. ‘Real unity’, he concludes, ‘requires genuine respect, which in turn requires genuine reconciliation’.
Ireland’s relationship with Europe is the subject of Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe’s essay. He directs attention to Ireland’s historical orientation towards Europe, dating even back as far as the Carolingian Renaissance and extending to the country’s profoundly positive engagement with the European Union in recent decades. The EU, Donohoe notes, was ‘built through centrist compromise’, and it is this attitude which conveys the importance of openness, tolerance and consent in the debate about the future of the island of Ireland.
Other essays in this special issue, by Jane Ohlmeyer, Cormac Moore, and Ted Hallett, consider historical aspects of the Boundary Commission itself as well as Ireland’s wider experience of empire. One hundred years ago this year, the commission came to a dismal end, with all sides agreeing to bury its report and to leave the existing partition between the Free State and Northern Ireland just as it was. The consequences of this fiasco were deeply harmful and are still apparent. By leaving a large, politically alienated nationalist minority in Northern Ireland, it contributed substantially to decades of sectarian tension, to the Troubles from 1968 to 1998, and to the legacy of division and grievance that continues to blight Northern society.
Also in this issue, John Coakley, John FitzGerald, Jennifer Todd and Joseph Ruane consider the thorny social, economic, and identity matters that would have a bearing on the question of national unification, while Ireland’s complex relationship with Britain in recent decades are treated in the essays of Stephen Collins and Brian Murphy.
Two further essays consider present-day attitudes in the North – nationalist hopes by Brian Feeney and unionist fears by Alex Kane. And lastly, Seamus Murphy SJ argues that for the Good Friday Agreement truly to bear fruit, hard lessons must be learned from the past.
This issue of Studies will be launched at the end of the month by Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe.