(Northern) Ireland and the Brexit debate : ethno-national alignments in political uncertainty

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(Northern) Ireland and the Brexit Debate:

Ethno-National Alignments in

Political Uncertainty

Barry O’Connell

Master Thesis of Political Science

Political Economy

Graduate School of Social Sciences

University of Amsterdam

Thesis Supervisor: Dr Mike Medeiros Second Reader: Dr Eelco Harteveld

Student number: 12238988

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Abstract

The contemporary and ever-changing status of Brexit has instilled a palpable political uncertainty both in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The intensive Brexit debate has brought heightened attention to the sensitive issues surrounding Northern Irish identity, which have been carefully pacified by the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process. This paper seeks to determine the extent of the fallout, by asking: Has the Brexit

debate strengthened traditional ethno-national alignments in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, making a United Ireland less likely? This paper adopted the lens of Social

Identity Theory, and performed a mixed-method analysis combining newly collected quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative analysis was done through an experiment within a student survey distributed across the island of Ireland (N=771) with an additional Brexit section to act as a priming mechanism. The qualitative data was collected through interviews with leading political elites from across the unionist-nationalist spectrum. The qualitative data gives clear evidence of strengthening ethno-national alignments. The results of the experiment show a significant strengthening of SIT in the Republic, and a recurrent pattern, although insignificant, of in-group identification among Northern Irish Protestants. The Brexit section also presents results for a significant drop in Irish identification in the North in the weeks after the murder of journalist Lyra McKee, and a significant drop in Irish identification and increase in UK attachment when moderated for social ideology.

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I’d like to thank my parents Marie and Tim O’Connell for all their encouragement and support, both in my academic career and outside it. My name may be on this paper, but it was always a team effort to get me over the finish line. They are to this day, the two most inspiring and enlightened people I’ve ever met, and very generous benefactors!

I’d like to give enormous thanks to my thesis supervisor and mentor Dr Mike Medeiros, who gave me great encouragement from start to finish while working on this paper. Many a time I went into his office deflated and pessimistic, but I always left energised with a plan. His support lifted me out of many intellectual and methodological quagmires, for which I’m very grateful.

I’d like to thank the many politicians who spent time answering questions for the qualitative research that went into this paper. I’d especially like to thank the Irish Minister of State for European Affairs Helen McEntee and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar for their generosity.

Finally, I’d like to pay tribute to journalist Lyra McKee who was killed in the Derry/ Londonderry riots on April 18th_{, 2019. Her writing unabashedly laid bare the scars of ‘The}

Troubles,’ yet she herself embodied a Northern Ireland free from conflict or animosity. She gave a voice to minority groups in the region who had never been heard from before and has left a lasting legacy. May her death inspire action on behalf of politicians and be the last tragedy in this conflict.

Barry O’Connell

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List of Figures

Figure 2. 1 2011 Map of Northern Ireland with spatial distribution of Protestants and

Catholics ... 6

Figure 2. 2 Brexit referendum results 2016 ... 10

Figure 2. 3 Three predicted economic scenarios of Brexit for Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in both GDP and GDP per capita ... 12

Figure 3. 1 Percentage of citizens per country by their satisfaction with the way democracy works in the EU ... 22

Figure 5. 1 Northern Ireland, How British do you feel? Moderated by religion. ... 45

Figure 5. 2 Northern Ireland, How attached do you feel to the UK? Moderated by religion .. 45

Figure 5. 3 Northern Ireland, How Irish do you feel? Moderated by religion ... 46

Figure 5. 4 Northern Ireland, How attached do you feel to the RoI? Moderated by religion .. 46

Figure 5. 5 Northern Ireland, How Irish do you feel? Moderated by time: before and after the murder of Lyra Mckee on April 18th, 2019. ... 48

Figure 5. 6 Northern Ireland, How Irish do you feel? Moderated by social ideology ... 48

Figure 5. 7 Northern Ireland, How attached do you feel to the UK? Moderated by social ideology... 48

Figure 5. 8 Republic of Ireland, How attached do you feel to NI? ... 49

Figure 5. 9 Northern Ireland, The long term policy should be to unite. Moderated by religion ... 50

Figure 5. 10 Northern Ireland, There will be a united Ireland in my lifetime. Moderated by religion ... 50

Figure 5. 11 Northern Ireland, Border poll of unification. Moderated by religion ... 51

Figure 5. 12 Republic of Ireland, Long term policy to unite ... 52

Figure 5. 13 Republic of Ireland, There will be a united Ireland in my lifetime ... 52

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List of Tables

Table 5. 1 Number and percentage of primed in sample ... 44

Table 5. 2 Overview of sample by region and religion... 44

Table A. 1. Northern Ireland, British and UK attachment by religion ... 76

Table A. 2. Northern Ireland, Irish and RoI attachment by religion ... 77

Table A. 3. Northern Ireland, Irish identification by time ... 78

Table A. 4. Northern Ireland, Irish identification/UK attachment by social ideology ... 78

Table A. 5. Republic of Ireland, attachment to NI... 79

Table A. 6. Northern Ireland, Unification... 79

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List of Abbreviations

CIRA Continuity Irish Republican Army CTA Common Travel Area

CU Customs Union

DUP Democratic Unionist Party EC European Commission

EEC European Economic Community ERG European Research Group EU European Union

GB Great Britain

GDP Gross Domestic Product

GFA Good Friday Agreement/Belfast Agreement IRA Irish Republican Army

MLA Member of the Legislative Assemble for Northern Ireland MP Member of the UK Parliament at Westminster

NI Northern Ireland; Northern Irish NIRA New Irish Republican Army NUI National University of Ireland RIRA Real Irish Republican Army

RoI Republic of Ireland, also referred to as the ‘South’ SDLP Social Democratic and Labour Party

SIT Social Identity Theory SM Single Market

SNP Scottish National Party

TD Teachta Dála (Irish Member of Parliament) UDF Ulster Defence Force

UI United Ireland

UKIP United Kingdom’s Independence Party UUP Ulster Unionist Party

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Chapter 1: Introduction

“The top priority for us remains the issue of the border on the island of Ireland, and the guarantee to maintain the peace process in accordance with the Good Friday Agreement. There’s no room for speculation here. […] I’ve been wondering what that special place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it [out] safely.”

-Donald Tusk, European Council President (BBC, 2019a).

The twentieth century has witnessed state borders drastically shift and change. Many of these borders were hastily, expediently, and arbitrarily drawn by western powers in their retreat from empire, or after the two Great Wars. This has often resulted in widespread unrest and violence across territories all over the colonised globe, particularly in Africa and India. For some, new countries were drawn up whose population shared neither language, religion nor sense of ethnic history, such as the case of Nigeria. For others, borders acted as a partition that divided ethnic groups across multiple territories, such as the Kurdish people in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. The focus of this paper is 499-kilometre border on the island of Ireland, which encased two peoples with a diverging sense of ethnicity, religion and political aspiration in one state, while splitting the Irish ethnic group across two states.

In the late twentieth century, the Northern Irish case was marked with one of the most violent and publicised civil conflicts in the western world. This civil war, euphemistically called ‘The Troubles,’ claimed the lives of over 3,300 people and lasted for three decades (Hayes & McAllister, 2005: 601). The opposing sides in the conflict were segregated on multiple fronts: one group predominantly Protestant with British identity who wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom; and the other predominantly Catholic group who identified as Irish with nationalist aspirations in an irredentist sense to join the Irish Republic. ‘The Troubles’ finally came to an end with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998, which has had unparalleled success in the twenty-year interim. However, due to the impending UK withdrawal from the European Union, the world’s attention is firmly back on the complex and sensitive status of Northern Ireland.

The Brexit process has caused a multitude of crises across Great Britain and beyond. It sounded the death knell for, at least, two UK Prime Ministers and countless ministers of state, had a hand in the closure of the parliament at Stormont in Northern Ireland, and is the genesis

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Introduction

of the UK’s newest right-wing political party that gained the largest share of seats in the May 2019 EU elections (The Economist, 2019a; 2019b). Brexit has politically polarised the population of the UK, and also poses an existential threat to the European project. As Donald Tusk has stated, one issue which has consistently stalemated the withdrawal negotiations is navigating and enforcing the UK’s only land border with the EU: the border that separates Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.

The status of Northern Ireland is central to the current Brexit impasse, with talk of numerous potential solutions such as ‘The Backstop,’ Hard Brexit, Soft Brexit, and even Irish unification. This has brought heightened attention to Northern Irish identity, a sensitive issue that has lain relatively dormant for two decades. This paper seeks to analyse if the rekindling of a debate on identity in Northern Ireland has influenced intergroup relationships among a generation who spent their developmental years in the peaceful aftermath of the GFA. The research question of this paper asks: Has the Brexit debate strengthened traditional

ethno-national alignments in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, making a United Ireland less likely?

In order to attempt to answer this question, this paper used a mixed-method analysis applying Social Identity Theory (SIT) to newly collected quantitative and qualitative data. SIT is a prominent lens used for analysing intergroup dynamics, and purports that individuals in society are divided into different social groups or categories based on salient attributes, such as religion, language or skin colour (Tajfel & Turner, 1979: 59-60). Subsequently, interactions between groups are marked with in-group bias against the out-group in evaluations and behaviour (Tajfel & Turner, 1979: 56). Ferguson and McKeown (2016) indicate that political stability can play a role in intergroup interaction, with “high levels of political instability linking to higher levels of in-group bias” (Ferguson & McKeown, 2016: 218). The accuracy of this claim will be examined in this thesis. Throughout this paper, the groups in question will be chiefly identified by their religious markers, Protestant and Catholic. However, group grievances stem from more than religious disharmony. As Berberi states, “Community tensions in Northern Ireland do not reflect religious tensions even though the religious identity of the two coincides with their national identity […] These tensions are ethno-national – they refer to two groups, each having a specific identity based on common descent, language, culture or religion” (Berberi, 2016: 2).

In this analysis, the quantitative data was gathered through an experiment which was constructed within a survey that allowed for a random 50% of respondents to receive an

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Introduction

3 would influence the socio-political opinions of respondents compared to the control group. This survey was distributed to several hundred students across both Northern Ireland and the Republic, including students in all universities on the island, collecting a sample of N=771. The means of both groups were compared through several regressions, and moderated for variables including religion, social ideology, EU satisfaction, and time, to name a few.

Qualitative data was collected through interviews with political elites across the ideological spectrum. This included Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) from both unionist and nationalist parties in Northern Ireland, among others. Politicians from the Irish government were also interviewed to gauge the Republic’s feelings towards Brexit’s impact on Irish identity and the prospects for a United Ireland (UI). These interviews were with the Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar, and the Irish Minister of State for European affairs Helen McEntee.

Both the quantitative and qualitative results indicate that Brexit has aggravated national groups North and South. Unionist and nationalist political elites both believe ethno-national tensions have been heightened due to Brexit, however, are diametrically opposed on the severity and the underlying cause of these tensions. The quantitative data would also lend to an interpretation that the Brexit debate has aggravated ethno-national identities on the island of Ireland. Significant increases in in-group identification were found among the population of the Republic towards the North, and though not statistically significant, clear patterns in the data across several regressions also indicated increased in-group identification among Northern Irish Protestants. Significant results in the North were found when moderated for social ideology, which highlighted that the Brexit section made those who were socially progressive identify less with being Irish and increased attachment to the UK, and vice versa. Another important finding highlights a significant drop in Irish identification with the Brexit section in the weeks after the murder of journalist Lyra McKee, whose tragic death occurred in the middle of the data collection.

This thesis is divided into seven chapters. After this introduction, chapter two is a literature review which will introduce and contextualise the case of Northern Ireland and the main tenets of the Good Friday Agreement. Chapter three will lay out the theoretical framework for this paper, chiefly Social Identity Theory and discuss its application on intergroup relations in Northern Ireland, and go on to set out this paper’s hypotheses. Chapter four will discuss this paper’s methodology and research design, explaining how the new quantitative and qualitative data was collected, and how it was analysed. Chapter five will present the results of the data analysis in relation to this paper’s stated hypotheses. Chapter six

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Introduction

will discuss the results and how they interact with the literature and theory, and finally chapter seven will offer an overall conclusion to this paper.

The contemporary and ever-changing status of Brexit has instilled a palpable political uncertainty both in Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and also the Republic of Ireland. This uncertainty has been exacerbated by both the closure of the Northern Irish Assembly with the collapse of the power-sharing executive, and the continued dysfunction in Westminster and the Tory party. A number of high-profile politicians are calling for a Hard Brexit with little regard for its ramifications on the Northern Irish peace process. One such politician and PM-contender is Boris Johnson, who stated the sustained focus on the Irish border issue is “allowing the tail to wag the dog” (The Guardian, 2018). The tragic murder of journalist Lyra McKee by a dissident Irish Republican in Derry/Londonderry1_{on April 18}th_{, 2019 sent shockwaves through}

the Northern Irish public and many Irish and UK politicians. This is because it marked a solemn reminder of the not so distant past, where civilian executions and public terror remained a fixture of the daily Northern Irish news cycle. It is a reminder of a different Northern Ireland, violently divided on stringent and uncompromising ethno-national lines, and disharmony of identities. This paper seeks to examine whether the Brexit debate has aggravated these political cleavages, and exacerbated intergroup tensions in Northern Ireland and the Republic making the notion of a united island nation in the future untenable.

1_{The city is referred to as ‘Derry’ for people who identify as being Irish, and ‘Londonderry’ for those who}

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Chapter 2: Literature Review

This chapter will introduce and contextualise the case of Northern Ireland, and provide a brief historical overview to highlight the impact of the colonial period on the socio-politics of the region past and present. It will then go on to discuss the founding of Northern Ireland, simultaneous to the founding of the Irish Free State, in the twentieth century, and discuss ‘The Troubles’ that ravaged the region from the late 1960s. This will allow for a view into the genesis of intergroup grievances. The chapter will go on to examine the text of the Good Friday Agreement, and highlight its complications in relation to Brexit. It will then discuss the economic ramifications of Brexit, ‘The Backstop’ put forward by the EU to mitigate Brexit damage to Ireland, and finally discuss the concept of Irish unity.

2.1 Introduction of Case: (Northern) Ireland and Brexit

Northern Ireland (NI) is a country within the United Kingdom that comprises of six of the nine counties of Ulster on the North-Eastern part of the island of Ireland. NI became a politically separate region to the rest of the island in 1921, with the partition of Ireland (Patterson, 2010: 340; Guelke, 2017: 42). To this day, NI is a very socially segregated country, and has experienced intense intergroup conflict between two greatly divide social groups. These groups are divided on religious, ethnographic and political grounds. Protestants in NI tend to have historical lineage from the island of Great Britain, and tend to be ‘unionist,’ in the sense of maintaining and strengthening the union of (Northern) Ireland and Great Britain, also called ‘Loyalists.’ Catholics, on the other hand, tend to have native ancestors from the island of Ireland, and be ‘nationalist’ in the irredentist sense to join the Republic of Ireland (RoI) of the South, also called ‘Republicans’ (Clements, 2010: 394). The 2011 census found that 48% of the resident population in Northern Ireland self-identified as Protestant, and 45% self-identified as Catholic, highlighting the very narrow margin between group population (Ferguson & McKeown, 2016: 218).2

2_{It is worth mentioning that these intergroup distinctions in identity and allegiance are not absolute. Many}

individuals vote and act in ways which do not clearly align with their identity group. However, these broad allegiances continue to hold true among the majority of the population.

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Literature Review

Figure 2. 1 2011 Map of Northern Ireland with spatial distribution of Protestants and Catholics (FactCheckNI, 2019).

Intergroup conflict reached its peak during a thirty-year period referred to as ‘The Troubles,’ that resulted in over 3,300 deaths (Hayes & McAllister, 2005: 601). It was not until 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that the region welcomed a new era of peace and reconciliation. Brexit, however, poses a very real threat to decades of peace talks and trust-building between the Protestant and Catholic groups in NI. To get a clear insight into the complex nature and hybrid identity of Northern Ireland, and to understand the intergroup grievances, a short historical overview is necessary.

2.2 Historical Overview: Colonial Period, Creating Division

Britain commenced the colonising process on the island of Ireland through a system of plantations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The large influx of “undertakers,” loyal subjects to the English Crown, were, “virtually all Protestants who retained their religious,

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Literature Review

7 Ulster (nearly 50,000 by 1633) resulting in native Irish farmers being forced to occupy small overcrowded holdings in the west and south (Terchek, 1977: 50-51). Catholics were deprived of political and other rights granted to Protestants, creating a systematic bias between groups, consolidated by the Protestant victory at the Battle of the Boyne 1690 which secured a Protestant ascendancy for centuries to come (Terchek, 1977: 51; Campbell, 2014: 137-8). Catholic resentment intensified with further disenfranchisement of the native Irish due to the moving of the Irish parliament from Dublin to Westminster in 1800, and the Irish Famine of the 1840s in which a million starved and millions more immigrated abroad from what was the richest and most powerful nation in the world (Campbell, 2014: 195-196; 214). In an effort to gain outright independence for Ireland, the political party Sinn Féin (“Ourselves Alone”) was founded in the early twentieth century, and was central in the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) mobilising into the Irish Republican Army (Campbell, 2014: 253-4).

2.3 The Founding of Northern Ireland; ‘The Troubles;’ Grievances

The 1920 Government of Ireland Act negotiated a settlement between London and Dublin but stipulated two separate parliaments on the island: one in Dublin, creating an Irish Free State, and one in the city of Belfast in Ulster, which would remain part of the United Kingdom, due to its majority Protestant population and industrial centre (Campbell, 2014: 266). Partition of the island caused bitter division (practically and figuratively), not just between Protestants and Catholics but within each group too, resulting in the Irish Civil War (1922-23). Though Catholics were outnumbered by about two to one in Northern Ireland, there was still a large Catholic population in the newly formed NI, with two of the six counties, Fermanagh and Tyrone, both containing Catholic majorities, but were politically minoritised due to unionist gerrymandering (Patterson, 2010: 340). Blake (1996) describes the implementation of the Irish border as “a classic case study of a poorly-planned boundary commission,” which has been a common trait of British withdrawal in their dismantling of empire (Blake, 1996: 55-58).

Inequalities worsened for Catholics, and poorer Protestants, as wealthy businessmen were allowed to cast multiple votes in elections based on the size of their companies, while those who did not rent or own property were not allowed to vote at all (Campbell, 2014: 302). In 1968, civil rights marches were held demanding electoral reform, which led to violence, and resulted in the British army being sent by Westminster to establish order, a hostile act for many Catholic nationalists (Campbell, 2014: 302). This tension then sparked the thirty-year period known as ‘The Troubles,’ fought between the Catholic/nationalist Irish Republican Army

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Literature Review

(IRA), also known as the Provisional IRA, and the Protestant/unionist Ulster Defence Force (UDF) with the British army, dividing Belfast into two camps (Campbell, 2014: 303-4). Both sides were responsible for numerous atrocities against civilians, such as the terrorist attack staged by the IRA in Enniskillen in 1987, and the British army’s Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972; the latter of which saw a conviction of a British soldier for the crime in March, 2019, nearly fifty years after the act (Irish Times, 2017a; 2019a).

Republican splinter groups began to form in response to the cessation of violence by the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin politicians entering into negotiations with Britain and eventually opting for parliamentary politics. The Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) split from the IRA in 1986, and the Real IRA (also called the New IRA) emerged in 1987 and carried out the Omagh bombings in 1998, killing 29 people and injuring upwards of 300 (Neumann, 2005: 87-88; Irish Times, 2018). In 2016, a new far-left, and as of yet unregistered, political party was formed in NI called Saoradh, which is made up of dissident republicans closely connected to the RIRA. Saoradh (‘Liberated’ in the Irish language) have been heavily condemned for their rejection of the peace process by both Sinn Féin and unionist parties (The Guardian, 2019).

Grievances between Catholic and Protestant groups can be clearly observed: Catholics generally want to join the Republic, and have been discriminated against by the majority Protestant group. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) held government from NI’s inception until 1971, and were “politically, nationally, ethnically, culturally, religiously, and economically discriminatory, disorganising the cultural Catholic population, largely of Irish native descent, and organising the cultural Protestants who were largely of British settler decent” (O’Leary, 2018b: 223). Protestants, on the other hand, felt greatly threatened by violent radical nationalists, and wanted to maintain their close ties with the UK.

2.4 The Paradox: Good Friday Agreement and Brexit

The Good Friday Agreement marked the turning point between Catholic and Protestant communities, bringing ‘The Troubles’ to an end after three decades of violence. The GFA was ratified by concurrent referendums both North and South, with the support of 71% of people from NI and 94% from the RoI which, alongside Great Britain, pledged to be its guarantors (O’Leary, 2018b: 224). A three-strand approach for peace was conceived: Strand One mandated a power-sharing executive with devolved powers following NI Assembly elections; Strand Two mandated a North-South Ministerial Council which consisted of both First and

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Literature Review

9 Deputy-First Ministers of NI, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) among other high-ranking politicians; and Strand Three founded a British-Irish Council which held a British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference twice a year (Tannam, 2001: 505-6). With the creation of a power-sharing executive in the devolved government of the Northern Irish Assembly, both unionist and nationalists parties could rule in tandem. This meant that Sinn Féin, the nationalist party affiliated with the IRA, was brought in out of the cold and into the centre of political power, which quickly de-escalated IRA violence. This can be seen to reflect the work of Birnir, who states that regarding minority ethnic group inclusion in the democratization process, “the causal arrow runs from exclusion to intransigence and/or violence,” thus political access leads to moderation of extremist behaviour (Birnir, 2007: 116).

A very significant mandate of the Good Friday Agreement, which is currently causing complications due to Brexit, states the importance of recognising the birthrights of NI citizens:

“the birthrights of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British or both, as they may choose, and accordingly confirm that their rights to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland.”

(Good Friday Agreement, 1998: (vi) 33)

According to the agreement, the future status of Northern Ireland is dependent on the will of the majority of people in both NI and the Republic to exercise their “right to self-determination,” which may bring about a United Ireland if the majority voted for it, as, “there would be a binding obligation on the part of Irish and British governments to introduce legislation to support that wish” (Good Friday Agreement, 1998: 33). This is also referred to as the “consent principle.” This legitimizes the aspirations for Irish/Catholic/nationalist people in the North who reject British rule, and set out a constitutional avenue in which to join the RoI.

Though the GFA is a peace agreement between the UK and RoI, certain wording did not foresee specific political changes. The text states that both NI and RoI’s efforts to “still further the unique relationship [and] close cooperation […] as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union” (emphasis added) (Good Friday Agreement, 1998: 32). This agreement clearly acknowledges the inherent importance of past and future European integration at the GFA’s core of functioning, and mutual membership of the EU is crucial for its success.

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Literature Review

The RoI and the UK both joined the European Economic Community (EEC), precursor to the EU, at the height of ‘The Troubles’ in 1973. European integration was a huge factor that facilitated the peace process, and ultimately many of the terms of the GFA. The most difficult and polarising question with regards to UK withdrawal from the EU is that of the NI/RoI border, the only land border that the UK shares with an EU (or any) country. EU membership allows for free trade, free movement, and a frictionless border between the two regions, with the CTA and single market (Dixon, 1994: 168; Hayward & Murphy, 2018: 280). The EU also funded the PEACE programmes, which gave huge amounts of money to NI and the border region if members of different communities agreed to work together in a bipartisan way. PEACE I in 1995 donated €400 million; PEACE II 2000-2004 gave €597 million; and PEACE III 2007-2013 allocated €333 million (Phinnemore et al., 2012, 565-6). NI Structural Funds and Common Agricultural Policy allocations from the EU from 2014-2020 were forecasted at €2,299 million, but Brexit has put all of this into jeopardy (Tannam, 2018 :252). With the UK and RoI so deeply embedded in the EU, along with so much of the NI peace process facilitated by Europe, Brexit would be a logistical, impractical and unfeasible nightmare for the island of Ireland.

Figure 2. 2 Brexit referendum results, 2016 (BBC, 2016).

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Literature Review

11 the population of NI are being undemocratically forced to leave the EU because of the votes of their neighbours in England and Wales. The fact that the people of NI voted overwhelmingly to accept the GFA, and rejected Brexit which would put it into jeopardy, points to the fact that the people of NI wish to continue with the GFA without risk of disruption. It is also significant to point out that in comparing Figure 2.1 and Figure 2.2, there is a clear correlation with Protestant-majority areas and Leave voters in the Brexit referendum. It is also worth noting that both NI and Scotland have major political parties in power purely set on secession: Sinn Féin in the NI and the Scottish National Party (SNP) in Scotland, who are also anti-Brexit and narrowly lost a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 by a remain vote of 55.3% (BBC, 2016).

The complications NI faces with Brexit have been greatly exacerbated due to the current and on-going closure of the Northern Irish Assembly. This political stalemate began with the resignation of Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness (Sinn Féin leader) in January 2017, which also ousted First Minister Arlene Foster (DUP leader) bringing about a collapse of the power-sharing executive. In the subsequent election, unionists lost their overall majority and refused a coalition with Sinn Féin chiefly because of two polarising issues: the legal status for Gaeilge under an Irish Language Act and for the legalisation of same-sex marriage (Irish Times, 2019b). The lack of a sitting Assembly with no ministers in place, means that no major policies can be reformed, debates cannot be had, and no laws can be passed, all of which threatens NI’s dissolved status and the possibility of returning to direct rule from Westminster.

2.5 Economic Ramifications of Brexit

There have been numerous studies that have attempted to analyse the potential ramifications of different types of Brexit for the economy of the UK. Studies have shown that UK based businesses are very concerned about the effect of any type of Brexit (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2016:13). Another significant study which has gained attention from nationalist parties was conducted by Kurt Hübner and Renger van Nieuwkoop, who undertook an in-depth investigation of Brexit on the economies of NI and RoI.

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Literature Review

Figure 2. 3 Three predicted economic scenarios of Brexit for Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in both GDP and GDP per capita (Heubner & van Niewkoop, 2018:3)

Their results are startling. They state that in the event of a hard Brexit, over the period of 2021 to 2025, NI’s GDP would reduce by 10.1 billion euro; a 5,035 euro per capita loss (Hübner & van Nieuwkoop, 2018: 4). If NI stays within the SM and CU, there would still be a significant GDP loss of 3.8 billion euro over the same period. They clearly state: “The only winning scenario is the case of unification where between 2018 and 2025 NI would increase its GDP by 17.9 billion, i.e. an increase per capita of Euro 9070 over the period” (Hübner & van Nieuwkoop, 2018: 4). The economy of the Republic was also calculated for these three same scenarios, and mirror the outcome for NI: both a ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Brexit would significantly damage the Republic’s economy, whereas unification would also benefit the Republic, although to a lesser extent than NI (Hübner & van Nieuwkoop, 2018: 4). A hard Brexit would lead to a 32.4 billion euro reduction in GDP for the Republic between 2021 and 2025; Soft Brexit would be a 13.8 billion euro loss; whereas unification would have an increase of 5.6 billion euro (Hübner & van Nieuwkoop, 2018: 3). This paper clearly puts forward that Irish unification would be the best solution to mitigate for Brexit fallout on the island of Ireland.

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Literature Review

13

2.6 ‘The Backstop’

The number one priority of the Irish government, which has been well-represented by EU’s Chief Brexit Negotiator Michel Barnier, is keeping a hard border off the island of Ireland. There are many reasons why a hard border would be detrimental, including compromising the CTA and free movement of people North and South, hindering people who work and trade across the border. The border also acts as a powerful symbol for many Irish Republicans, who see it as infrastructure of British imperialism and occupation, making it a site very prone to attack and violence, as ‘The Troubles’ has shown. The EU has maintained solidarity with the RoI in this demand, and the Irish border problem is still as of yet unsolved at the time of writing this paper. ‘The Backstop,’ as it has come to be named, would maintain, in the event of a non-satisfactory Brexit, that NI would “remain within the EU’s customs unions and apply EU law regarding internal taxation, non-tariff barriers to trade, VAT and excise duties” as well giving the EU Court of Justice final jurisdiction (O’Leary, 2018a: 325). This is to maintain North-South cooperation on the island and avoid any physical infrastructure, such as customs checks. However, the DUP, and consequently the right-wing of the Tory party such as the ERG, have flatly rejected ‘The Backstop,’ with the DUP adamant that Northern Ireland will leave the EU on the exact same terms as the rest of the UK (Irish Times, 2017b). The dissent of the DUP has become very problematic for the UK Government as, at the time of writing this paper, the Conservative Party depend on DUP MPs for their majority, after a disastrous snap election which lost the overall Tory majority in June 2017 (Cabinet Office, 2019). As the DUP are now in coalition, they also have a central voice and veto power at the negotiation table, and claim that if NI leaves on different terms than Great Britain, there will be a border drawn in the Irish Sea as opposed to on the island; a situation which for them is completely unacceptable.

2.7 Irish Unity

Brexit, by definition, means that NI will have to give up its EU membership rights, which will create challenges in cooperation with the Republic. This forfeit, which they voted against in the Brexit referendum, has given rise to the question of Irish unification, a topic which has a complicated history. The whole island of Ireland experienced 24 hours of independence on December 6th_{, 1922, before the Northern Irish House of Commons petitioned to return to the}

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Literature Review

‘The Troubles’ demonstrated that there would need to be a way to constitutionally harmonise UK membership with nationalist aspiration. The Sunningdale Agreement 1973, and reiterated in the GFA in 1998, legitimized the nationalist claim for unification, but only through a democratic process in which the majority of people in NI (and subsequently the Republic) vote to make it so. This, Coakley argues, can also be seen as the “capstone of political evolution towards acceptance of the reality of partition” for nationalists both North and South. MacDonagh (1983) states, “the geographical integrity of the single island would dominate the nationalist’s mental map,” and nationalists in the South have always seen NI as part of their “imagined community” (MacDonagh, 1983: 33; Coakley, 2017: 208). The GFA has managed to respect both political ideologies in NI, and also between people in the South. This shows the flexibility of identity, and nuance of circumstance that can intensify or pacify in-group/out-group rigidity.

Northern Ireland’s demography is changing, which could result in a culturally-Catholic majority by 2021 overtaking Protestants for the first time (BBC, 2018). This, and the impending future status of the United Kingdom with the EU due to Brexit, leads to the very likely possibility that a border poll for Irish unification will be called within the next few years (BBC, 2019b). For this reason, understanding the effect of how the intensive Brexit debate has influenced the socio-political opinions of young people towards Irish unification is very pertinent; has it made it more likely due to the difficulty of surrendering its EU membership and disruption to Irish cooperation? Or, alternatively, has the debate resurrected intergroup tension, by highlighting cleavages between Irish and British identity? The following section will present the theoretical framework of this paper, adopting Social Identity Theory as a tool to analyse the binary identities of Protestant/Catholic, unionist)/nationalist, and British/Irish, and the extent in which these identities are resolutely at odds.

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Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework

In order to examine identity and socio-political preference, this paper will adopt Social Identity Theory (SIT) as its main theory of reference. This is because SIT has been widely employed in investigating conflicts of identities with two or more groups, including its previous, and ubiquitous, use in understanding that “Northern Irish problem.” This chapter will explain SIT, and then go on to apply the theory to the Irish case. This will be followed by looking at the literature on political cleavages and party alignments, and go on to explain how these theories can be observed in the NI electorate voting along in-group lines. The chapter will then discuss the use of priming in interaction with the theories, and finally conclude with highlighting this paper’s research question and two sets of hypotheses.

3.1 Social Identity Theory

Social Identity Theory (SIT) has become a popular lens through which to analyse intergroup conflict. First developed by Tajfel and Turner in 1979, it has become a useful framework for understanding collective grievances, bias, prejudice and societal discrimination. According to Tajfel and Turner, SIT is based on in-group bias: “the tendency to favour the in-group over the out-group in evaluations and behaviour, [and is] a remarkably omnipresent feature of intergroup relations” (Tajfel & Turner, 1979: 56). A “social group” can be understood as a collection of individuals who perceive themselves members of a “social category;” these categories can vary depending on the salient attributes that act as a prerequisite for membership, from skin colour in the United States, or language in Canada (Tajfel & Turner, 1979: 59-60). Building from Tajfel & Turner, Gough, Robinson, Kremer, and Mitchell (1992) state SIT posits that self-identity is composed of personal identity, “defined by one’s unique traits, characteristics and experiences;” and social identity, which is based on “one’s membership in different groups” (Gough et al., 1992: 676). Individuals are motivated “to maintain or achieve a positive sense of self or identity [and] desire their groups to be positively valued;” this evaluation achieved by comparing their group with other groups to see if their membership does indeed provide them with positive social identity (Gough et al., 1992: 676). Cassidy and Trew (1998) explain that through SIT, “identity emerges from the processes of social categorization,” and through intergroup comparisons, one determines whether their group is different from, or superior to, groups of which they’re not affiliated (Cassidy & Trew, 1998:

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Theoretical Framework

726). A group’s status within society can be central to estimating whether group membership is positive or negative, and if found negative, one may leave the group or, if membership is based on ascribed categories such as race or ethnicity, reduce group identification (Cassidy & Trew, 1998: 726).

Hargie, Dickson, Mallett, and Stringer (2008) state that SIT purports that the processes of social identity encourages distinguishable characteristics, which enhance stereotypical perceptions of one’s own and other groups: “Individuals then adopt the behaviour of their group through self-stereotyping” (Hargie et al., 2008: 794). An example of this self-stereotyping could be, for example, NI Protestants adopting a love of the British Royal family. This is because social categorisation encourages prototypes, a representation of the features that best define the in-group, which the individual members then evaluate themselves against to determine how well they match their group, a process defined as self-prototypically (Cassidy & Trew, 1998: 727). Group membership can thus shape one’s behaviour and define their identity, greatly simplifying society through “emphasising differences between, and similarities within, groups” (Hargie et al., 2008: 794). Other writers, such as Stryker (1980; 1987), expands on Tajfel & Turner’s work and proposes identities are hierarchically ordered into a structure based on their salience, and identities with the most salience are more likely to be activated than those down the list, thus examining identity behaviourally rather than psychologically (Stryker 1980; 1987; Cassidy & Trew, 1998: 277). As Tajfel & Turner state, this systemising of the social world creates and defines the individual’s place within society, as a system of self-reference, and enables the individual to undertake many forms of social action due to the “cognitive tools that segment, classify, and order the social environment” (Tajfel & Turner, 1979: 59). Through SIT, many intergroup conflicts can be empathetically analysed, allowing for insight into group dynamics and grievances.

3.2 (Northern) Ireland and Brexit: Social Identity Theory

SIT has been a popular lens used by academics to examine Northern Ireland’s intergroup conflict. The region has been deeply divided for centuries, even before the county’s inception. Though impressive, positive strides have been made through peace talks and the GFA, stark division among communities are still very much an everyday reality. Knox states that in 2009, 70% of social housing estates are 90% single community occupied between Protestant and Catholics (Knox, 2011: 549). Turner et al. (2013) state that 94% of Northern Irish schools are religiously segregated, with only 0.6% of Protestant pupils in Catholic schools, and less than

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17 5% of Catholics in Protestant schools (Turner at al., 2013: 216). Cairns’s (1987) study investigated social identity awareness and categorisation by young people in the North, and found that ethnic determinations based on first names were common by the age of 7 years old, and the majority of children were able to do so by 11 or older (Cairns, 1987; Gough et al., 1992: 647).

Working from Jackson (1971), Cassidy and Trew highlight the interesting and complex conundrum of the “double-minority model” visible in intergroup relations in Northern Ireland. Both groups can be seen to hold minority status: Catholics, as they are (by an increasingly-smaller margin) the minority in NI, and Protestants because they are the minority on the island of Ireland; “As a result, both groups may feel threatened and evaluate their identities negatively” (Cassidy & Trew, 1998: 727; Jackson, 1971). Gough at al. even include the fact that in the UK as a whole, both NI Protestant and Catholic groups can be considered as constituting minority positions, creating a triple-minority complex (Gough et al., 1992: 647). Cairns (1987) however, argues that instead of a double-minority model, a double-majority model may be more appropriate to garner a better understanding on group self-esteem (Cairns, 1987; Cassidy & Trew, 1998: 727). McAloney, Stringer & Mallet (2013) highlight the delicacy of the groups’ status and self-esteem:

“[W]ithin Northern Ireland, minority and majority status can fluctuate across streets, estates, and towns, and an individual’s identity as a majority or minority member may then also fluctuate as he or she moves from one situation or environment to another. This may have ramifications for the development of mistrust.”

(McAloney et al., 2013: 331)

In-group security and peace of mind is a pertinent factor to take into account when analysing intergroup relations, particularly in NI. A lack of trust is intensified if the out-group is considered to have a majority, or superior, status, as it puts the individual and their in-group in a position more likely to be exposed to discrimination. As both Protestants and Catholics can be considered to hold both/either minority and majority group status in varying situations, the threat of discrimination or prejudice also varies depending on the circumstance (McAloney et al., 2013: 331). As Ferguson and McKeown (2016) point out, “it is a taboo subject to directly ask someone which ethno-religious group they belong to, as this line of questioning may cause the recipient anxiety and could trigger a hostile response” (Ferguson & McKeown, 2016: 217). For this reason, because group divisions are not based on racial or physiognomic qualities,

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Northern Irish people categorise others as being Protestant/ Catholic, British/ Irish through certain cues. Gough et al. write that there are five most frequently used stereotyping cues which people use to determine an individual’s group membership: residence, school attended, name, appearance, and speech (accent and content) (Gough et al., 1992: 647; Lloyd 1976).

The Irish language has been very politicised in NI, being used as a clear identity marker after partition, and then again as a form of cultural rebellion against British authorities during ‘The Troubles.’ Protestant communities are still greatly opposed to putting Irish on the school curriculum because of its nationalist connotations, and tension around the language was reignited again in 2014 when a DUP politician made mocking remarks about its use in the NI Assembly (Irish Times, 2014)3_{. Though the Irish language does not seem to have large,}

everyday consequences for the masses in NI (less than 1% use it as their main language), the fact that it has been, and continues to be, undermined and threatened by the Protestant majority could have a significant impact on Catholic opinions towards the Protestant outgroup (The Economist, 2017). As mentioned, Irish language is one of the largest cleavages, along with LGBT rights, between the DUP and Sinn Féin which has prevented a functioning power-sharing Assembly and Executive.

As discussed, Stryker (1980; 1987), expands Tajfel & Turner’s work positing that identities are hierarchically ordered into a structure based on salience. Hargie et al. (2008) used university freshmen (N=273) in Northern Ireland to examine the communicative aspects of social identity theory, with emphasis on self-disclosure as a central role for intergroup friendship (Hargie et al., 2008: 803). They state that identity consists of a “panoply of personal, social, historical, local, national, and international variables” which are hierarchically ordered, and because of the university-context of their study, the category of student may have taken more salience during the survey in comparison to traditional Protestant/Catholic allegiances (Hargie et al., 2008: 815). Cassidy & Trew’s (1998) paper also sought to analyse the relative importance of national and religious identities in Northern Irish students’ identity structure. The writers also crafted a questionnaire for 284 first-year psychology undergraduates at Queen’s University Belfast. The results counterintuitively showed that despite the background of political violence, national and religious identities featured with relatively low salience to young people. This can be seen to support the understanding that when at college, the lack of

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19 group distinctiveness can lead to a more inclusive category, where students may attenuate rather than accentuate group boundaries (Cassidy & Trew, 1998: 737).

Coakley (2017) highlights the issue of nomenclature as a point of contention for Irish/British identity. An act to sever any remaining links with the Commonwealth was passed in 1948, introducing the Republic of Ireland, which was significantly the description and not the name of the state (Coakley, 2017: 204). This created tension between the two countries, as the Republic of Ireland Act “implied a complete break with the United Kingdom, one that by implication extended to all 32 counties” (Coakley, 2017: 204). This sensitivity over nomenclature can be seen to reflect the delicacy and nuance of identifying and signifying people, and reflects the suspicion and scepticism of the two states with regards to demarcation of boundaries, a debate which has returned in the light of the Brexit debate.

3.3 Political Cleavages and Party Alignments

Political cleavages can be overtly seen between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. As Evans and Sinnott state, if cleavages weren’t a central issue in comparing the two parts of Ireland, “we would not be comparing ‘two parts of Ireland’; nor would there be a ‘Northern Ireland problem’” (Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 419). In an effort to understand these political cleavages and why groups vote the way they do, Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) paper puts forward that in the early-twentieth century, European party systems were defined by cleavages that continue to form the basis of divisions in contemporary politics. They state that this “‘freezing’ of different party systems” greatly explains the current alignments of voters, and can be understood through looking back at the genesis of the parties, and the “packages” that they represent:

“In our Western democracies the voters are only rarely called upon to express their stands on single issues. They are typically faced with choices among historically given “packages” or programs, commitments, outlooks, and, sometimes, Weltanschauungen”

(Lipset & Rokkan, 1967: 2-3).

Historical junctures in a state’s history can have a significant influence on its past and present political divisions. According to Lipset and Rokkan, these historical developments have tended to generate four major cleavages: centre-periphery, church versus state, town versus country, and employer versus workers; and which of these cleavages, or combination of cleavages,

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comes to dominate depends on the state’s history, and the degree of social and cultural distinctiveness of the social groups involved (Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 419-420; Bartolini & Mair, 1990: 224).

For Whyte (1974), all four cleavage categories expressed Lipset and Rokkan regarding party systems and voter alignment can apply to the Irish case, and its long political history with the United Kingdom: “Ireland has handled all these conflicts to varying extents in exceptional ways” (Whyte, 1974: 647-648; Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 422). Whyte states that in particular, “the centre/periphery crisis was […] resolved in Ireland in an unusually absolute way: Ireland is a former part of the United Kingdom periphery that simply broke off” (Whyte, 1974: 647-648). The land-industry conflict was also solved by Ireland breaking off to establish a new state, and the same can be said with the church-state conflict, as “the periphery and therefore the secessionist state was overwhelmingly and loyally Catholic” in a Protestant-dominated UK (Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 422). According to Evans and Sinnot, “In absence of major conflict along agrarian-industrial, church-state and owner-worker fault-lines, the dominant cleavage in what was to become the Republic of Ireland was based on the centre-periphery conflict, in which Southern Ireland was the centre-periphery and London the centre” (Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 422). The parties that resulted from this cleavage are still the main political parties in the Republic today, Sinn Féin and Fianna Fail as hard-line nationalists who rejected the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty, and Fine Gael, the party currently in government (Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 422).

As for NI, the centre-periphery cleavage can be seen through the unionist-nationalist conflict, in which religion acted as an ethnic marker splitting the new political entity into a two-thirds majority versus a one-third minority (Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 424). The church-state cleavage can also be seen in the North, as NI is a Protestant state with an opposing Catholic minority. As Evans and Sinnott state, both centre-periphery and church-state cleavages were strong in the North, and by and large, each reinforced the other (Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 424). At the time of Irish secession, the North was vastly more industrialised than the South, with 39% of the workforce engaged in industry in the North and 26% in agriculture, compared to 12% in industry in the South and 50% in agriculture (Harkness, 1983: 46). The owner versus workers cleavage that arose in the industrialised North was subsumed into the conflict between unionism and nationalism, allowing for no type of conflict-ameliorating cross-cutting, but instead reinforced religion as the ethnic marker which dominated all other cleavages in society (Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 424-425). The ethnic/centre-periphery cleavage is still central to the

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21 Partition of Ireland created different legacies in both regions. In the North, partition institutionalised conflict, greater than any political party; in the South, partition institutionalised homogeneity, however, it did so at the cost of institutionalising conflict between North and South, and also between Ireland and Great Britain (Evans & Sinnott, 1999: 453). For this reason, though the Republic has had independence for nearly a century, her political parties can still be seen to reflect its old cleavages and conflicts, not so much between political parties, but between states.

3.4 Voting Along In-Group Lines

The main political parties in NI can still be looked at through their ethnic/centre-periphery cleavages, on a scale supporting either the cause for nationalism or unionism. Sinn Féin would be the most devout nationalist political party, with the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) having a softer approach towards unification. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) would be the most extreme unionist party, followed by the Ulster Unionist Party. Alliance would be the most centrist party between these two ideologies.

In May 2019, the local elections demonstrated that the two parties that gained most of the seats were also the two parties with the hardest stances on their constitutional status: The DUP gained 24.1% of the seats, and Sinn Féin gained 23.2% (Irish Times, 2019b). Although, some smaller parties such as Alliance can be seen to have significantly increased their vote-share, perhaps signalling a slow-moving shift towards a middle-ground. Negative party identification also plays a role here, as Sinn Féin, though representing the staunchly nationalist Catholic group, is far more liberal than the DUP on topics of abortion and gay marriage, seemingly counterintuitive to the Catholic values. As Medeiros and Noël (2014) demonstrate in their study on other Western countries, there can be seen a “pattern of hostility between the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority,” and Catholics (along with Jews and African Americans, for example) have routinely identified with liberal parties as often conservative parties are affiliated with Protestants (Medeiros & Noël, 2014: 1025, 2032).

The region can still be seen as deeply divided, and though NI is edging towards a post-Christian future, religious differences still serve as a potent marker of ethnographic difference (Fahey et al., 2006: 231). Studies have also demonstrated that in NI, Protestant and Catholic identities are prescribed at birth, and the vast majority will declare themselves Protestant or Catholic regardless of whether or not they even attend church (Ferguson & McKeown, 2016: 218; Niens & Cairns, 2001). The 2016 Brexit referendum gave a telling insight into the

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dynamics of intergroup identity. As has been stated, Northern Ireland is part of the UK and awaiting withdrawal from the EU, brought about by a rising Euroscepticism. However, NI is also a region that is geographically, ethnographically, and systemically tied to the Republic of Ireland, one of the EU’s biggest supporters, with 85% believing EU membership is a good

Figure 3. 1 Percentage of citizens per country by their satisfaction with the way democracy works in the EU. Note that Ireland is the country ranked top at 74% Total Satisfaction, whereas the UK is tied second from the bottom, with 38% (Eurobarometer Survey, 2018: 41).

thing (Clements, 2010: 394; McGowan & O’Connor, 2004: 28; Eurobarometer, 2019). Though the majority of NI voted to remain in the EU by 55.8%, a poll indicated that Catholic voters overwhelmingly would vote to remain at 74%, while the opposite can be seen in Protestant communities, with 63.6% opting to leave (Berberi, 2016: 11; 3-4). This division among community lines can be viewed through the impact of European integration on each group’s status in NI. Many unionists in the North believe their British identity has been threatened by the EU’s removal of national borders, especially as they are the only part of the UK to share a land border with another country. Unionists often see cross-border cooperation as a ‘Trojan Horse’ whereby the Irish Republic can subtly gain influence of the region, whereas nationalists welcome the diminishing border for its ease of travel and trade between the two states (Lagana, 2017: 294).

3.5 Priming Mechanism

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23 across disciplines. One paper which show its impact on Social Identity Theory in Northern Ireland is that of Waddell and Cairns (1986), who constructed a survey experiment in which to compare national and religious identity. They used a five-point scale for participants to evaluate their individual identity: Irish being 1, Neutral being 3, and British being 5; while primed to think in depth about 36 different situations, all of which could be seen to have had a significant effect on one or both Catholic/Irish, Protestant/British groups. As Gough et al. (1992) state, three types of situational influence can be seen: 1. Those which enhanced existing social identity, such as “IRA violence” making Protestants feel more British; 2. Social identity being attenuated, such as “Irish culture” making Protestants feel less British; and 3. A reversal of Social identity, such as “Watching Ireland play rugby” which made Protestants feel Irish (Gough et al., 1992: 648; Waddell & Cairns, 1986). This can be seen to highlight the multiplicity of social identities, with one identity coming to the fore at any one time depending on the circumstance. It also highlights identity as susceptible to priming; that if an issue is presented to a participant, particularly one that can manifest a strong feeling, rigid identity binaries can soften.

The complexity of pigeonholing groups into strict, resolute identities was explored by Gallagher (1988, 1989), who used a mixed method analysis which highlighted the shortcoming of labels. Gallagher states that such identifiers as Protestant/ unionist/ British, are often in themselves the site of dynamic contest of meaning between members within the in-group (Gallagher, 1988; 1989). This highlights that even when in-group members who share the same allegiances on some or all fronts, often these identities are not interpreted to the same extent by the individuals across the board, which undermines a monolithic, concrete view of ‘them and us.’ The previously mentioned study by Hargie et al. (2008) found that in their survey experiment with Northern Irish university freshmen, traditional SIT Catholic/Protestant in-group/out-group was undermined due to the university context, giving more salience to the

student category of identity. Though not intentional, Hargie et al. (2008) can be seen to have

primed their respondents due to their contextual circumstance.

Priming has the potential to influence an individual’s political opinion and shows particularly interesting results when examining the fluidity and susceptibility of an individual’s hierarchy of identities. As Brexit is such a polarising topic of intensive debate, which has seen chaos in Westminster and continued failure in agreement for implementation, it is reasonable to think that it can conjure up strong socio-political feelings. The above literature would suggest that Brexit too would be able influence people’s ethno-national identities and alignments.

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3.6 Hypotheses

The Brexit debate has reintroduced the sensitive issues of identity in Northern Ireland, and has not only aired this debate among the people of NI, but has also made it one of the most polarising, sustained debates among Great Britain, RoI and the EU. With this being the case, it would be of great interest and importance to understand the extent to which this debate impacts on the youth of Ireland, who have, for the most part, narrowly only experienced enduring peace brought about by the peace process and the GFA. Is NI susceptible to the “ancient hatreds” theory, which posits continued “mutual hostility among ethnic groups, caused by past traumatic events to the collectivities, as influencing intergroup relations?” (Medeiros, 2018: 4). Hayes and McAllister (2001) have shown that the intense exposure to political violence perpetuates further violence, as it increases public support for paramilitarism and decreases support for decommissioning paramilitary weapons (Hayes & McAllister, 2001: 919). The success of the GFA has brought sustained peace, and it would be of great interest to examine the opinions of Ireland’s youth today towards the binary identities that dominated their parents’ generation, and Irish unification. For this reason, this paper asks the following research question: Has the

Brexit debate strengthened traditional ethno-national alignments in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, making a united Ireland less likely?

In order to tackle this question, it is best to divide it into two parts: Irish Identity and

Irish Unification. The first two hypotheses will be looking at ethno-national identification.

British Identity hypotheses:

H1a. The Brexit section leads Northern Irish Protestants to identify more with United Kingdom.

H1b. The Brexit section leads Northern Irish Catholics to identify less with United Kingdom.

Irish Identity hypotheses:

H2a. The Brexit section leads Northern Irish Catholics to identify more with the Republic of Ireland.

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25 H2b. The Brexit section leads Northern Irish Protestants to identify less with the

Republic of Ireland.

Republic of Ireland attachment hypothesis:

H3. The Brexit section leads people in the Republic of Ireland to feel more attached to Northern Ireland.

To answer the second half of the research question, the second set of hypotheses will be looking at Irish Unification, and state:

H4a. The Brexit section influences Northern Irish Protestants to be less in favour of a United Ireland.

H4b. The Brexit section influences Northern Irish Catholics to be more in favour of a United Ireland.

H5. The Brexit section leads to an increase in support for a United Ireland in the Republic of Ireland.

The next section will describe the methodology and research design of this paper, and succinctly explain how it plans to go about carefully measuring the impact of the Brexit debate on identity in Ireland, North and South, and on whether its impact has accelerated the likelihood of a United Ireland.

(Northern) Ireland and the Brexit debate : ethno-national alignments in political uncertainty