Earlier this year, the International Association of Constitutional Law published a blog symposium on Irish Unification: Processes and Considerations, convened by Professor Oran Doyle. Here, Professor Doyle summarises the  contributions to the symposium. 

The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (GFA)—the agreement between the parties in Northern Ireland and the related international treaty between the British and Irish governments that was central to the peace settlement in 1998—built a new model of power-sharing politics on the foundation of a territorial compromise. On the one hand, Ireland and Irish nationalists accepted the legitimacy of Northern Ireland’s status as a component part of the United Kingdom. They thereby relinquished a territorial claim to the whole island of Ireland that had been advanced in different ways since independence and partition of the island of Ireland in 1921-22. On the other hand, the United Kingdom and unionists accepted that Northern Ireland would only remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority of people in Northern Ireland so wished it. They thereby relinquished the right of the United Kingdom to preserve its own territorial boundaries.

In 1998, Irish unification seemed a distant prospect. The priority for most Irish nationalists—and certainly for all Irish governments—was to make the new political arrangements work, not to advocate for a united Ireland. But demographic change was slowly producing an electorate more open to unification, and Brexit has now dramatically increased the attractiveness of a united Ireland replete with EU membership. As a result, although opinions on the likelihood of a united Ireland diverge widely, the territorial compromise of 1998 is under pressure. Continue reading →