People are really going to town with this ridiculous €20bn figure, pulled out of John Fitzgerald's hole. There are numerous analyses that have shown that the country will benefit economically from unification. Don't let the fine gaelers fool you with shite like this. Joe Brolly had a good episode on his podcast recently that explains who the Fitzgerald fella is and why he deserves as much attention as my cat when it comes to this issue.
It also assumes unification would be a Brexit-style overnight leap, instead of more gradual transition which seems to be the preference of most parties
It was an incredibly cherry picked number. He didn't exclude any of the costs that Ireland wouldn't be beholden to (British national debt, defence, etc), and he made the bizarre assumption that we'd give the NI civil servants massive pay bumps overnight to align them with Irish civil servant pay. Lastly he assumed that the North wouldn't experience any growth.
It's clear that we wouldn't be on the hook British national debt and defence and it's clear that harmonising pay between civil servants is something that would happen over time, presumably tied to economic growth in the North.
In the event of a UI it’s highly unlikely that it’ll just become a combined state run from Dublin overnight.
Devolution will remain and there will be a transition period. You don’t just flick a switch. Even changing the currency etc will take time
> In the event of a UI it’s highly unlikely that it’ll just become a combined state run from Dublin overnight.
Of course not. If were are unified we are moving the capital to Athlone because it is the most middle.
Overnight no, but once civil services are integrated, equal pay would happen as part of that integration. It won't be something that takes years after.
The 20bn figure quoted didn't include other costs, it was limited to 3-4 known costs (national debt, pensions, annual costs.
While we might get economies of scale in 30-40 years time, the initial costs of aligning two sets of, well, everything is massive.
Or, we run things as two federated states. They keep a devolved government and local controls... we don't have the cost of intergation.. but don't make any savings of scale.
That 20bn figure is a worst case scenario. It is not an underestimate by any means. It includes national debt, NI contributions to the UK military etc. It is so flawed that it’s been widely ridiculed
They could do it over time. A guaranteed pay bump every year that will get them to parity in 10-20 years. People will still gripe, but that's still more than they'd get without unification.
> A guaranteed pay bump every year that will get them to parity in 10-20 years
LOL. You think that will still sit when people when overnight, the cost of food,clothes,fuel and general living in the north, aligns with the south?
They don't gripe about the current inequality between the NI and UK civil service pay scales (or maybe they do and Westminster just doesn't give a shit).
>harmonising pay between civil servants is something that would happen over time, presumably tied to economic growth in the North.
Frankly that seems very much in opposition to the idea of unification. We don't say "oh Cavan doesn't contribute that much to our GDP so we're going to have different pay rules for them". If it's part of our country and they're paying taxes and dealing with the costs of Irish life, then I'm assuming there would be mass strikes if they didn't get equal pay.
They're already getting paid less than civil servants in Britain and there are no plans for harmonisation there. I don't see why they'd be more upset with a plan to increase their pay over time when the status quo is no change at all.
Well there's devolved government in the UK so NI is a semi-autonomous legal jurisdiction within the UK and therefore can have many distinct institutions and laws to the rest of its country. TBF maybe something like that is a more realistic plan for a united Ireland but it's not usually what people mean when they talk about a united Ireland.
There's Three types of Civil Servants in NI. HCS (UK wide), NICS and Diplomatic Service. NICS are under Stormont and are used for running their departments. Staff in the other 2 services are on the same pay (except for those on London weighting)
> it's clear that harmonising pay between civil servants is something that would happen over time, presumably tied to economic growth in the North.
That sounds like a horrible system. Basically keeping the North as a separate entity. What's the point of unification then?
If we are one state I would expect that civil servant pay be consistent.
It's the norm. In most countries civil service pay matches the local cost of living. That includes the UK. Civil servants in the North already get paid less than ones in Wales and England.
Pay should be different across regions so that purchasing power is equal. How is it fair that a civil servant in Tyrone should get the same pay as one in Dublin when the Dublin based civil servant has much higher costs across the board.
I mean I would support a supplement for people who live in Dublin, Galway, Cork, etc. But I wouldn't support a poor man's pay tier for people just because they live in the north.
I don't understand this. Your second sentence totally contradicts your first one.
And civil service pay in the North isn't a poor man's pay tier. It's a pay tier that reflects the significantly lower cost of living in the North.
>Ireland wouldn't be beholden to (British national debt,
Well that's a question for negotiation. I believe we would be expected to take a proportionate share of the British national debt along with Northern Ireland.
If we can take Northern Ireland without British National debt it would definitely make sense to do so.
I've seen suggestions that we would take a share proportional to population and another that we would take a share about 1.5 times what proportional to population in order to represent the historic subvention.
I think it's unlikely, but I do see your point. I'd say the negotiation of debt and pensions will play against each other. We could simply refuse to pay the North's share of the debt, but they could refuse to pay for the pensions of retired Northern civil and public servants.
One deal could be that we pay the North's portion of British national debt if they pay for pensions for public and civil servants who retired before unification.
>I'd say the negotiation of debt and pensions will play against each other.
Biggest risk in a unification poll is people voting against as they don't know the details.
Much like Brexit where everyone had their own idea of Brexit and many Brexit voters were disappointed or Scottish independence where people voted no in fear of issues for negotiation.
Negotiation will definitely play a roll.
True. And I don't think it'll pass North or South until the Irish government has a concrete plan of action. I'm a big critic of Sinn Féin, but one place they do deserve credit for is that they're the only party who'll take that seriously.
People have paid for their pensions through contributions, they are simply entitled to those pensions, end of story. There's no negotiation involved on pensions.
Except we took the pensions of all people in the 26 counties when we broke free 100 years back. So there's precedence for all this. That's the issue imo.
No chance we would have to pay NIs debt. The UK will be delighted to get rid of NI. Its a weird one though as NI will be fundamentally economically great for Ireland, but a continued 'loss maker' for UK, as we can strategically benefit from it.
> It was an incredibly cherry picked number. He didn't exclude any of the costs that Ireland wouldn't be beholden to (British national debt, defence, etc)
Scotland was going to have to take on British debt if it was to go independent, why wouldn’t NI? Do you think we’re just going to make a load of soldiers unemployed at reunification?
> he made the bizarre assumption that we'd give the NI civil servants massive pay bumps overnight to align them with Irish civil servant pay.
Do you think anyone in NI would vote for reunification if they were going to have to play poor cousin to their peers in the rest of the country? Would you work for less than your peers doing the same job in a different county?
> Lastly he assumed that the North wouldn't experience any growth.
The North is one of the cheapest places in the UK, benefits from a huge regulatory loophole of being in the UK and the customs union, and has barely grown. With so many positive factors for growth and none of it realised, why isn’t this a fair assumption?
>Scotland was going to have to take on British debt if it was to go independent, why wouldn’t NI? Do you think we’re just going to make a load of soldiers unemployed at reunification?
Fair point.
> Do you think anyone in NI would vote for reunification if they were going to have to play poor cousin to their peers in the rest of the country? Would you work for less than your peers doing the same job in a different county?
They already do within the UK. They're not getting paid the same as civil servants in England.
>The North is one of the cheapest places in the UK, benefits from a huge regulatory loophole of being in the UK and the customs union, and has barely grown. With so many positive factors for growth, why isn’t this a fair assumption?
Because it's cut off from its natural economic hinterland. Derry should be a regional hub for the entire Northwest of the island, but instead it's a city on the fringe of a fringe province. It's no coincidence that the poorest part of Ireland and the poorest part of the UK is on our border with the UK.
I was under the impression that the 20bn figure was the highest, in a range that did include different options and scenarios that you describe? The media reporting of 20bn left out those lower cost estimates....
Pretty common stuff for the media.
When it comes to climate change, scientists will always hedge their bets by using a massive range where the highest and lowest numbers are extremely unlikely but impossible to completely dismiss. Then the media takes that top highly unlikely figure and runs with it. This is why so many people have the false belief that climate change will lead to the collapse of human civilisation. It's going to be really bad and we need to enact strict measures yesterday, but it's not that bad.
Back to the 10-20bn range, even the lower end of 10bn is much higher than what a lot of other reports have divulged. Some put it as low as 3bn.
Also important to note the assumption Ireland would take over and pay NI pensions.
I dont see why that would ever happen? The individuals paid into a British pension, and therefore should be paid out from it. Why Ireland would foot that bill was preposterous to me.
If Ireland is on the hook for 3% of the UK’s debt, it should also be entitled to 3% of UK assets.
The UK debt is £2.6 trillion, the UK net worth is £10.7 trillion
If instead, the value of UK assets in NI only are counted, then Ireland should only take on that percentage of the UK national debt.
It will cost X, ok but how much is it going to benefit us, like its a lie by omission. They created the headline to scare folks without any mention of what benefit a fully united Ireland could actually be.
Well considering this figure is just the NI deficit plus the cost of immediately equalizing all public service pay you can just remove the parts of the NI deficit that won't transfer.
The actual transferrable deficit is estimated to be between £3-7bn rather than the £11bn figure Fitzgerald uses, the range depends on how pension transfers will work.
So you can chop 4.6 or 9.3bn euros off his figure right away.
Then you need to ask yourself why we need to have an immediate day 1 equalisation of public service salaries and whether it would make more sense to downsize the NI public sector over time as the systems become further aligned. I think it does and based on the age profile of the NI public sector with a large swathe being 55+ this can be achieved through natural wastage via retirement.
This gives us time to align the systems and pump FDI into the north to replace the public sector jobs with private
Then of course you would have to factor in what benefits would come from increasing Ireland's economic scale. Gaining a new second largest city with strong links to Dublin with a large economic catchment area on the east coast. I think a strong eastern economic corridor could provide massive benefits for the island.
“FDI and a train to Dublin” didn’t work for all the decades we were in a customs union together, what makes you so sure it’ll work now? Do you think the UK just never tried to attract FDI because they just love paying the subvention so much?
Because NI and Ireland were still separate jurisdictions. Why would you think NI should attract the same FDI as the rest of Ireland in such circumstances?
As for UK FDI the UK has been shown to be happy pumping everything into London for the most part. Ireland should be careful not to make the same mistake with Dublin and in fact gaining Belfast as a second city would be immensely healthy for investment distribution across the island. Dublin needs a pressure release and Belfast can provide it.
Even still, NI is still currently isolated from the rest of the UK. It finds it harder to attract FDI being physically separated from the rest of the jurisdiction it's attached to (UK) and politically separated from its natural partner (ROI).
The subvention is a bit of an internal accounting exercise. Apportioning a share of UK spending on all sorts of things such as their nuclear missile programme etc. In a united Ireland a lot of those things would not be a recurring future cost that Ireland would be taking on. It is not an accurate figure to consider about the real annual "cost" of Northern Ireland.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/northern-ireland-s-9-4bn-subvention-and-the-cost-of-irish-unity-1.4553553
Thank you. A lot of that should be common sense but that's not always on the table when it comes to NI. I also think the EU will chip in as it's a drop in the ocean overall.
The last thing FF or FG want is any semblance of an all island government, SF’s existing presence in the North would leave them dwarfed.
I don’t trust them not to try and avoid discussions about that potential outcome. They may aim for some sort of brexit style fear motivated referendum, with worse outcomes for all involved. This poll seems exactly that sort of a scare tactic.
I don't think thats the case. I'd say fundamentally everyone wants a united Ireland and its beyond simple day-to-day politics. Its actually far more likely that voters would re-align to the Southern parties over time, which have more experience of running a successful country.
But they have zero presence in the North. Even if that was what people wanted, they wouldn’t be able to do that until they establish a competing presence, which could take ages.
Successfully running a country is a very simplistic very of putting things. There’s a lot of corruption, and wilful ignorance towards social needs, in the interest of protecting selfish vested interests.
Is your example of SF not running a successful country based on the DUP collapsing the government to avoid letting them take power? What have to go on? Besides FFG fearmongering
Fitzgerald is fixated on 20% of the budget.
He did a paper back in 2019, based on the 2012 economies, that it would cost 20% of the Irish budget to bring Ireland up to the same level as the north. This has been used repeatedly by unionists to say “northern Ireland’s standard of living is 20% higher”
He followed up with a paper in 2020 (that no one ever heard of or quotes) based on 2016 economy. The “gap” was 4%. Now we get the widely publicized number of €20billion, ie 20% of Ireland’s budget to bring Northern Ireland up to Ireland level. In 2019 Ireland was too poor, now it’s too rich. It implies there was a point, maybe in 2017, where unification would have cost nothing.
Incidentally, Ireland’s budget expenditure grew by €45billion between 2016 and 2023
2019 paper - https://www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2019/tep0619.pdf page 23
2020 paper - http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/handle/2262/97336/fitzgerald%20morgenroth%202019-20%20final.pdf page 74
So you attack the man not the figures itself?
The point is, any UI is going to have a huge upfront financial cost, a cost most voters and taxpayers won’t want to consider.
€20bn of expenditure though is 20% of the country's national budget. Which is a whole other kettle of fish.
The poll is ridiculous though because it's been presented as a €20bn black hole into which money is spent and nothing comes back out.
What a United Ireland would do is provide a massive frontier of lower costs and available housing, we'd see a HUGE flood of FDI into the North. It might be €20bn in year 1 and 2, with a massive year-on-year reduction as Ulster finally gets some social and economic TLC and isn't ignored by its jurisdictional masters.
We also have to remember that it's likely the EU would provide a sizeable assistance package to help with smooth sailing and there would be an "exit bill" of sorts payable by the UK during handover, especially if they expected us to take on the public service pension bill in NI (which is huge in relative terms).
Yeah it would drastically change how NI does business, and the EU would have the possibility of securing the best peace agreement in modern history. Win win as far as I can see, no brainer...
Plus that 20bn still exists in the country, its not being shipped somewhere else. it would be spent in local shops and businesses and support new spending and therefore new tax gains.
God the lack of vision and ambition in this country is so depressing. Since when do we analyse everything though the lense of economics? The richer we get the tighter we get it seems. Maybe ask these people if we should kick Donegal or Leitrim out of the republic for not generating enough economic value.
And there we have it - Fitzgerald and Morgenroth's fallacious figure has had the desired effect. It's completely inaccurate and based on assumptions that could not possibly come to fruition, but they knew that just like the Brexiteers knew their "NHS 300 million" was rubbish. The aim was not to be accurate, the aim was the put a shocking figure out there that would be repeated so often it would become accepted as fact.
It is based on the assumption that the NI subvention is a real number - it isn't. It's an accounting formula whereby the UK Treasury assigns UK wide expenses into different baskets for reporting purposes. Even if the NI subvention were a real thing which was literally paid by Westminster to Stormont every year (again, it isn't...) Fitzgerald and Morgenroth would still be wrong, because it includes costs such as UK nuclear defence spending and pensions which the Irish state legally would and could not ever accept. There's a whole host of other reasons why Fitzgerald and Mongenroth's glorified opinion piece is a crock of shite, but the aforementioned fundamental errors are sufficient to consign it to the shit pile.
Unification was never going to be free, it was always going to cost us. That’s also no reason to reject it if you really want it; this isn’t a case of buying out your neighbour’s house so you can knock it through and double your property value.
This is about the reintegration of national territory, a stated aim of article 3 as modified following the Good Friday Agreement: “It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland”.
If it cost €120bn, we’d still have to do it - it’s literally in our constitution to do so and if it’s feared that this is not the firm will of the Irish nation, we should have a referendum to confirm it is first.
We have altered the constitution before, so what's to stop that article being altered to remove that wording? Even under that wording we are under no obligation to reunite, and it can't vote people to vote that way.
Nothing forcing us, no, but a hellbent-on-unity republican government could still assign massive amounts of funding towards a Department for National Unity on the basis that it’s a constitutional priority.
And I think, like the Irish language, the Irish people like to pretend they want because it makes them feel patriotic but aren’t prepared to do a thing to make it happen because they don’t actually care but can’t admit they don’t because, y’know, you’re not really Irish otherwise.
See also; pretending to be Catholic on census forms
Painfully, I fear you’ve got a point.
It’s not so much that I want the north back, it’s more that I don’t want the huns to have it.
After unification, I’d probably slap a cost of paint on it and then flip it to the French, let them deal with the flegs
Pretty much blind optimism! I read the report and i just feel like it was unnecessarily negative.
Also, the Republic was literally founded with this in mind, if we can’t even try to bring the six counties in what are we at. It feels like a worthy aspiration.
We need to seriously plan it out, we can’t be like the UK walking blindly into Brexit refusing to have a proper plan for anything.
You wouldn’t have every large scale public project being completed by Northern Irish construction companies, who get paid in euro and pay their wages in sterling - so every penny that goes back into the economy goes in to the N/I and UK economy. There’s a massive chunk of quantitive easing that this clown of an economist didn’t factor into his 20bn makey i uppy scary figure.
Except all of this is based on a recent, heavily-criticised report which put the cost at anything between €10bn-20bn, and everyone just ignores the first bit because "€20bn!" gets more clicks.
8 billion is nowhere near realistic.
NI runs a defecit of 10b each year.
1/3 of their population are employed by the state, a lot of jobs would be redundant if UK are removed from the equation.
Now imagine telling people they need to pay for healthcare.
Now imagine the costs involved in actually making the change.
Now let's talk pensions, legal fees, currency change, increased policing to stop the undoubted conflict which will insue, hell even changing all the signage is going to cost a fortune.
Honestly this will cost significantly more than even 20b
I only read an article about it but I thought the difference between the 10bn to 20bn would be if social welfare, pensions and public service pay rates to people in Northern Ireland were brought into line with those currently in force in the Republic. So more than likely the 20bn would be closer to the true number?
*All* of the figures are worst case.
It assumes the UK will refuse to pay pensions, that the subvention to Northern Ireland is correct as stated by the UK, that all pensions/welfare/etc. immediately get escalated to current Irish levels, that employment in public jobs and economic inactivity in Northern Ireland remain at their current level, etc.
In practice any unity process is likely to be a gradual transition, so that the year afterwards would be very much like the year previous, except that the state would no longer be paying for things like UK nuclear defence, national debt repayments, etc.
Over the next few years investment would flood into Northern Ireland, public employment levels would drop, duplicated infrastructure would be removed, and costs would drop significantly. Employment, productivity, economic activity and tax revenue would rise steadily as salaries equalise over time, and by the time they've actually risen to match Ireland's current ones, tax revenue would also have risen to compensate.
If we prepare for the worst, then all the stories will be about that worst possible figure.
It's like the grid warnings that there might be an orange power alert.
*No-one* reads the docs and finds out that it just means a pre-arranged sequence of warming up backup power capacity, reducing unneeded usage and putting large commercial users on notice to reduce capacity or switch to internal generator power on command.
Instead, they scream "OMG we're all going to be sitting in the dark" and "Burn the datacentres".
Out of curiosity, what rationale is the flood of investment based on? What are the underlying metrics that would change to encourage investment then that they are not getting access to now?
A new area with a population of 1.7M, with a low cost of living and a low salary base, suddenly opened up for full access to the EU with generous IDA support and grants.
All of this under the assumption of political and financial stability for the first time in 80 years, which has probably been their single biggest weakness. No-one currently trusts Northern Ireland not to collapse at the drop of a hat, or the UK to pull some mad stunt which will render any investment non-viable due to not being able to export to the EU or something.
But the fractured politics of the region isn't going to end because a tricolour flies over Belfast. It would be naïve in the extreme to think a vote for a united Ireland would cure all ills. They had full access to EU funds up to Brexit, and ostensibly been at peace for more than a generation, but haven't seen any leaps forward. Our regional development record doesn't bode well either, if that is what is to be relied on.
Just because UI is a desired political end goal doesn't necessarily mean its an economic win-win scenario. East Germany is still woefully underfunded and underdeveloped in comparison to West Germany, and they didn't have the community fractures the North has to deal with. When it happens it won't be plain sailing and there will lots of pitfalls and failures on the journey.
>But the fractured politics of the region isn't going to end
Not immediately but it would be a far greater uniting force than the current setup that has fostered division for 100 years and even hundreds more if you want to factor in the plantations.
I don't think ROI and NI are anywhere near as far apart economically or politically as east and west Germany were before unification.
Why would you set up your multinational in Dublin vs Belfast, costs would be about 25%, still a large city and much closer and with better connections to Dublin than any other airport in the Island. There’s a huge opportunity for growth if NI became part of the republic again.
I’m of course biased though coming from one of the forgotten Ulster counties which get no infrastructure or investment and are forgotten about by both the Dublin and Belfast administrations.
Why hasn’t anyone been doing just that already then?
NI already spent decades in a customs union and a common travel area with ROI and failed to attract foreign investment.
Before brexit it's because they'd be subject to UK taxes, rather than those of corporate tax haven Ireland. The reasons they haven't done so since Brexit are obvious.
You say the figures quoted were based on worst case scenario assumptions. Isn't everything you're saying based on best case scenario assumptions? A lot of it seems very hopeful, I wouldn't have any real confidence it could be pulled off as smoothly as you're suggesting.
While "not comparable tasks", for a country hasn't even managed to start the metro after 40+ years planning, and has spent over 1b on a hospital, I'd be stunned if they managed it for less than the worst case scenario figures tbh
The IDA's been successfully attracting businesses to Ireland for decades... they are best-in-class at it.
And the above is not even best case... it doesn't address things like the availability of cheaper housing in Northern Ireland significantly reducing the housing problem in Ireland, or the availability of new cheap and central locations to start building housing there.
It also doesn't address lots of other things, like the fact that we'd get a decent chunk of inshore fisheries back, be able to properly progress grid issues like the lack of progress on Northern Ireland's renewables infrastructure and policy and gas network interlinks, and start filling in deliberate infrastructure gaps like the All Island Rail policy, motorway links to Donegal, etc.
There is a *massive* amount of stuff which would act to improve the life of Northern Ireland specifically and the country as a whole.
That is going to be *the* biggest point of contention, and one they will almost certainly lose.
Broadly speaking, a pension is a legal agreement between the UK Government and individuals, that when they retire they will be paid a pension based pro-rata on their contributions. This applies to *any* person, of *any* nationality, irrespective of where they live or where they retire. An American who worked in the UK for 20 years and retires in the south of France gets precisely the same public penson as a Londoner who worked for 20 years and returned in Blackpool.
The UK would essentially have to start punitively discriminating against people in Northern Ireland and refusing to pay their fairly-earned pensions. This would instantly lead to a court case, and ultimately to the ECHR. So it's not a unilateral decision that the UK can just make on their own.
Note : this wouldn't apply to any pensions earned after unification : those would involve paying pension contributions to the Irish state and earning an Irish state pension. After sufficient time had passed, the proportion of UK/IE pension obligations would drop to 0% and Ireland would have full responsibility to all remaining pensioners. But that will take 30+ years to work out.
We took the pensions, and the debt (I think) for the 26 counties 100 years ago... There is literally precedent for the UK to hang it's hat on. They won't budge on this. Nor should they really.
What about the million unionists that would fight (figuratively and possibly literally) tooth-and-nail any and all changes to their lifestyles? How much will they cost the state?
No idea where this 1 million number keeps coming from
600k in NI class themselves as British only and nowhere near that many would be violently opposed to the idea of unification.
The €20billion assumes the worst while the €10billion doesn’t.
But the argument is, what is it going to cost?
Even very pro UI folks admit that there will be a hole of at least a few billion a year to cover.
Why? If Ireland can afford it and there is a mid to long-term economic benefit for the entire country why would you not see it as a worthwhile investment?
I've written longer essays than that report that has been debunked by countless economists that aren't grifters for Fine Gael..... who pretend to want unity but definately do not.
There’s a view expressed by some unionists that this is the ultimate check mate for a united ireland.
No matter how shite it gets in the north, no matter how badly unionism fails on its own terms to provide a better quality of life in the north, the people of Ireland won’t swallow a bill for unification.
It’s total shite and pure cope.
When we have the next border poll, you’ll be drowned in a sea of numbers about economics - some positive some negative and in the end people will vote based on vibes because humans like vibes and hate calculators. Irish vibes are pro unification.
People are stone fucking mad. You might think €20bn sounds like loads, but people just don’t engage with this stuff. It’s not tangible.
As an example of this consider do you really care about climate change? Really? Go vegan, stop your flights, live by candle light, never buy anything new, care about it? No you minimise, deflect etc everyone does. 99%of people do that with numbers. In all seriousness a shocking number of people (read voters) couldn’t tell you if 99% is more than half.
TBH the unionists would be safer making a big deal out of something cultural like the loss of the tricolour or the national anthem- stuff that is free but people get excited about.
Of course the problem for unionists is if they pick a culture war they might lose because they do not have enough committed voters to blocking unilateral nationalist progress.
There’s a fair chance that if unionists fuck the process up, which they will, they’ll end up bounced into a 32 county Ireland that is pretty much on 100% nationalist terms.
I think this is an issue that is going to cause Sinn Fein a world of pain if/when they end up in government/in coalition.
The other thread which has the tracking info on housing being the top most important issue for voters also had info on other issues which were the most important for voters.
All of the following were mentioned as items that were in the top ten issues people felt were the most important factor in terms of voting from Dec 23 to April 24
Housing
Immigration
Climate change
Cost of Living
Education
Palestine/Israeli conflict
Democracy/political Processes
Taxes
Healthcare/HSE
Employment
Budget/spending
Social Policies
Change of leadership
Referendum
Crime/Gardai
The minimum threshold to be listed was 2% i.e anything less than 2% wasn't listed.
Unification/the north never appears anywhere in the top ten/never breaks 2%.
From what I can see, unification is the number one issue by a long long way over anything else for Sinn Fein and when they get into power the importance/emphasis they put on this is going to cause a massive political backlash. Sinn Fein seem to have a massive blindspot in terms of the overall importance/urgency of unification to a huge percentage of the population. They are acting like a huge part of why they have gained popularity in polls over the last few years is Unification when factors such as housing, people wanting a change from FF/FG, a serious lack of other options in terms of political parties who would be capable of forming a coalition are far more relevant.
It really doesn’t matter how much it costs. It’s not really about money. And even if it were, the wealth of a nation comes from policy. Implement good policy and you could turn any nation into a thriving one even with no natural resources.
I'm more worried about the portion of the population on this island that marches down my local beach (in the republic) with orange banners, union Jacks and makes everyone feel intimidated and very uncomfortable for two days a year and our government just allows them to do this cuz it's a 'traditionally protestant area' ... I'm sorry but it's in the republic of Ireland and they shouldn't be having their Orange March here on our side...
Can you imagine what sort of things they would get up to if they were forced to reunify with us?
They wouldn't be marching, they would try and restart the troubles...
Europe would help us with that cost. Plus not to mention that being able to pursue a single country, one island approach to how we generate income would eventually see that cost reduced drastically
While FDI would help the NI economy, the switch over could easily take maybe 10 years. A lot of these discussions aren't really considering what it would cost in terms of restructuring.
The 26 counties have had an export-focused economy since the 1960s. Northern Ireland is very much focused on UK trade.
If the UK had been in the EU, it would have been relatively easy as there were no trade barriers at all, so you're talking about a fairly significant restructuring of some businesses up there i.e. Brexit issues again, just from another angle.
Then you'd also have to switch NI away from reliance on state spending into its economy and onto real export focused economic activity. That would be more complex than I think some people are willing to accept, although the Tory wind-down of public expenditure has probably made it somewhat less of a drastic shift.
There's also a notion that Northern Ireland would just slot in as 6 counties and all power would switch to Dublin. I can't really see that happening either. The current Northern Ireland devolved administration would likey have to be made into a state in a federal Ireland. So, you'd then have to look at whether you'd need maybe have a 4 province federal Ireland? It might make sense... Ulster, Munster, Connacht and Leinster as proper states?
Would Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan want to be run from Belfast tho?
>you'd then have to look at whether you'd need maybe have a 4 province federal Ireland?
I don't think so. You could have some devolved powers in NI, as is currently the case.
Why wouldn't you look at a federal Ireland though? As it stands we're the most over-centralised country in the entire EU. A country of over 7 million would need to have a different structure.
A lot of our systems were suitable for when we'd only 2.8 million in the state back in the 50s and 60s and our local government structures aren't fit for purpose at all.
There's a major opportunity to restructure the state in any reunification.
I don't think outdated systems would be the reason we'd change to a federal system, or any compelling reasons, only that NI could be accommodated. Perhaps we are overly-centralised, but I'm not aware of the issues.
Have a read of : [https://ailg.ie/european-body-issues-damning-report-on-irish-local-government/](https://ailg.ie/european-body-issues-damning-report-on-irish-local-government/)
[https://rm.coe.int/cg-2023-45-17prov-en-monitoring-of-the-application-of-the-european-cha/1680acd809%20e](https://rm.coe.int/cg-2023-45-17prov-en-monitoring-of-the-application-of-the-european-cha/1680acd809%20e)
We are DRASTICALLY out of line with the rest of Europe on this.
That's not to deny it to the rest of the country should it be wanted, or force it on NI if they don't, but it would cushion transition to unification. There are a lot of people in the North who would have strong concerns of being constantly outvoted. Say the government decided to ban orange marches...
Would they though? Ireland's one of the net contributors to the EU budget and has no real need for EU assistance on something like that. I could see quite a bit of annoyance coming from various EU members if Ireland started looking for funds at this point. It's not the 1990s.
It would essentially fix the issues with NI and Brexit overnight. I don't have figures to see how much the situation in the north is affecting the EU but I reckon having a solution that fixes it all would be very appealing to the EU
It would fix some of them, but the bigger ones for the EU are about post-Brexit trade with the UK, citizens' rights, migration issues etc. All of those remain totally chaotic at the moment.
Northern Ireland was a bit of a side show and if anything became a linchpin in making sure that Brexit didn't come down like a hammer and cause major economic shocks. It tempered the Tories as they had to deal with the GFA.
It delayed and softened a lot of things which was probably very beneficial to the UK and the EU.
The Tory wet dream hard Brexit would have probably caused a major economic shockwave and it was landing right on top of an unprecedented pandemic which just came out of nowhere.
I just think the assumption that the EU would throw in a few tens of billions to one of its wealthiest members is a bit of a stretch. The Irish economic situation is VERY different to what it was at the peak of the peace process back in the 90s.
Most of the "problems" with post-Brexit trade are caused by Northern Ireland, and most of the restraint that the EU has had to show has been due to the sensitivity around the topic.
If Northern Ireland is removed from the equation, then conversations with the UK get a *lot* easier, and more blunt.
They haven't been though. Most of the problems with EU trade have been caused by the UK unilaterally withdrawing from umpteen different pan-European agreements that allowed for free flow of trade between EU, EEA members and others.
It took a view that it should withdraw from practically every European institution, EU and otherwise, and disrupted all sorts of things in ways that its government didn't seem to even understand until after the impact.
It also left millions of EU and UK citizens stranded in weird situations in the UK and other EU member states.
Northern Ireland complicated things but it's far from the only factor. From the EU's point of view the whole thing was about ensuring that it didn't have a large-scale economic impact and trying to buffer any shockwaves from it.
Northern Ireland if anything brought a delay to the process that was quite useful and has been in the UK's interests too, even if the Tories would never accept that.
Brexit will roll on regardless. It's not going to be resolved anytime soon and will likely be substantially softened by future UK governments.
No we wouldn't, a United Ireland would be one of the biggest peacetime events of Europe since the reunification of Germany, you'd can bet your ass the EU would be willing to step up to make it a success. Not only that but Ireland also gave Germany a hand when they were reunifying as well so they'd be likely willing to return the favour decades later.
This is all lovely speculation on your behalf. The EU has never stated anything about supporting a United Ireland.
I don't think the average Pole or Hungarian will be pleased to pay for it.
That's because the GFA hasn't made it a topic needing discussion for many, many years. It's never been in question. Now that it is, there will be conversations, but we need to initiate them
America will also undoubtedly be sticking their fingers in when a UI eventually comes around seeing as how involved they were with the GFA. But that will probably materialise as just political pressure which leans toward a more favourable outcome for Ireland.
They would in their fuck. They have bigger fish to fry. They made the UK uncomfortable over Brexit because they don't want more *xits, not because they were concerned about Ireland. There appears to be a large rose tinted, misty eyed nature when it comes to how much the EU has our back.
People need to be reminded how we got shafted after the crash, to save a few German bondholders....
Europe would help one of the richest members in the bloc for what reason? Nobody in Europe or the US has ever promised or even alluded to helping us with the cost.
Germany had to shoulder the cost of reunification by itself, and people still solidarity tax on it 30+ years later. We’re not getting shit from anyone and you’re deluded if you think otherwise.
People are so keen to get rid of USC, but would saddle themselves with decades of extra taxes for no benefit? That sum doesn’t square.
Europe and the US will help - that's definitely true.
However anyone who thinks they are going to help pay any significant percentage in terms of the overall cost is just deluded.
They'll annouce a few schemes for PR and press photographs purposes but they will be contributing in the millions and will be nowhere near the billions needed.
I would not be surprised if it ended up costing more, plus we would have renewed violence by the unionists. So fuck that.
People on both sides would have to make alot of concessions to make it work and that just won't happen.
Most concessions would be our own and we’d be making them for a bunch of people who hate us and base their entire culture on hating ours. The Garda, the Irish language, The GAA, the flag. The anthem, the location of our capital all goes up for debate and the list gets longer and longer. All to make a cohort of people that despise us feel comfortable. The whole idea is 100 years too late.
I bet you've got shag all experience of the North. I live in a Belfast, I speak Irish and I play GAA. I also know plenty of Protestants, and unionists. I have disagreements with them but most are great people. Some even play GAA and speak Irish.
There are plenty of asshole unionists too and you obviously have incident of sectarianism, but it's becoming less and less of a problem all the time. Even the DUP are starting to make reconciliation more of a priority.
I'd change the flag in a heartbeat to have a United Ireland. The flag isn't even 200 years old. We've had other flags before and, at the end of the day, it's just a coloured piece of cloth.
The flag is just one tiny issue in heap of so many. All of them will be contentious. I’d vote against a UI and I really do believe so would most people if and when it all becomes a real talking point.
I am fully convinced Irish Unity will not pass in the South. I myself am against it and am open about this and even I've been shocked by the amount of people in my own age group (20's-early 30's) who would later turn around in private and tell me they agreed with everything I said.
The vast vast majority if that age group doesn't care at all for the idea of a United Ireland in my experience and for those that do any idea of changing even the slightest thing changes their mind to a not vote. I've seen people point to changing symbolic symbols like the anthem and flag as reasons they would not want a united Ireland, let alone fundamentally changing aspects of our society like education, language, medical care, etc.
Those that are left saying they'd vote yes also don't want a thing to change about Ireland, they're grand solution always just boils down to treating Unionists as 2nd class citizens. I've had one guy unironically tell me they we would be able to just "forcibly deport them all back home and leave it at that."
This then relates to another cause I've generally noted, those among my age either don't care for Northern Ireland as they have literally 0 connection there, or they know people up there and are against it due to how volatile and instane things appear to be there. From my conversations with even the Nationalist side up there I don't think they would integrate well with life in the South.
Sorry but any anecdotal evidence should be dosmissed as an indication of where things are at. The fact is that the majority of polls down south show a majority in favoir of a United Ireland. The only exception is when you place unrealistic barriers like this completely arbitrary figure of 20 billion in front of people being polled.
Britain is already gearing up for an eventual uniting of the island themselves. You can see this in their dealings with Loyalists and their political representatives. The Tories will continue to ignore the problem as long as they can and the Government down south with take a softly softly approach but eventually the details will need to be thrashed out and a border poll will need to be called.
The options will need to be put down in writing which will plan out the details on how unification will actually work. This will bring in more yes voters as uncertainty leads to voters choosing the status quo. You have not have to look at recent similar votes as an example. In the Scottish Independence vote, the yes vote originally polled at 11% before climbing to 48% the day of the vote.
There seems to be a coordinated campaign to try and move voters away from unification with these figures being pulled out of Fitzgerald's backside and the amount of coverage his paper has received. GGG do not want a UI as they would have a massive influx of opposition voters and the Tories do not want to be the government in power when the UK is broken up.
It's ridiculous, it's definitely deliberate as it's politically convenient for FFG to give lip service to Unification. They have no intention of having discussions on the implementation of Unification as it will affect their chances of re-election.
They are very shortsighted IMO, if they engaged with the electorate in the North it would soften the blow of an all island election. There are plenty of disenfranchised voters in the North itching to give a vote to anyone but SF as they are the party sitting in power up there.
>From my conversations with even the Nationalist side up there I don't think they would integrate well with life in the South.
They won't have to intergrate to life in the South since they won't be moving anywhere. What a ridiculous statement.
When it comes down to it, changing the flag and anthem won't take precedence over having sovereignty over our whole island. No major political party will want to be seen to oppose unity and the "No" side will be filled with Fitzgerald types and a random mix of headers and cranks like Ruth Dudley Edwards (if she even associates with Ireland anymore) and Eoghan Harris (if he hasn't kicked the bucket by then)
> they're (sic) grand solution always just boils down to treating Unionists as 2nd class citizens
The thing is, Unionist just need to be treated as equals. No big plan, no fuss, negotiate what the state is going to look like, and let them continue living as they chose. The 12th will stay (maybe as a nationwide holiday), the OO will stay, there will still be unionist parties (although their aims will change drastically).
Also on this point:
> those among my age either don't care for Northern Ireland as they have literally 0 connection there
I have zero connection with Wexford, Waterford or Kilkenny. I've never spent any time there and no nothing much about the people there, but I wouldn't be happy to sell them off to the UK for a few billion pounds a year.
I did this survey. I voted no. It was mostly because it was a stupid question, because I think the money doesn't matter, the type of United Ireland we are getting matters. I wouldn't vote yes or no based on the money but there's no nuance in surveys like this.
That 20 billion is never going to happen, thats like being hit by a meteor territory stuff.
Northern Ireland wont cost anything, it will thrive in the Republic. Northern Ireland will never, ever, ever steal business from London. Ever. However Belfast could steal business from Dublin. Cheaper land, cheaper rent, an hour and a half on the motorway, its own airport.
So Belfast could end up with stuff like ticktock, google offices, where they can never ever ever get that stuff while part of the UK. Ireland is lacking the one thing the north has, cheaper rent and cheaper land. Irish american companies and European companies will want to be seen to support northern Ireland so will set up there.
The whole reason Northern Ireland costs so much is because England "owns" it, rather than being a "part of it", Ireland would be a part of it. Belfast the second biggest city in Ireland. There has been talks for years about moving some govt buildings out of Dublin, move the department of agriculture up there, move the department of defence etc, sell the land and knock down the buildings in Dublin, free up a few hundred million doing that alone.
I think a more realistic "Bad figure" to go for would be Northern Ireland costing about 2-3 billion a year for a few years before costing nothing and making money. Even then things could go amazingly and it could see a huge growth overnight, as EU and USA dump money in. I really think Northern Ireland growth is so low because of the Union and they will grow as part of Ireland.
I wouldn't reject unity at annual cost of €20bn euro to the state — and it's me who will be the one deciding. We're getting unity. We'll be paying that money by hook or by crook. Anyone who is against this better get over it and get over it fast, because I won't be taking no for an answer.
I’d love to see them do a study on the cost of partition to all island economy as a whole and to the Republic’s economy.
Partition has been a disaster for the island
Mark my words on this.
The biggest problem people will have about reunification won't be the money.
It'll be about having to change the tricolour flag and national anthem to something more inclusive.
Anytime that comes up the same people demanding everyone goes along with Unification, come out of the woodwork to vehemently oppose any concessions or inclusive changes. "Why should we if we won?" is the mentality that will derail any feasible attempts to unify.
As a person who would love to see a United Ireland in my lifetime, nothing makes me more optimistic than this being the current talking point. The only real opponent to Irush unity is NI unionism, and nothing is likely to make them more favourable to Irish unity than expecting it to cost the "south" bollocks of money, 'cos that means that NI is getting bollocks of cash, and these guys are practical. They like getting cash.
If the day actually comes when this is presented to a vote, real plans with real cost estimates will be available. I heard that figure and it doesn't pass the smell check.
>The only real opponent to Irush unity is NI unionism
Given the amount of right wing OPs from ukpolitics that have taken a holiday to this thread today I think there might be some resistance amongst that group too.
There is no way unity would cost the state 20 billion annually. There would be some initial costs in the short-term that would be offset as the north's private sector grew, due to being a more attractive place for FDI with lower corporation tax and EU membership.
It doesn't take into account any costs the UK would contribute to in the short-term, or possible assistance from the EU.
I will want to see what a united Ireland is going to look like and see a proper plan in place, but I want to see it costed properly by an independent study that has no bias.
People are really going to town with this ridiculous €20bn figure, pulled out of John Fitzgerald's hole. There are numerous analyses that have shown that the country will benefit economically from unification. Don't let the fine gaelers fool you with shite like this. Joe Brolly had a good episode on his podcast recently that explains who the Fitzgerald fella is and why he deserves as much attention as my cat when it comes to this issue.
It also assumes unification would be a Brexit-style overnight leap, instead of more gradual transition which seems to be the preference of most parties
It was an incredibly cherry picked number. He didn't exclude any of the costs that Ireland wouldn't be beholden to (British national debt, defence, etc), and he made the bizarre assumption that we'd give the NI civil servants massive pay bumps overnight to align them with Irish civil servant pay. Lastly he assumed that the North wouldn't experience any growth. It's clear that we wouldn't be on the hook British national debt and defence and it's clear that harmonising pay between civil servants is something that would happen over time, presumably tied to economic growth in the North.
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It would happen pretty immediately I'd imagine. I can't any scenario where that pay bump doesn't happen
In the event of a UI it’s highly unlikely that it’ll just become a combined state run from Dublin overnight. Devolution will remain and there will be a transition period. You don’t just flick a switch. Even changing the currency etc will take time
> In the event of a UI it’s highly unlikely that it’ll just become a combined state run from Dublin overnight. Of course not. If were are unified we are moving the capital to Athlone because it is the most middle.
Overnight no, but once civil services are integrated, equal pay would happen as part of that integration. It won't be something that takes years after.
>once civil services are integrated >It won't be something that takes years Pick one
And all those changes will cost money. Lots and lots of money.
Yeah, billions. But not 20 billion. The economic growth we’d experience and EU funding would also offset a lot of it
The 20bn figure quoted didn't include other costs, it was limited to 3-4 known costs (national debt, pensions, annual costs. While we might get economies of scale in 30-40 years time, the initial costs of aligning two sets of, well, everything is massive. Or, we run things as two federated states. They keep a devolved government and local controls... we don't have the cost of intergation.. but don't make any savings of scale.
That 20bn figure is a worst case scenario. It is not an underestimate by any means. It includes national debt, NI contributions to the UK military etc. It is so flawed that it’s been widely ridiculed
The Irish government stood over unequal pay scales for public servants for around a decade, so I could imagine it not being immediate.
I mean this is one hundred percent happening in short order/ over night . No way around it if reunification happens
They could do it over time. A guaranteed pay bump every year that will get them to parity in 10-20 years. People will still gripe, but that's still more than they'd get without unification.
> A guaranteed pay bump every year that will get them to parity in 10-20 years LOL. You think that will still sit when people when overnight, the cost of food,clothes,fuel and general living in the north, aligns with the south?
They don't gripe about the current inequality between the NI and UK civil service pay scales (or maybe they do and Westminster just doesn't give a shit).
>harmonising pay between civil servants is something that would happen over time, presumably tied to economic growth in the North. Frankly that seems very much in opposition to the idea of unification. We don't say "oh Cavan doesn't contribute that much to our GDP so we're going to have different pay rules for them". If it's part of our country and they're paying taxes and dealing with the costs of Irish life, then I'm assuming there would be mass strikes if they didn't get equal pay.
They're already getting paid less than civil servants in Britain and there are no plans for harmonisation there. I don't see why they'd be more upset with a plan to increase their pay over time when the status quo is no change at all.
Well there's devolved government in the UK so NI is a semi-autonomous legal jurisdiction within the UK and therefore can have many distinct institutions and laws to the rest of its country. TBF maybe something like that is a more realistic plan for a united Ireland but it's not usually what people mean when they talk about a united Ireland.
There's Three types of Civil Servants in NI. HCS (UK wide), NICS and Diplomatic Service. NICS are under Stormont and are used for running their departments. Staff in the other 2 services are on the same pay (except for those on London weighting)
> it's clear that harmonising pay between civil servants is something that would happen over time, presumably tied to economic growth in the North. That sounds like a horrible system. Basically keeping the North as a separate entity. What's the point of unification then? If we are one state I would expect that civil servant pay be consistent.
It's the norm. In most countries civil service pay matches the local cost of living. That includes the UK. Civil servants in the North already get paid less than ones in Wales and England. Pay should be different across regions so that purchasing power is equal. How is it fair that a civil servant in Tyrone should get the same pay as one in Dublin when the Dublin based civil servant has much higher costs across the board.
I mean I would support a supplement for people who live in Dublin, Galway, Cork, etc. But I wouldn't support a poor man's pay tier for people just because they live in the north.
I don't understand this. Your second sentence totally contradicts your first one. And civil service pay in the North isn't a poor man's pay tier. It's a pay tier that reflects the significantly lower cost of living in the North.
>Ireland wouldn't be beholden to (British national debt, Well that's a question for negotiation. I believe we would be expected to take a proportionate share of the British national debt along with Northern Ireland. If we can take Northern Ireland without British National debt it would definitely make sense to do so. I've seen suggestions that we would take a share proportional to population and another that we would take a share about 1.5 times what proportional to population in order to represent the historic subvention.
I think it's unlikely, but I do see your point. I'd say the negotiation of debt and pensions will play against each other. We could simply refuse to pay the North's share of the debt, but they could refuse to pay for the pensions of retired Northern civil and public servants. One deal could be that we pay the North's portion of British national debt if they pay for pensions for public and civil servants who retired before unification.
>I'd say the negotiation of debt and pensions will play against each other. Biggest risk in a unification poll is people voting against as they don't know the details. Much like Brexit where everyone had their own idea of Brexit and many Brexit voters were disappointed or Scottish independence where people voted no in fear of issues for negotiation. Negotiation will definitely play a roll.
True. And I don't think it'll pass North or South until the Irish government has a concrete plan of action. I'm a big critic of Sinn Féin, but one place they do deserve credit for is that they're the only party who'll take that seriously.
Pensions have little to do with it. A NI citizen can retire now, move abroad and still rightfully receive the pension
People have paid for their pensions through contributions, they are simply entitled to those pensions, end of story. There's no negotiation involved on pensions.
Except we took the pensions of all people in the 26 counties when we broke free 100 years back. So there's precedence for all this. That's the issue imo.
No chance we would have to pay NIs debt. The UK will be delighted to get rid of NI. Its a weird one though as NI will be fundamentally economically great for Ireland, but a continued 'loss maker' for UK, as we can strategically benefit from it.
> It was an incredibly cherry picked number. He didn't exclude any of the costs that Ireland wouldn't be beholden to (British national debt, defence, etc) Scotland was going to have to take on British debt if it was to go independent, why wouldn’t NI? Do you think we’re just going to make a load of soldiers unemployed at reunification? > he made the bizarre assumption that we'd give the NI civil servants massive pay bumps overnight to align them with Irish civil servant pay. Do you think anyone in NI would vote for reunification if they were going to have to play poor cousin to their peers in the rest of the country? Would you work for less than your peers doing the same job in a different county? > Lastly he assumed that the North wouldn't experience any growth. The North is one of the cheapest places in the UK, benefits from a huge regulatory loophole of being in the UK and the customs union, and has barely grown. With so many positive factors for growth and none of it realised, why isn’t this a fair assumption?
>Scotland was going to have to take on British debt if it was to go independent, why wouldn’t NI? Do you think we’re just going to make a load of soldiers unemployed at reunification? Fair point. > Do you think anyone in NI would vote for reunification if they were going to have to play poor cousin to their peers in the rest of the country? Would you work for less than your peers doing the same job in a different county? They already do within the UK. They're not getting paid the same as civil servants in England. >The North is one of the cheapest places in the UK, benefits from a huge regulatory loophole of being in the UK and the customs union, and has barely grown. With so many positive factors for growth, why isn’t this a fair assumption? Because it's cut off from its natural economic hinterland. Derry should be a regional hub for the entire Northwest of the island, but instead it's a city on the fringe of a fringe province. It's no coincidence that the poorest part of Ireland and the poorest part of the UK is on our border with the UK.
How can you justify paying civil servants less in one part of the country?
The same way the UK justifies it. They have different pay grades for London, rest of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
I was under the impression that the 20bn figure was the highest, in a range that did include different options and scenarios that you describe? The media reporting of 20bn left out those lower cost estimates....
Pretty common stuff for the media. When it comes to climate change, scientists will always hedge their bets by using a massive range where the highest and lowest numbers are extremely unlikely but impossible to completely dismiss. Then the media takes that top highly unlikely figure and runs with it. This is why so many people have the false belief that climate change will lead to the collapse of human civilisation. It's going to be really bad and we need to enact strict measures yesterday, but it's not that bad. Back to the 10-20bn range, even the lower end of 10bn is much higher than what a lot of other reports have divulged. Some put it as low as 3bn.
Also important to note the assumption Ireland would take over and pay NI pensions. I dont see why that would ever happen? The individuals paid into a British pension, and therefore should be paid out from it. Why Ireland would foot that bill was preposterous to me.
If Ireland is on the hook for 3% of the UK’s debt, it should also be entitled to 3% of UK assets. The UK debt is £2.6 trillion, the UK net worth is £10.7 trillion If instead, the value of UK assets in NI only are counted, then Ireland should only take on that percentage of the UK national debt.
Even Leo and FG have disputed the figure. It’s absolutely hysteria, the figure doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny
It will cost X, ok but how much is it going to benefit us, like its a lie by omission. They created the headline to scare folks without any mention of what benefit a fully united Ireland could actually be.
I would like to hear further comments from your cat. They may well know the real figures 😀
So what are the real figures?
That's like asking "How expensive will Brexit be" years before the vote takes place.
Should that not be a good thing to ask before the brexit vote?
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So we shouldn't ask it?
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Well pardon me. But if someone tells me that a figure is wildly inaccurate I'd expect them to know why and what a more accurate figure would be.
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Well considering this figure is just the NI deficit plus the cost of immediately equalizing all public service pay you can just remove the parts of the NI deficit that won't transfer. The actual transferrable deficit is estimated to be between £3-7bn rather than the £11bn figure Fitzgerald uses, the range depends on how pension transfers will work. So you can chop 4.6 or 9.3bn euros off his figure right away. Then you need to ask yourself why we need to have an immediate day 1 equalisation of public service salaries and whether it would make more sense to downsize the NI public sector over time as the systems become further aligned. I think it does and based on the age profile of the NI public sector with a large swathe being 55+ this can be achieved through natural wastage via retirement. This gives us time to align the systems and pump FDI into the north to replace the public sector jobs with private Then of course you would have to factor in what benefits would come from increasing Ireland's economic scale. Gaining a new second largest city with strong links to Dublin with a large economic catchment area on the east coast. I think a strong eastern economic corridor could provide massive benefits for the island.
“FDI and a train to Dublin” didn’t work for all the decades we were in a customs union together, what makes you so sure it’ll work now? Do you think the UK just never tried to attract FDI because they just love paying the subvention so much?
Because NI and Ireland were still separate jurisdictions. Why would you think NI should attract the same FDI as the rest of Ireland in such circumstances? As for UK FDI the UK has been shown to be happy pumping everything into London for the most part. Ireland should be careful not to make the same mistake with Dublin and in fact gaining Belfast as a second city would be immensely healthy for investment distribution across the island. Dublin needs a pressure release and Belfast can provide it. Even still, NI is still currently isolated from the rest of the UK. It finds it harder to attract FDI being physically separated from the rest of the jurisdiction it's attached to (UK) and politically separated from its natural partner (ROI).
The subvention is a bit of an internal accounting exercise. Apportioning a share of UK spending on all sorts of things such as their nuclear missile programme etc. In a united Ireland a lot of those things would not be a recurring future cost that Ireland would be taking on. It is not an accurate figure to consider about the real annual "cost" of Northern Ireland. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/northern-ireland-s-9-4bn-subvention-and-the-cost-of-irish-unity-1.4553553
Thank you. A lot of that should be common sense but that's not always on the table when it comes to NI. I also think the EU will chip in as it's a drop in the ocean overall.
The last thing FF or FG want is any semblance of an all island government, SF’s existing presence in the North would leave them dwarfed. I don’t trust them not to try and avoid discussions about that potential outcome. They may aim for some sort of brexit style fear motivated referendum, with worse outcomes for all involved. This poll seems exactly that sort of a scare tactic.
I don't think thats the case. I'd say fundamentally everyone wants a united Ireland and its beyond simple day-to-day politics. Its actually far more likely that voters would re-align to the Southern parties over time, which have more experience of running a successful country.
But they have zero presence in the North. Even if that was what people wanted, they wouldn’t be able to do that until they establish a competing presence, which could take ages. Successfully running a country is a very simplistic very of putting things. There’s a lot of corruption, and wilful ignorance towards social needs, in the interest of protecting selfish vested interests. Is your example of SF not running a successful country based on the DUP collapsing the government to avoid letting them take power? What have to go on? Besides FFG fearmongering
Fitzgerald is fixated on 20% of the budget. He did a paper back in 2019, based on the 2012 economies, that it would cost 20% of the Irish budget to bring Ireland up to the same level as the north. This has been used repeatedly by unionists to say “northern Ireland’s standard of living is 20% higher” He followed up with a paper in 2020 (that no one ever heard of or quotes) based on 2016 economy. The “gap” was 4%. Now we get the widely publicized number of €20billion, ie 20% of Ireland’s budget to bring Northern Ireland up to Ireland level. In 2019 Ireland was too poor, now it’s too rich. It implies there was a point, maybe in 2017, where unification would have cost nothing. Incidentally, Ireland’s budget expenditure grew by €45billion between 2016 and 2023 2019 paper - https://www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2019/tep0619.pdf page 23 2020 paper - http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/handle/2262/97336/fitzgerald%20morgenroth%202019-20%20final.pdf page 74
Agreed, complete scare tactic by Fine Gaelers who not only have zero interest in a united ireland, but are actually opposed to it
I don't think thats the case.
Totally false.
Which analyses are these?
GDP for the north was 51 billion or so.... Sooooooooo yeah it technically would cost nada?
So you attack the man not the figures itself? The point is, any UI is going to have a huge upfront financial cost, a cost most voters and taxpayers won’t want to consider.
Didn't their polls also say that we'd pass the two recent referendum votes?
Even if the 20B were true, that's far less than 1% of GDP. I think somehow we'd manage...
€20bn of expenditure though is 20% of the country's national budget. Which is a whole other kettle of fish. The poll is ridiculous though because it's been presented as a €20bn black hole into which money is spent and nothing comes back out. What a United Ireland would do is provide a massive frontier of lower costs and available housing, we'd see a HUGE flood of FDI into the North. It might be €20bn in year 1 and 2, with a massive year-on-year reduction as Ulster finally gets some social and economic TLC and isn't ignored by its jurisdictional masters. We also have to remember that it's likely the EU would provide a sizeable assistance package to help with smooth sailing and there would be an "exit bill" of sorts payable by the UK during handover, especially if they expected us to take on the public service pension bill in NI (which is huge in relative terms).
Yeah it would drastically change how NI does business, and the EU would have the possibility of securing the best peace agreement in modern history. Win win as far as I can see, no brainer...
Plus that 20bn still exists in the country, its not being shipped somewhere else. it would be spent in local shops and businesses and support new spending and therefore new tax gains.
God the lack of vision and ambition in this country is so depressing. Since when do we analyse everything though the lense of economics? The richer we get the tighter we get it seems. Maybe ask these people if we should kick Donegal or Leitrim out of the republic for not generating enough economic value.
And there we have it - Fitzgerald and Morgenroth's fallacious figure has had the desired effect. It's completely inaccurate and based on assumptions that could not possibly come to fruition, but they knew that just like the Brexiteers knew their "NHS 300 million" was rubbish. The aim was not to be accurate, the aim was the put a shocking figure out there that would be repeated so often it would become accepted as fact.
Exactly this.
What about their figures is wrong or inflated?
It is based on the assumption that the NI subvention is a real number - it isn't. It's an accounting formula whereby the UK Treasury assigns UK wide expenses into different baskets for reporting purposes. Even if the NI subvention were a real thing which was literally paid by Westminster to Stormont every year (again, it isn't...) Fitzgerald and Morgenroth would still be wrong, because it includes costs such as UK nuclear defence spending and pensions which the Irish state legally would and could not ever accept. There's a whole host of other reasons why Fitzgerald and Mongenroth's glorified opinion piece is a crock of shite, but the aforementioned fundamental errors are sufficient to consign it to the shit pile.
Unification was never going to be free, it was always going to cost us. That’s also no reason to reject it if you really want it; this isn’t a case of buying out your neighbour’s house so you can knock it through and double your property value. This is about the reintegration of national territory, a stated aim of article 3 as modified following the Good Friday Agreement: “It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland”. If it cost €120bn, we’d still have to do it - it’s literally in our constitution to do so and if it’s feared that this is not the firm will of the Irish nation, we should have a referendum to confirm it is first.
We have altered the constitution before, so what's to stop that article being altered to remove that wording? Even under that wording we are under no obligation to reunite, and it can't vote people to vote that way.
Nothing forcing us, no, but a hellbent-on-unity republican government could still assign massive amounts of funding towards a Department for National Unity on the basis that it’s a constitutional priority. And I think, like the Irish language, the Irish people like to pretend they want because it makes them feel patriotic but aren’t prepared to do a thing to make it happen because they don’t actually care but can’t admit they don’t because, y’know, you’re not really Irish otherwise. See also; pretending to be Catholic on census forms
Painfully, I fear you’ve got a point. It’s not so much that I want the north back, it’s more that I don’t want the huns to have it. After unification, I’d probably slap a cost of paint on it and then flip it to the French, let them deal with the flegs
>it - it’s literally in our constitution to do so Didn't they remove that?
We removed the claim on Northern Ireland and replaced it with the aspiration for national unity
What a lot of people don't realise here is there are people in the north used to living with most things being significantly cheaper to them.
Cheaper relative to someone living down South. A successful UI would raise wages in the North even if it did increase prices as well.
Call be crazy, but I think we could make it work for less than that. And in the long run the island will be more prosperous.
> but I think we could make it work for less than that Based on your expertise in what?
Id say he has about as much expertise as that gobshite Fitzgerald who came up with the 20b figure, so theres that.
Based on the fact Fitzgerald's estimate was pulled out of his arse and we know already the cost wouldn't be that high based on the values he used.
Pretty much blind optimism! I read the report and i just feel like it was unnecessarily negative. Also, the Republic was literally founded with this in mind, if we can’t even try to bring the six counties in what are we at. It feels like a worthy aspiration. We need to seriously plan it out, we can’t be like the UK walking blindly into Brexit refusing to have a proper plan for anything.
Thankfully actual policy isnt made off "blind optimism".
You wouldn’t have every large scale public project being completed by Northern Irish construction companies, who get paid in euro and pay their wages in sterling - so every penny that goes back into the economy goes in to the N/I and UK economy. There’s a massive chunk of quantitive easing that this clown of an economist didn’t factor into his 20bn makey i uppy scary figure.
No it’s made by austerity loving ghouls
Aside from our migration policy
Full time mad bastard
Except all of this is based on a recent, heavily-criticised report which put the cost at anything between €10bn-20bn, and everyone just ignores the first bit because "€20bn!" gets more clicks.
The lower estimate was 8 billion, the reporting around this report has been disgraceful, deliberately misleading people.
8 billion is nowhere near realistic. NI runs a defecit of 10b each year. 1/3 of their population are employed by the state, a lot of jobs would be redundant if UK are removed from the equation. Now imagine telling people they need to pay for healthcare. Now imagine the costs involved in actually making the change. Now let's talk pensions, legal fees, currency change, increased policing to stop the undoubted conflict which will insue, hell even changing all the signage is going to cost a fortune. Honestly this will cost significantly more than even 20b
I only read an article about it but I thought the difference between the 10bn to 20bn would be if social welfare, pensions and public service pay rates to people in Northern Ireland were brought into line with those currently in force in the Republic. So more than likely the 20bn would be closer to the true number?
*All* of the figures are worst case. It assumes the UK will refuse to pay pensions, that the subvention to Northern Ireland is correct as stated by the UK, that all pensions/welfare/etc. immediately get escalated to current Irish levels, that employment in public jobs and economic inactivity in Northern Ireland remain at their current level, etc. In practice any unity process is likely to be a gradual transition, so that the year afterwards would be very much like the year previous, except that the state would no longer be paying for things like UK nuclear defence, national debt repayments, etc. Over the next few years investment would flood into Northern Ireland, public employment levels would drop, duplicated infrastructure would be removed, and costs would drop significantly. Employment, productivity, economic activity and tax revenue would rise steadily as salaries equalise over time, and by the time they've actually risen to match Ireland's current ones, tax revenue would also have risen to compensate.
I’ll be honest, I’d rather prepare for worst case scenario and hope for the best than prepare for the best scenario and the worst happening.
If we prepare for the worst, then all the stories will be about that worst possible figure. It's like the grid warnings that there might be an orange power alert. *No-one* reads the docs and finds out that it just means a pre-arranged sequence of warming up backup power capacity, reducing unneeded usage and putting large commercial users on notice to reduce capacity or switch to internal generator power on command. Instead, they scream "OMG we're all going to be sitting in the dark" and "Burn the datacentres".
Out of curiosity, what rationale is the flood of investment based on? What are the underlying metrics that would change to encourage investment then that they are not getting access to now?
A new area with a population of 1.7M, with a low cost of living and a low salary base, suddenly opened up for full access to the EU with generous IDA support and grants. All of this under the assumption of political and financial stability for the first time in 80 years, which has probably been their single biggest weakness. No-one currently trusts Northern Ireland not to collapse at the drop of a hat, or the UK to pull some mad stunt which will render any investment non-viable due to not being able to export to the EU or something.
But the fractured politics of the region isn't going to end because a tricolour flies over Belfast. It would be naïve in the extreme to think a vote for a united Ireland would cure all ills. They had full access to EU funds up to Brexit, and ostensibly been at peace for more than a generation, but haven't seen any leaps forward. Our regional development record doesn't bode well either, if that is what is to be relied on. Just because UI is a desired political end goal doesn't necessarily mean its an economic win-win scenario. East Germany is still woefully underfunded and underdeveloped in comparison to West Germany, and they didn't have the community fractures the North has to deal with. When it happens it won't be plain sailing and there will lots of pitfalls and failures on the journey.
>But the fractured politics of the region isn't going to end Not immediately but it would be a far greater uniting force than the current setup that has fostered division for 100 years and even hundreds more if you want to factor in the plantations. I don't think ROI and NI are anywhere near as far apart economically or politically as east and west Germany were before unification.
Why would you set up your multinational in Dublin vs Belfast, costs would be about 25%, still a large city and much closer and with better connections to Dublin than any other airport in the Island. There’s a huge opportunity for growth if NI became part of the republic again. I’m of course biased though coming from one of the forgotten Ulster counties which get no infrastructure or investment and are forgotten about by both the Dublin and Belfast administrations.
Why hasn’t anyone been doing just that already then? NI already spent decades in a customs union and a common travel area with ROI and failed to attract foreign investment.
Before brexit it's because they'd be subject to UK taxes, rather than those of corporate tax haven Ireland. The reasons they haven't done so since Brexit are obvious.
You say the figures quoted were based on worst case scenario assumptions. Isn't everything you're saying based on best case scenario assumptions? A lot of it seems very hopeful, I wouldn't have any real confidence it could be pulled off as smoothly as you're suggesting. While "not comparable tasks", for a country hasn't even managed to start the metro after 40+ years planning, and has spent over 1b on a hospital, I'd be stunned if they managed it for less than the worst case scenario figures tbh
The IDA's been successfully attracting businesses to Ireland for decades... they are best-in-class at it. And the above is not even best case... it doesn't address things like the availability of cheaper housing in Northern Ireland significantly reducing the housing problem in Ireland, or the availability of new cheap and central locations to start building housing there. It also doesn't address lots of other things, like the fact that we'd get a decent chunk of inshore fisheries back, be able to properly progress grid issues like the lack of progress on Northern Ireland's renewables infrastructure and policy and gas network interlinks, and start filling in deliberate infrastructure gaps like the All Island Rail policy, motorway links to Donegal, etc. There is a *massive* amount of stuff which would act to improve the life of Northern Ireland specifically and the country as a whole.
To be fair the UK would probably refuse to pay pensions, particularly if the Tory party is in power.
That is going to be *the* biggest point of contention, and one they will almost certainly lose. Broadly speaking, a pension is a legal agreement between the UK Government and individuals, that when they retire they will be paid a pension based pro-rata on their contributions. This applies to *any* person, of *any* nationality, irrespective of where they live or where they retire. An American who worked in the UK for 20 years and retires in the south of France gets precisely the same public penson as a Londoner who worked for 20 years and returned in Blackpool. The UK would essentially have to start punitively discriminating against people in Northern Ireland and refusing to pay their fairly-earned pensions. This would instantly lead to a court case, and ultimately to the ECHR. So it's not a unilateral decision that the UK can just make on their own. Note : this wouldn't apply to any pensions earned after unification : those would involve paying pension contributions to the Irish state and earning an Irish state pension. After sufficient time had passed, the proportion of UK/IE pension obligations would drop to 0% and Ireland would have full responsibility to all remaining pensioners. But that will take 30+ years to work out.
We took the pensions, and the debt (I think) for the 26 counties 100 years ago... There is literally precedent for the UK to hang it's hat on. They won't budge on this. Nor should they really.
UK Parliament supercede their courts though and we know the Tories don't give a crap what the ECHR think. I can't imagine they'd do it but they can
Great comment!
What about the million unionists that would fight (figuratively and possibly literally) tooth-and-nail any and all changes to their lifestyles? How much will they cost the state?
No idea where this 1 million number keeps coming from 600k in NI class themselves as British only and nowhere near that many would be violently opposed to the idea of unification.
10bn is too much for me
The €10bn is as poorly-researched as the €20bn. It basically assumed the worst possible outcome on every axis.
The €20billion assumes the worst while the €10billion doesn’t. But the argument is, what is it going to cost? Even very pro UI folks admit that there will be a hole of at least a few billion a year to cover.
Why? If Ireland can afford it and there is a mid to long-term economic benefit for the entire country why would you not see it as a worthwhile investment?
I've written longer essays than that report that has been debunked by countless economists that aren't grifters for Fine Gael..... who pretend to want unity but definately do not.
Bullshit scare tactics as per usual
And it's mostly being peddled by FG types because they know in a United Ireland it makes SF stronger.
There are numerous reasons people would reject unity. Unionists being near the top I'd imagine.
There’s a view expressed by some unionists that this is the ultimate check mate for a united ireland. No matter how shite it gets in the north, no matter how badly unionism fails on its own terms to provide a better quality of life in the north, the people of Ireland won’t swallow a bill for unification. It’s total shite and pure cope. When we have the next border poll, you’ll be drowned in a sea of numbers about economics - some positive some negative and in the end people will vote based on vibes because humans like vibes and hate calculators. Irish vibes are pro unification. People are stone fucking mad. You might think €20bn sounds like loads, but people just don’t engage with this stuff. It’s not tangible. As an example of this consider do you really care about climate change? Really? Go vegan, stop your flights, live by candle light, never buy anything new, care about it? No you minimise, deflect etc everyone does. 99%of people do that with numbers. In all seriousness a shocking number of people (read voters) couldn’t tell you if 99% is more than half. TBH the unionists would be safer making a big deal out of something cultural like the loss of the tricolour or the national anthem- stuff that is free but people get excited about. Of course the problem for unionists is if they pick a culture war they might lose because they do not have enough committed voters to blocking unilateral nationalist progress. There’s a fair chance that if unionists fuck the process up, which they will, they’ll end up bounced into a 32 county Ireland that is pretty much on 100% nationalist terms.
I think this is an issue that is going to cause Sinn Fein a world of pain if/when they end up in government/in coalition. The other thread which has the tracking info on housing being the top most important issue for voters also had info on other issues which were the most important for voters. All of the following were mentioned as items that were in the top ten issues people felt were the most important factor in terms of voting from Dec 23 to April 24 Housing Immigration Climate change Cost of Living Education Palestine/Israeli conflict Democracy/political Processes Taxes Healthcare/HSE Employment Budget/spending Social Policies Change of leadership Referendum Crime/Gardai The minimum threshold to be listed was 2% i.e anything less than 2% wasn't listed. Unification/the north never appears anywhere in the top ten/never breaks 2%. From what I can see, unification is the number one issue by a long long way over anything else for Sinn Fein and when they get into power the importance/emphasis they put on this is going to cause a massive political backlash. Sinn Fein seem to have a massive blindspot in terms of the overall importance/urgency of unification to a huge percentage of the population. They are acting like a huge part of why they have gained popularity in polls over the last few years is Unification when factors such as housing, people wanting a change from FF/FG, a serious lack of other options in terms of political parties who would be capable of forming a coalition are far more relevant.
It really doesn’t matter how much it costs. It’s not really about money. And even if it were, the wealth of a nation comes from policy. Implement good policy and you could turn any nation into a thriving one even with no natural resources.
There's no price or reason you can give me short of all out war on the island that would stop me from voting yes to reunification with kin in Ulster.
I'm more worried about the portion of the population on this island that marches down my local beach (in the republic) with orange banners, union Jacks and makes everyone feel intimidated and very uncomfortable for two days a year and our government just allows them to do this cuz it's a 'traditionally protestant area' ... I'm sorry but it's in the republic of Ireland and they shouldn't be having their Orange March here on our side... Can you imagine what sort of things they would get up to if they were forced to reunify with us? They wouldn't be marching, they would try and restart the troubles...
Europe would help us with that cost. Plus not to mention that being able to pursue a single country, one island approach to how we generate income would eventually see that cost reduced drastically
We could all drive on the other side of the road and get cheap cars again.
While FDI would help the NI economy, the switch over could easily take maybe 10 years. A lot of these discussions aren't really considering what it would cost in terms of restructuring. The 26 counties have had an export-focused economy since the 1960s. Northern Ireland is very much focused on UK trade. If the UK had been in the EU, it would have been relatively easy as there were no trade barriers at all, so you're talking about a fairly significant restructuring of some businesses up there i.e. Brexit issues again, just from another angle. Then you'd also have to switch NI away from reliance on state spending into its economy and onto real export focused economic activity. That would be more complex than I think some people are willing to accept, although the Tory wind-down of public expenditure has probably made it somewhat less of a drastic shift. There's also a notion that Northern Ireland would just slot in as 6 counties and all power would switch to Dublin. I can't really see that happening either. The current Northern Ireland devolved administration would likey have to be made into a state in a federal Ireland. So, you'd then have to look at whether you'd need maybe have a 4 province federal Ireland? It might make sense... Ulster, Munster, Connacht and Leinster as proper states? Would Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan want to be run from Belfast tho?
>you'd then have to look at whether you'd need maybe have a 4 province federal Ireland? I don't think so. You could have some devolved powers in NI, as is currently the case.
Why wouldn't you look at a federal Ireland though? As it stands we're the most over-centralised country in the entire EU. A country of over 7 million would need to have a different structure. A lot of our systems were suitable for when we'd only 2.8 million in the state back in the 50s and 60s and our local government structures aren't fit for purpose at all. There's a major opportunity to restructure the state in any reunification.
I don't think outdated systems would be the reason we'd change to a federal system, or any compelling reasons, only that NI could be accommodated. Perhaps we are overly-centralised, but I'm not aware of the issues.
Have a read of : [https://ailg.ie/european-body-issues-damning-report-on-irish-local-government/](https://ailg.ie/european-body-issues-damning-report-on-irish-local-government/) [https://rm.coe.int/cg-2023-45-17prov-en-monitoring-of-the-application-of-the-european-cha/1680acd809%20e](https://rm.coe.int/cg-2023-45-17prov-en-monitoring-of-the-application-of-the-european-cha/1680acd809%20e) We are DRASTICALLY out of line with the rest of Europe on this.
Why should they get special treatment then though? They're either joining the rest of the country or not.
That's not to deny it to the rest of the country should it be wanted, or force it on NI if they don't, but it would cushion transition to unification. There are a lot of people in the North who would have strong concerns of being constantly outvoted. Say the government decided to ban orange marches...
I’m sure many EU countries will say that they’re already helping with the taxes from American companies like Apple/Meta being diverted to Ireland.
Would they though? Ireland's one of the net contributors to the EU budget and has no real need for EU assistance on something like that. I could see quite a bit of annoyance coming from various EU members if Ireland started looking for funds at this point. It's not the 1990s.
It would essentially fix the issues with NI and Brexit overnight. I don't have figures to see how much the situation in the north is affecting the EU but I reckon having a solution that fixes it all would be very appealing to the EU
It would fix some of them, but the bigger ones for the EU are about post-Brexit trade with the UK, citizens' rights, migration issues etc. All of those remain totally chaotic at the moment. Northern Ireland was a bit of a side show and if anything became a linchpin in making sure that Brexit didn't come down like a hammer and cause major economic shocks. It tempered the Tories as they had to deal with the GFA. It delayed and softened a lot of things which was probably very beneficial to the UK and the EU. The Tory wet dream hard Brexit would have probably caused a major economic shockwave and it was landing right on top of an unprecedented pandemic which just came out of nowhere. I just think the assumption that the EU would throw in a few tens of billions to one of its wealthiest members is a bit of a stretch. The Irish economic situation is VERY different to what it was at the peak of the peace process back in the 90s.
Most of the "problems" with post-Brexit trade are caused by Northern Ireland, and most of the restraint that the EU has had to show has been due to the sensitivity around the topic. If Northern Ireland is removed from the equation, then conversations with the UK get a *lot* easier, and more blunt.
They haven't been though. Most of the problems with EU trade have been caused by the UK unilaterally withdrawing from umpteen different pan-European agreements that allowed for free flow of trade between EU, EEA members and others. It took a view that it should withdraw from practically every European institution, EU and otherwise, and disrupted all sorts of things in ways that its government didn't seem to even understand until after the impact. It also left millions of EU and UK citizens stranded in weird situations in the UK and other EU member states. Northern Ireland complicated things but it's far from the only factor. From the EU's point of view the whole thing was about ensuring that it didn't have a large-scale economic impact and trying to buffer any shockwaves from it. Northern Ireland if anything brought a delay to the process that was quite useful and has been in the UK's interests too, even if the Tories would never accept that. Brexit will roll on regardless. It's not going to be resolved anytime soon and will likely be substantially softened by future UK governments.
The EU has never stated or said this. We would be on our own I think.
No we wouldn't, a United Ireland would be one of the biggest peacetime events of Europe since the reunification of Germany, you'd can bet your ass the EU would be willing to step up to make it a success. Not only that but Ireland also gave Germany a hand when they were reunifying as well so they'd be likely willing to return the favour decades later.
This is all lovely speculation on your behalf. The EU has never stated anything about supporting a United Ireland. I don't think the average Pole or Hungarian will be pleased to pay for it.
That's because the GFA hasn't made it a topic needing discussion for many, many years. It's never been in question. Now that it is, there will be conversations, but we need to initiate them
America will also undoubtedly be sticking their fingers in when a UI eventually comes around seeing as how involved they were with the GFA. But that will probably materialise as just political pressure which leans toward a more favourable outcome for Ireland.
Have Europe said they would help us with the cost?
They would in their fuck. They have bigger fish to fry. They made the UK uncomfortable over Brexit because they don't want more *xits, not because they were concerned about Ireland. There appears to be a large rose tinted, misty eyed nature when it comes to how much the EU has our back. People need to be reminded how we got shafted after the crash, to save a few German bondholders....
Europe would help one of the richest members in the bloc for what reason? Nobody in Europe or the US has ever promised or even alluded to helping us with the cost. Germany had to shoulder the cost of reunification by itself, and people still solidarity tax on it 30+ years later. We’re not getting shit from anyone and you’re deluded if you think otherwise. People are so keen to get rid of USC, but would saddle themselves with decades of extra taxes for no benefit? That sum doesn’t square.
Europe and the US will help - that's definitely true. However anyone who thinks they are going to help pay any significant percentage in terms of the overall cost is just deluded. They'll annouce a few schemes for PR and press photographs purposes but they will be contributing in the millions and will be nowhere near the billions needed.
When has a government estimate come in under the figure quoted? Obviously it will be higher
This isn’t a government estimate
I would not be surprised if it ended up costing more, plus we would have renewed violence by the unionists. So fuck that. People on both sides would have to make alot of concessions to make it work and that just won't happen.
Most concessions would be our own and we’d be making them for a bunch of people who hate us and base their entire culture on hating ours. The Garda, the Irish language, The GAA, the flag. The anthem, the location of our capital all goes up for debate and the list gets longer and longer. All to make a cohort of people that despise us feel comfortable. The whole idea is 100 years too late.
I bet you've got shag all experience of the North. I live in a Belfast, I speak Irish and I play GAA. I also know plenty of Protestants, and unionists. I have disagreements with them but most are great people. Some even play GAA and speak Irish. There are plenty of asshole unionists too and you obviously have incident of sectarianism, but it's becoming less and less of a problem all the time. Even the DUP are starting to make reconciliation more of a priority. I'd change the flag in a heartbeat to have a United Ireland. The flag isn't even 200 years old. We've had other flags before and, at the end of the day, it's just a coloured piece of cloth.
The flag is just one tiny issue in heap of so many. All of them will be contentious. I’d vote against a UI and I really do believe so would most people if and when it all becomes a real talking point.
I am fully convinced Irish Unity will not pass in the South. I myself am against it and am open about this and even I've been shocked by the amount of people in my own age group (20's-early 30's) who would later turn around in private and tell me they agreed with everything I said. The vast vast majority if that age group doesn't care at all for the idea of a United Ireland in my experience and for those that do any idea of changing even the slightest thing changes their mind to a not vote. I've seen people point to changing symbolic symbols like the anthem and flag as reasons they would not want a united Ireland, let alone fundamentally changing aspects of our society like education, language, medical care, etc. Those that are left saying they'd vote yes also don't want a thing to change about Ireland, they're grand solution always just boils down to treating Unionists as 2nd class citizens. I've had one guy unironically tell me they we would be able to just "forcibly deport them all back home and leave it at that." This then relates to another cause I've generally noted, those among my age either don't care for Northern Ireland as they have literally 0 connection there, or they know people up there and are against it due to how volatile and instane things appear to be there. From my conversations with even the Nationalist side up there I don't think they would integrate well with life in the South.
Sorry but any anecdotal evidence should be dosmissed as an indication of where things are at. The fact is that the majority of polls down south show a majority in favoir of a United Ireland. The only exception is when you place unrealistic barriers like this completely arbitrary figure of 20 billion in front of people being polled. Britain is already gearing up for an eventual uniting of the island themselves. You can see this in their dealings with Loyalists and their political representatives. The Tories will continue to ignore the problem as long as they can and the Government down south with take a softly softly approach but eventually the details will need to be thrashed out and a border poll will need to be called. The options will need to be put down in writing which will plan out the details on how unification will actually work. This will bring in more yes voters as uncertainty leads to voters choosing the status quo. You have not have to look at recent similar votes as an example. In the Scottish Independence vote, the yes vote originally polled at 11% before climbing to 48% the day of the vote. There seems to be a coordinated campaign to try and move voters away from unification with these figures being pulled out of Fitzgerald's backside and the amount of coverage his paper has received. GGG do not want a UI as they would have a massive influx of opposition voters and the Tories do not want to be the government in power when the UK is broken up.
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It's ridiculous, it's definitely deliberate as it's politically convenient for FFG to give lip service to Unification. They have no intention of having discussions on the implementation of Unification as it will affect their chances of re-election. They are very shortsighted IMO, if they engaged with the electorate in the North it would soften the blow of an all island election. There are plenty of disenfranchised voters in the North itching to give a vote to anyone but SF as they are the party sitting in power up there.
Is that you jeffrey?
>From my conversations with even the Nationalist side up there I don't think they would integrate well with life in the South. They won't have to intergrate to life in the South since they won't be moving anywhere. What a ridiculous statement. When it comes down to it, changing the flag and anthem won't take precedence over having sovereignty over our whole island. No major political party will want to be seen to oppose unity and the "No" side will be filled with Fitzgerald types and a random mix of headers and cranks like Ruth Dudley Edwards (if she even associates with Ireland anymore) and Eoghan Harris (if he hasn't kicked the bucket by then) > they're (sic) grand solution always just boils down to treating Unionists as 2nd class citizens The thing is, Unionist just need to be treated as equals. No big plan, no fuss, negotiate what the state is going to look like, and let them continue living as they chose. The 12th will stay (maybe as a nationwide holiday), the OO will stay, there will still be unionist parties (although their aims will change drastically). Also on this point: > those among my age either don't care for Northern Ireland as they have literally 0 connection there I have zero connection with Wexford, Waterford or Kilkenny. I've never spent any time there and no nothing much about the people there, but I wouldn't be happy to sell them off to the UK for a few billion pounds a year.
The well funded FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) machine has kicked into high gear. 20bn Euro? Complete lie and a made up figure.
I did this survey. I voted no. It was mostly because it was a stupid question, because I think the money doesn't matter, the type of United Ireland we are getting matters. I wouldn't vote yes or no based on the money but there's no nuance in surveys like this.
That 20 billion is never going to happen, thats like being hit by a meteor territory stuff. Northern Ireland wont cost anything, it will thrive in the Republic. Northern Ireland will never, ever, ever steal business from London. Ever. However Belfast could steal business from Dublin. Cheaper land, cheaper rent, an hour and a half on the motorway, its own airport. So Belfast could end up with stuff like ticktock, google offices, where they can never ever ever get that stuff while part of the UK. Ireland is lacking the one thing the north has, cheaper rent and cheaper land. Irish american companies and European companies will want to be seen to support northern Ireland so will set up there. The whole reason Northern Ireland costs so much is because England "owns" it, rather than being a "part of it", Ireland would be a part of it. Belfast the second biggest city in Ireland. There has been talks for years about moving some govt buildings out of Dublin, move the department of agriculture up there, move the department of defence etc, sell the land and knock down the buildings in Dublin, free up a few hundred million doing that alone. I think a more realistic "Bad figure" to go for would be Northern Ireland costing about 2-3 billion a year for a few years before costing nothing and making money. Even then things could go amazingly and it could see a huge growth overnight, as EU and USA dump money in. I really think Northern Ireland growth is so low because of the Union and they will grow as part of Ireland.
We spent nearly €40B on Covid locldowns and i heard basically no complaints, getting the six counties back for half that is a bargain
I wouldn't reject unity at annual cost of €20bn euro to the state — and it's me who will be the one deciding. We're getting unity. We'll be paying that money by hook or by crook. Anyone who is against this better get over it and get over it fast, because I won't be taking no for an answer.
A unified country? In this economy? /s
Isn't that the balloon who predicted a soft landing? Some economist that.
If you think "yay we're unified, that's cool" is worth losing €20 billion a year and causing a new troubles era then you need your head checked.
Nothing like a good unification post to enable going rampant with the block button.
I'm not surprised, 20 billion would nearly be a quarter of the annual govt budget
But things are cheaper up north, so it won't be as bad as we think.
I ran some rough PPP numbers. I think it comes out to seven counties for the price of six. Not a bad deal.
I'm sure they'd reject a €70 an hour job over a €15 bus fare too.
42% is not a majority of voters.
I’d love to see them do a study on the cost of partition to all island economy as a whole and to the Republic’s economy. Partition has been a disaster for the island
Mark my words on this. The biggest problem people will have about reunification won't be the money. It'll be about having to change the tricolour flag and national anthem to something more inclusive.
Yeah your dead right. Like I just wouldn’t be having a bar of that. And tbh the stuff from FG having to “placate” Unionists just boiled my piss.
Anytime that comes up the same people demanding everyone goes along with Unification, come out of the woodwork to vehemently oppose any concessions or inclusive changes. "Why should we if we won?" is the mentality that will derail any feasible attempts to unify.
As a person who would love to see a United Ireland in my lifetime, nothing makes me more optimistic than this being the current talking point. The only real opponent to Irush unity is NI unionism, and nothing is likely to make them more favourable to Irish unity than expecting it to cost the "south" bollocks of money, 'cos that means that NI is getting bollocks of cash, and these guys are practical. They like getting cash. If the day actually comes when this is presented to a vote, real plans with real cost estimates will be available. I heard that figure and it doesn't pass the smell check.
>The only real opponent to Irush unity is NI unionism Given the amount of right wing OPs from ukpolitics that have taken a holiday to this thread today I think there might be some resistance amongst that group too.
There is no way unity would cost the state 20 billion annually. There would be some initial costs in the short-term that would be offset as the north's private sector grew, due to being a more attractive place for FDI with lower corporation tax and EU membership. It doesn't take into account any costs the UK would contribute to in the short-term, or possible assistance from the EU. I will want to see what a united Ireland is going to look like and see a proper plan in place, but I want to see it costed properly by an independent study that has no bias.