The Same People with Different Relatives? Modern Scholarship, Unionists and the Irish Nation

Abstract

Responding to the suggestion that there were two nations rather than one in Ireland, the eminent Irish republican Peadar O’Donnell impishly replied that he thought it ‘nonsense to suggest that we are two peoples. We are the same people with different relatives.’1 O’Donnell’s socialism made him something of a dissident figure within the modern republican movement in Ireland.2 But in his dismissal of the problem which Irish unionism posed for Irish nationalism he was, perhaps, rather typical. For within nationalist circles there has tended to be a certain complacency in regard to the question of unionist opposition to the nationalist project. The Irish nation, it has been assumed, is coextensive with the Irish island; and separatist sympathies have been taken as indicative of authentic Irishness. Coupled with the view that History (indeed, Providence) is in sympathy with the completion of the Irish nationalist agenda, these assumptions have proved powerfully resilient well into the contemporary period. Moreover, they have coloured the actions of crucial players outside the nationalist canip. As Patrick Roche has recently observed, ‘The policy orientation of the British political parties is … based on the acceptance of the intellectual coherence and practical feasibility of Irish nationalism.’3