St. Patrick’s Day and the triumph of political pragmatism

Spoiler alert: This is a good news column.

When Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar visits President Joe Biden for the annual White House St. Patrick’s Day celebration, they will be paying tribute to more than Ireland’s patron saint.

Biden, a proud Irish Catholic, will be in his element as they toast the anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which — with major input from the United States — ended 30 years of brutal “Troubles” between Northern Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics. The former want to remain part of Great Britain, while the latter have fought to drive out occupying British troops and reunite the six counties in Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.

The White House gathering will also be celebrating the revival of the shared Catholic-Protestant government in Belfast, whose establishment was a key part of the agreement. (The only discord at the celebration may be an expected earful from Varadkar to Biden about ending Palestinian casualties in Gaza.)

At a time when compromise is disdained inside U.S. politics, and peace prospects for foreign conflicts seem dim, the survival of the 1998 Good Friday accord is proof that political pragmatism can still triumph — if leaders on warring sides want peace badly enough to compromise. And if mediators — in this case the United States — are available to keep things on track.

I must admit that when I started out long ago as an international correspondent, I decided to avoid the Irish question because I thought it was hopeless. Instead, I focused my attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as more soluble. Guess I got that one wrong.

As I sat down recently with Ireland’s ambassador to Washington, Geraldine Byrne Nason, to discuss how the Irish have sustained the Good Friday accord and how they plan to keep it going, pragmatism was the word I heard repeatedly.

“Internationally, the Good Friday Agreement is one of the longest, most sustainable peace agreements,” Byrne Nason said. As Ireland’s former U.N. ambassador, she has seen “peace agreements that sometimes last for two weeks. Seeing something last 25 years is spectacular and is an American foreign policy success,” due to the critical roles played by Sen. George Mitchell and President Bill Clinton.

Yet, that success, which has surmounted many bumps, was nearly undone by London’s decision to exit the European Union.

While Great Britain and Ireland were both part of the EU, trade and travel barriers between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic disappeared. It became hard to tell when you were crossing from one to the other. This eased the urgency of Irish nationalists’ demands for unification.

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During the Brexit divorce talks, a provision was made to keep the Irish internal border open. But a new “Irish Sea” customs border was established for trade between non-EU Britain and Northern Ireland. This outraged Protestant unionists who felt the border separated them from their British motherland. Their leading party, the Democratic Unionists Party (DUP), boycotted the shared government in 2022, freezing the parliament. Violent incidents by Protestant youths began breaking out.

Yet, somehow, compromise prevailed and prevented disaster. Pressed by their publics, who were fed up with a tanking economy, Protestants and Catholics finally worked out a formula with London that all sides could swallow.

Moreover, the DUP miraculously accepted that Belfast’s first minister, Michelle O’Neill, would come from the Catholic nationalist party, Sinn Fein, which, for the first time, had received the most votes in Northern Ireland elections. The DUP’s deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, actually has equal powers with her Sinn Fein coleader, but the importance of political symbolism cannot be ignored.

Both ministers now pose together in photos and will be arriving at the White House this weekend for the celebration. “All the signs are that these are two pragmatic women who have been given an unrivaled opportunity to make this work, and they are grabbing that with both hands,” said Byrne Nason.

To help them succeed, the Irish government is investing more than one billion euros in the Shared Island project to build north-south links in education, research, health care, tourism, and infrastructure that support joint development.

“We are trying to do what makes good economic sense for both communities,” said the ambassador. “Being pragmatic is a signature for the Irish government right now because there is a lot of rhetoric and symbolism that gets in the way of the economy and bringing the communities together.”

The Irish government has invested heavily in a new highway to facilitate traffic between north and south and in frequent train service between Belfast and Dublin. It is also trying to promote the value of an integrated Irish economy to foreign investors, especially since Northern Ireland now has a foot in the EU and another in Great Britain.

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Many young people from the republic study at Queen’s University in Belfast, while Northern Irish students study at Ireland’s universities, further erasing boundaries. “Now we need to work with this new generation who see their identity and future perhaps in less polarized ways than all those who came to the table in 1998,” noted Byrne Nason.

“We live on a small island in the Atlantic, and in total, we are just under seven million people, so we are determined to show that our collective space is a shared concern,” she added.

In further illustration of political realism, there seems to be little rush in the north or south for a referendum on unifying the island. (Varadkar has said he believes he will see a united Ireland in his lifetime, but he is only 45.)

“If you look at the polls, the majority in the republic is in favor of unification,” said the ambassador, while between 30%-39% in Northern Ireland want a united Ireland. “But the issue is how do you get there. I don’t think we are there yet. The younger generation is very aware that this would not be an overnight pasting together of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the way that Germany came together. This is much more complex.”

Indeed, when I spoke with Irish university students in 2022, I heard young Catholics in Belfast hesitate about unification because they feared they would lose their free British health care. And Catholic students in Dublin worried that unification would raise their future taxes because the republic would have to subsidize the lagging economy in the north, as West Germany did for East Germany.

None of this is to say that Protestants in the north, who identify as British, are not nervous about their future, or that nationalist emotions have evaporated in the name of pragmatism.

But 30 years of (more or less) peace in Northern Ireland, despite religiously segregated neighborhoods and schools, have led to a new generation with shifting ideas about Irish identity.

In sum, Byrne Nason concluded: “The more we can do, the better, to focus minds on the value of relationships across the island, on opportunities to be young citizens who can work in Dublin, or access jobs in Paris or Frankfurt because of [Northern Ireland’s] relationship with the EU.

“This is the sweet spot for a generation who have never known violence on the island. So, they are given this unrivaled opportunity, and that’s where the pragmatism of the two leaders [of Northern Ireland] now pivots.”

Plenty of challenges, but plenty to celebrate when the White House goes green this St. Paddy’s Day.