Sinn Fein's election success is important – but Boris Johnson is likely to be the architect of Irish unity

Within a few weeks, Sinn Fein, the political wing of violent republicanism will be in power on both sides of the Irish border. At some cross-border summit in the not too-distant future a Sinn Fein minister from a coalition Irish government in Dublin will be in conversation about some routine administrative issue with a friendly Sinn Fein minister in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive from Belfast: like it was the most natural thing in the world. They will approach things with common policies, common values.

A little further out? Try to envisage a Sinn Fein Taoiseach doing the historic handshake with a Sinn Fein first minister. It is no longer the stuff of dreams (or nightmares, depending on your viewpoint). At the annual Sinn Fein conference, or Ard Fheis, ministers from both sides of the border will be accountable to the membership on similar issues – housing, say, or health, as well as the border question. There is not yet a united Ireland, but, with a preserved soft-border between the north and the south, it may well feel more and or like one. In a contactless world, even the biggest everyday difference – using sterling or the Euro – will become imperceptible. So this Irish election is an important and an historic moment, for obvious reasons – but some paradoxical ones too.

First, Sinn Fein has only got where it is today through peaceful means. It is only because the Provisional IRA (de facto) renounced lethal force and accepted the principle of consent two decades ago that the political objective of a united Ireland in come into focus. Indeed, for most of Sinn Fein’s long history – going back way beyond Irish independence a century ago to the 1860s – the very failure and futility of political processes (as they perceived it) entirely justified all the bombings and the assassinations.

Even to this day Sinn Fein refuse to take up their elected seats at Westminster. They long boycotted any of the many well-meaning attempts by the British at cross-party talking shops in the north, The only agreed to stand for the Dail Eireann (a “partitionist” parliament) as late as 1986 – part of the “armalite and the ballot box” dual tract strategy to unity via paramilitary and democratic means. Historically, their engagement with democratic politics has been contingent, and always entirely sincere. Then, in the early 1990s, it occurred to them that the military campaign was the futile one.

It is difficult to believe that Sinn Fein would be in quite the position it is today if it had not abandoned the gun, and instead agreed to some historic compromises, pursuing their aim of unity by other means. The Northern Irish peace process and the Good Friday Agreement opened the door for a long-term development as a more normalised political movement, with the results we see today.

No doubt Sinn Fein will use their new found heft to agitate for Irish unity via a fresh border poll. No politician on either side of the Irish Sea can fail to recognise their electoral significance, and the party will be able to use their influence on both sides of the border to press for their goal. They will be patient, as it will not be conceded easily or soon.

Yet the paradox is that, despite the heated arguments of the past few years, we know there will certainly be no hard border on the island of Ireland because of Brexit. There will be no obvious north-south “border” for Sinn Fein to object. Under the protocols in the UK-EU withdrawal agreement, the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland will remain invisible, just as it is now, for ever. No matter how hard a Brexit the British government and the European Commission end up with by this time next year, goods and people will be moving across that border around the six counties as casually as they do today.

Where a no-deal Brexit would bite is at the new economic border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That is the new fault line – the new hard border within the UK. If there really is going to be a no-deal Brexit – with tariffs and quotas as well as regulatory divergence – then the movement of goods and services between Northern Ireland and rest of the UK will be on the same basis as between Great Britain and France or Belgium or Denmark, ie a hard border, painful and expensive.

At that point Northern Ireland might well feel - in trading and economic terms – that it had already left the UK and become some sort of colonial trust territory of the EU Commission – a rule taker but not a rule maker, unable to send MEPs and minsters to Brussels with a voice and a vote. It would be unable to do anything about it, in London, Dublin or Brussels. What is sometimes touted as a unique status for Northern Ireland would lose its attractions. It might be pointed out that the EU Trade Commissioner, the ultimate rule-maker, is former Irish (Fine Gael) minister. It might also occur to the Northern Irish Unionists that their “friends” in the “Conservative and Unionist party” were happy to ditch them when it suited them. What use is such a Union to Ulster Unionists? They might be treated rather more respectfully by Dublin and Sinn Fein. That is saying something; yet that is Johnson’s toxic legacy.

There is no doubt about it. Johnson, when he was keen on courting them, said as much to the Democratic Unionist Party conference in 2018, when Michel Barnier was suggesting a border down the Irish Sea rather than one on the Ireland/Northern Ireland border. This is what the future PM said about the EU Commission:

“They have done a very clever trick. They have made Northern Ireland their indispensable bargaining chip in the next round of negotiations. Indeed if you read the withdrawal agreement you can see that we are witnessing the birth of a new country called UK-NI. UK-NI is no longer exclusively ruled by London or Stormont – it is in large part to be ruled by Brussels. And UK-NI will have to accept large swathes of EU regulations”. He went on: “No British Conservative government could or should sign up to anything of the kind and so our answer at the moment is rather desperately to make sure the whole UK stays in the backstop with the EU having the power to decide whether or not we can ever leave and why should they”.

In the end he did get rid of the UK-wide backstop – but had to revert to the Northern Ireland backstop that he had so colourfully denounced to a packed hall at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Belfast. Today we see that Boris Johnson, in signing that UK-NI protocol last year, is the real architect of Irish unity, pushing the Unionists out of the Union. More than Mary Lou McDonald, more than Gerry Adams, more than Eamon de Valera or Patrick Pearse, John Redmond or Wolfe Tone, it will be this blundering English imperialist who will make all of Ireland a nation once again.