It’s been twenty-seven years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed – the culmination of thousands upon thousands of negotiation meetings – to agree on a framework for separate governance for the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Reunification is a sensitive subject for many reasons. Chief among them is the extent to which we’d have to reconcile with our history in order to begin the process of reunification. But beyond that, practical questions emerge. In the face of economic, social, and political differences, how can two truly become one?
A new era
In 2025, the proportion of people who told pollsters they supported a united Ireland within the EU reached a record high of 67% in Northern Ireland – and 62% in Ireland. Meanwhile, the percentage of Northern Irish people who say they’d vote on “yes” on a unification referendum has slowly but surely increased each year since 2020, and parties like Sinn Fein (who call for a United Ireland) are building up their support in local elections.
If public momentum is consistently shifting in favour of reunification between the two states, the ramifications of that shift are enormous; the island’s identity has been defined by the Catholic-Protestant, Nationalist-Unionist binaries for decades, and the line between these two identities has been drawn in blood thousands of times over.
“The Troubles” is how most people in Ireland refer to the two decade-long sectarian conflict that took place in Northern Ireland. During this period, regions in northern Ireland became increasingly segregated between “loyalists”, who were overwhelmingly Protestant, and wanted the region to remain part of the United Kingdom, and “republicans”, who wanted northern Ireland to be part of the republic of Ireland. The discontent frequently boiled over into riots, bombings, and violent clashes between protestors, military, and paramilitary groups. Thousands died; tens of thousands were left physically and psychologically wounded. The shockwaves of the Troubles – the political instability, collective trauma, and delays in economic productivity which it caused – can still be felt today.
In Northern Ireland, inequality is still higher, rates of young people participating in education are still lower, and life expectancy at birth is shorter than that of Ireland by two full years. While Ireland bounced back from the 2008 financial crisis, and now hosts a plethora of billionaire big-tech companies thanks to favourable corporation tax rates, Northern Ireland had less luck: the cost of living is lower, but child poverty rates have been rising since 2009, while Irish rates fall each year.
Some – like EU law professor and Jean Monnet Chair Tobias Lock – believe other reunifications in European history can light a path forward.
Learning from the Germans: Key similarities
In the summer of 1989, citizens of the Democratische Deutsche Republik (or GDR) began to flee the state, a steady trickle that turned into a massive exodus; after Honecker’s resignation, the Berlin Wall came down. The challenge that faced the new Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was enormous, but the first free elections held in the GDR were a massive electoral victory for the Christian democrats, who had campaigned on a speedy reunification: Germany, the world saw, was ready for reunification and they wanted it now.
Germany was a “peaceful, democratic, and overall successful reunification process”, Tobias Lock said at a talk at the Institute for International and European Affairs, a think-tank based in Dublin, “within the European Union”. Those details – and the inarguable success of German reunification – make it a very useful case study to us today. So what can we learn from Germany?
According to Lock, we should see reunification as two separate processes: the first, economic, and the second, political.
Let’s start with the money. Both sides of the border are capitalist liberal democracies; presumably this makes economic integration a lot easier than it would have been in Germany, and the average worker’s day to day life would change a lot less. The welfare infrastructure and presence of public healthcare providers on both sides of the border also have far more similarities. Although a gradual phase-out of services like the NHS would probably create a number of administrative challenges, the redistribution of some of the Republic of Ireland’s vast wealth of multinational tax revenue into Northern Ireland could go towards reducing rates of inequality and improving local schools.
Politically, things quickly become more complicated. There is a clear pathway for the Irish island to become one political entity, as set out in the Good Friday Agreement. The consent of the peoples North and south must be “concurrently given”, most likely by referendum. Then would come two “border polls”, held on either side of the border, likely on the same day, and campaigns for and against a united Ireland. After two referendums had run their course, with both clearly in favour of reunification, both governments would have to introduce legislation to bring it about.
But what would citizens be voting to bring about exactly? Would the referendums call for an accession, à la Deutschland? Accession meant the Federal Republic of Germany continued to exist, its political structure “virtually unchanged”, Lock said, while the GDR simply ceased to exist on the day of October 3rd, 1990. When we think about German reunification, we should imagine one state absorbing another. (The popular game agar.io could provide a helpful visual aid at this point.) There’s no way to compare this with the concept of an Irish reunification.
Where we Differ
If Northern Ireland as a state was absorbed into the social and governmental infrastructure of Ireland, the United Kingdom would presumably not just disappear into thin air from the lives of the Irish. The Irish premier would have to negotiate new relationships between the government of the United Kingdom – centrally based in Westminster, in London – and Northern Ireland, currently governed by a devolved Assembly in Stormont, N.I., would have to be negotiated. Some decisions can’t be made in Northern Ireland and are still Westminster’s responsibility, including international relations, and defence. Given that the Assembly in Stormont shuts down so often due to political deadlock – where none of the politicians representing the pro-UK or pro-Ireland camps can agree – to the point they had to postpone their own elections last year – we shouldn’t assume these negotiations will go smoothly.
One other key difference: Germans, Professor Lock says, saw themselves as “ein Volk”, or one peoples. The same cannot be said of the collective Northern Irish identity. The Good Friday Agreement guaranteed the people of Northern Ireland the right to hold both British and Irish citizenship, and with that, the right to self-identify in either direction as they pleased. Even if the largest political party in Northern Ireland are now Sinn Fein, whose leader Mary Lou McDonald strongly supports unification, there are still major numbers of people in Northern Ireland whose British identity would face an existential threat.
Two Pasts, One Future?
At the end of October this year, the Irish people flocked to the polls to elect Catherine Connolly, an Independent candidate and one of Ireland’s most left-leaning politicians as President of Ireland. Her victory shook up Irish politics because she was so openly outspoken about foreign policy while campaigning for a mostly ceremonial role: she made comments describing Israel as a “genocidal state”, and stated that she would block American military activity in Ireland. She is also a strong voice for reunification, and said in an interview in September that “we should never have been divided … it doesn’t make sense”.
Even there, thorny questions are raised of democratic legitimacy – if the two states were unified during her term, would her Presidency extend to Northern Ireland? While her role is mostly as a symbolic figurehead, she still represents Ireland abroad and in diplomatic meetings with other heads of state. Could she speak for people in the Northern Ireland who never voted her in in the first place? Indeed, what would happen to the Northern Irish Premier and Vice-Premier, who campaigned and won equal responsibility for the country via a diarchic electoral system, designed to represent the spirit of two peoples coming together?
History has plenty to teach us, but often falls short when we move beyond practical questions.
The lasting wounds of civil conflict still sting on both sides of the border, and it’s impossible to condense those complicated memories and feelings into a single poll or statistic. As such, there may never be a time when we can say definitively that the island is truly ready for reunification. The challenges hardest to quantify – of spirit, of pride, and the collective identity of millions – may prove the hardest to overcome.