NS Hosts: Conor Kelly on people's views about unification referendums

I was joined in this episode of Northern Slant Hosts by Conor Kelly from the Constitution Unit at University College London. Conor is a Research Assistant and Project Manager on the ‘Perspectives on the Belfast Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland’ project and has worked for the Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland. He is also a part time PhD student at Birkbeck College, University of London.

I spoke to Conor about the Working Group’s detailed report, as well as the findings of an extensive public consultation that fed into it.

You can watch our conversation here (and on YouTube), or listen on Spotify if you’re on the go. You can also scroll down for some highlights from our Q&A.

First I asked Conor to tell us a bit of background to the project and the working group more generally?

The Public Consultation was run by a Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland. It is an academic project that is based at the Constitution Unit at University College London, and is chaired by an academic, my boss, Dr Alan Renwick. It brings together a team of a dozen academics from across Britain, Ireland, and Northern Ireland, and the United States. And it’s looking at how hypothetical referendums on Irish unification would best take place. So it doesn’t have a perspective on whether or not unification is a good thing, or whether or not a border poll should happen, but it’s examining how a referendum would best be designed and conducted if it ever does take place.

The team brings in some expertise from history, political science, with a team of lawyers, and it produced a report in May 2021, which basically laid out how unification referendums could take place and the different ways that referendums could be sequenced and configured, and looked at different issues that could come up in this debate around the role of the secretary of state, or what the franchise should be in the vote. It’s quite a meaty report – well over 200 pages – and part of that report analysed a public consultation that we had run.

We weren’t really able to go into a lot of detail on it (in the main report), but we had a lot of material available. So a team who are based at the Constitution Unit, not the Working Group itself, but research assistants like myself, research volunteers and Dr. Renwick, put together a supplementary working paper. And it’s examining the results of that public consultation in more detail.

One of the phrases that is used early on in the report was that “very few people that thought in any detail about the features of any referendum.” What is the power of deliberative discussions like this, and making sure that those sorts of discussions are useful and fruitful and feed into that process?

One of the findings of the consultation is that there aren’t large numbers of people in our survey coalescing around particular ideas or particular thoughts on how certain things to do with the mechanics of the referendum should be run. So that kind of indicates that there isn’t an agreed position across society, even within different communities in Northern Ireland around how certain things should happen. And that’s quite interesting in itself, there’s a lot of diversity in opinion.

I guess the benefit of our consultation is that anyone could take part. It was put out on the internet, you didn’t need to be invited, you didn’t need to have a pollster knock on your door, everybody who wants to take part no matter where you are in the world could take part. And that was, for me, is one of the benefits because it allows people to kind of reflect on these, as you say, kind of technical details of the referendum, and not just the core question of do I want a united Ireland.

We didn’t actually ask people about the shape of the United Ireland, but that came up nevertheless. We asked people about the mechanics or the referendum, which isn’t necessarily what people are chatting about at the kitchen dinner table, or over a pint in the pub, they’re not probably talking about the kind of intricacies of how a referendum would work.

And if we are heading towards a referendum – which we might be – it would be good if there was more public reflection on these sorts of questions. So hopefully, the consultation prompted some people to start thinking about these things.

You said that it got responses from a large number people, what were the main findings of the report, then?

Before I get into the findings, I would just point out that the survey was self-selected. People could take part if they wanted to take part. And given the nature of this subject, it’s not surprising that we had a lot of different skews across who did take part and who didn’t take part. The consultation was 63% filled in by people from a nationalist background, and people who describe themselves as nationalist, which obviously isn’t reflective of the demographics of Northern Ireland.

There were also skews around more men taking part than women. And people with higher education degrees tended to take part more than those without. So it isn’t a representative sample. So like the figures, and the findings that I’m going to go through are reflective of the people who took part in the consultation, and the way that we’ve analysed it. It’s not necessarily reflective of views in wider society.

There were two broad sets of findings. So the first are all around hopes and fears for a referendum process. And the second set of findings are around the mechanics and people’s views on different aspects of the process.

So in terms of hopes and fears, that was the first question: “When you’d hear talk about a referendum, what are your hopes and fears?” What was really interesting to read was there were different hopes and different fears for nationalists and unionists, and those who described themselves as neither. It wasn’t just that, you know, nationalist had a lot of hopes and unionists had a lot of fears – hopes and fears exist all across society.

One of the most common fears was that the referendum would be divisive – 10% of nationalists that said that the referendum might be divisive; 23% of unionists thought that so it’s obviously quite a fear within unionism; and 29% of those who identify as neither thought that the referendum might be divisive.

Another fear that people had was that it could spark a return to violence – 19% of nationalist thought it might lead to return to violence; 31% of unionists thought it might lead to return to violence; and 35% of neithers feared that there would be returned to violence. So that’s another really powerful fear that came across in different communities in different ways.

And then there were all different fears that came up across the survey around whether or not the losing side would accept the results; people talking about the need for cross community engagement before and after a referendum; unionists talking about the need for them to be protected in a United Ireland, if it ever comes about; and nationalists and neithers talking about the role of different governments, the British government or the Irish government and wanting the British government and the Irish government to lead this process in as fair a way as possible.

And there were lots of then hopes across society as well. A lot of nationalists – a quarter of nationalists actually – said that their hope would be that there would be better community cohesion in a United Ireland – if a United Ireland came about that different communities in Northern Ireland would get on better. And a small number of unionists actually brought that up as well, and13% of neithers.

Then there were other hopes around potential economic boosts for Northern Ireland, if it were to join a united Ireland, the prospect of re-joining the EU was another hope that existed across society. And that was brought up by neithers in particular, but also by nationalists.

What you see is that hopes aren’t confined to nationalists and fears aren’t consigned to Unionists. People have lots of different hopes and fears about what this process might lead to, both about a referendum but also about a united Ireland.

One of the things that I went into the report thinking I might see, but I didn’t – maybe you’ll correct me – was indication of unionists who want a referendum to put the question to bed. I saw people saying, “No, there’ll be no referendum at all, don’t open Pandora’s box”, or a unionist saying that they see this as an attack on British people, or people who identify as British in Northern Ireland. But it seemed like there was a lack of unionism wanting to tackle the question head on, which I saw as a surprising feature of the report.

That’s an interesting point that I haven’t actually mentioned, and I’ve thrown out percentages and the findings of the report, but if you actually read the report, in it we were very careful and we thought it was very important to take what people actually said and put it on the page and not just interpret all the results, and people could read their actual views. Most of the report is really just quotes from people and different excerpts of what they had said to us about these different issues. The report is full of really rich information from people who took part from all different perspectives on what they think, and it’s in their own language. We haven’t edited it at all.

It’s an important point that the unionists who took part, for the most part, in the consultation said they didn’t want a referendum to happen. That was pretty clear. In the vast majority of unionists responses, they thought it would be divisive. They thought it was unwarranted. That there isn’t anywhere near a majority for this to take place. Some people said there should be an increased threshold even if there is 50% support.

But also, unionists were willing to take part in the consultation and do want information about this process. Just because someone is opposed to a United Ireland or opposed to a referendum taking place doesn’t mean that if a referendum is to take place, that doesn’t mean that they don’t want answers to questions.

And so lots of unionists gave really interesting insight into the sort of questions that they have, the guarantees that they would want, the issues that they would want information on. There’s always this debate about unionist engagement in this conversation – but this is me speaking personally – I find that different people will engage on the terms that they feel comfortable with. So obviously, not as many unionists wanted to engage in this sort of exercise.

When looking at the report, there was some perspectives from other referenda. So, people said that it will be a highly contentious issue, and it’ll be important that there’s clear transparency on your range of issues. And people said that it should ensure that there’s no ‘Brexit lies’ and allowing people to see the breakdown of what they would either have or lose, whatever the result might be. And that’s quite hard to do. So what are the main findings from what have we learned from other referenda that we can put to use, should or should a referendum happen here?

This is something that we looked at later in our coding and going through the analysis of the results, but it was really interesting to see that quite a number of people from all different communities brought up previous constitutional referendums that have taken place in Britain and Ireland. And so one of the main findings, which is probably not surprising to anyone is don’t follow Brexit. That came up across all different communities, particularly neithers – don’t follow the Brexit template.

And one of the issues that kept coming up when people talked about Brexit was the need for donor transparency, and the need for greater transparency of who’s running campaigns, who’s financing campaigns, where’s the money coming from? All different communities brought that up in different ways. But they brought up making sure that if there’s a referendum, that it doesn’t follow some of the mistakes that maybe the Brexit process involved around ‘nefarious groups’ financing different campaigns.

And people also brought up the 2014 Scottish referendum again in different ways. Lots of nationalists brought up the Scottish referendum and talked about votes at 16 and wanting people to be able to vote from 16 on. Other people brought up the Good Friday Agreement referendum, the Belfast Good Friday Agreement referendum in 1998, and I think some, a couple of people mentioned the fact that at that time, a booklet was produced on what the agreement was, and was sent to every house in Northern Ireland. So something like that around the shape of a United Ireland, or what the plan for agreeing a united Ireland was, if that were sent to homes before the referendum that that might be something that they would find useful.

The other thing that came up, which isn’t directly linked to specific referendums is citizens’ assemblies. A lot of nationalists brought up citizens’ assemblies, which have become increasingly part of the Republic’s referendum process. People probably know there were citizens’ assemblies around things like abortion and gay marriage. Something like 24% of nationalists brought up citizens’ assemblies, and it’s actually something we say in the report that in a relatively short space of time, it seems that nationalists are advocating citizens assemblies where unionists aren’t. The point of citizens’ assemblies is to bring people together. So we just put a note of caution in there that citizens’ assemblies shouldn’t be associated with arguments one way or the other.

You look at the Brexit debate; you look at the Scottish Independence referendum, and elections more generally, you see, it isn’t always an ideal situation, or it isn’t always done as everyone wants. What can we do to impact this? And how can we ensure that any referenda, whatever they are for in the future, how can we use things like these processes to shape that into a fair process as far as possible?

That’s a heavy question. In the consultation, lots of people did say that, especially in response to that question about “what information do you need?”

Lots of people said, “No, I, I’ve made up my mind.” And I think lots of people who probably did say that they want information have their mind made up anyway. Unionists are for the Union and nationalists are for a United Ireland, that is their overarching constitutional preference. But again, that doesn’t necessarily mean that if this is going to happen, that nationalist don’t want their questions around the NHS answered, about what health care provision will be in a United Ireland. Equally unionists fully intent on voting against, would want to know what the plans were in a United Ireland, and would their Britishness be protected, but also would their pensions carry over, and what would the educational arrangements for their children be? Just because someone has a clearly defined constitutional preference doesn’t mean that they don’t want answers to these questions.

And same with neithers: the people who are responding and saying that they’re neither unionist or nationalist. One would have thought that their votes would be swayed by questions like this, or at least that it would be a big factor in considering whether or not to vote for unity.

And this gets to the heart of the tension, I guess, that’s in the whole process, and that the Working Group has identified, and it’s really between the desire for an informed choice, that people go to the ballot box, knowing what they’re voting for, and what’s going to happen if they vote yes. And then the desire for a consensual process where everybody agrees on what will happen after unity, what a united Ireland would look like. Because unionists, for very understandable reasons, are not inclined to take part in a conversation about how to make a united Ireland work before they’ve lost the referendum, there is that tension, because, sure, you can scope out what a united Ireland would look like, but you’re probably only going to get the input of nationalists or you’re not going to get a lot of engagement from unionism, you’re certainly not going to get engagement from unionism’s political representatives.

Yes, and whether or not people want to engage with the discussion, I would suggest that they very much go and engage with the paper, and the research because it was really, really interesting… Conor, thank you very much for speaking with us, it is really, really appreciated, and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.

Thank you very much, cheers.

This interview is available as a podcast on Spotify.

NS Hosts: Conor Kelly on people’s views about unification referendums

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Thank you