Micheál Martin

When a colleague and I visited Seamus Mallon in his Markethill, County Armagh home in 2019, Seamus was in declining physical health, but mentally he was as razor sharp as I had ever found him over our many years working together.

We sat for some hours, and Seamus used the view out of his kitchen windows to tell the story of the tension and conflict and interdependence between the communities in this part of the country and in the country as a whole – not over the course of his extraordinary career and life, but over the course of centuries.

Here was the O’Neill Kingdom; there was the huge estate of rich farmland settled in the seventeenth century. Here were the mountains of South Armagh, marking the end of the ‘good land’ and home to the dispossessed. There in his garden was part of the old Armagh–Dublin road, along which Hugh O’Neill and his army marched after victory at the Battle of the Yellow Ford. It was a remarkable presentation and remains a cherished memory.

Against this broadest sweep of history, our conversation turned to Seamus’ own life and the memoir he had recently published. I wanted to talk to him about the very powerful story he had often recounted about a neighbour who he called ‘Jack Adams’, and was it in the book? It was, he assured me.

Jack was in the RUC Reserve and therefore targeted and murdered by the Provisional IRA. But he was also a County Armagh farmer whose family had been farming the same ground for 400 years. We talked it through, and Seamus concluded by asking, ‘When are we going to realise we have to learn to share this place?’

On the return drive to Dublin, I reflected on the conversation, on Seamus’s enduring wisdom, and on the centrality of his parting question. When are we going to realise we have to learn to share this place? Obviously, the towering achievement of the Good Friday Agreement provides the context and the structure for answering it, but that didn’t engage sufficiently with the spirit of the question.

A few short months later, we returned to the nearby St James of Jerusalem Church in Mullabrack for the very sad occasion of Seamus’ funeral.

Shortly after that we had our general election and were soon involved in programme-for-government negotiations. By then, I had read his memoir A Shared Homeplace and had turned over his question many times in my mind. I was very conscious that as incoming taoiseach and government we would be taking up the role of co-guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement in difficult circumstances, and I wanted to make sure that within the Programme for Government we would have a determined effort to engage with the spirit of Seamus’ question.¹

And so the Shared Island Initiative was born. Established as a standalone unit in the Department of the Taoiseach and supported by a ring-fenced €1 billion budget, it was the most serious and most consequential policy initiative on North–South relationships in many decades.

Its stated formal objective is ‘to harness the full potential of the Good Friday Agreement to enhance co-operation, connection and mutual understanding on the island of Ireland and engage with all communities and traditions to build consensus around a shared future’.²

Central to the progress it has made is the fact that in its engagement with those communities and traditions it meets with them where they are, in terms of their objectives and outlook and identity. It doesn’t approach the task from a standpoint of telling them where we think they should be.

The work to date has been built around three broad pillars: investment in transformative infrastructure and capital projects, investment in research and knowledge, and the Shared Island Dialogue series.

Investment

When we first set up the unit, my team and I were very clear about one thing. For very many years, a series of big infrastructure projects had been kicked down the road of various treaties and agreements. In agreement after agree- ment, both governments and all the parties were at one on the importance of these projects, but virtually nothing ever happened.

This had the effect, I felt, of gradually undermining public trust in what we said and, more importantly, undermining any sense of momentum or even interest in developing the North–South relationship.

This had to change, and with the strength of the new Shared Island Fund behind us, we set about changing it. Two of the most iconic examples of these projects, the Narrow Water Bridge and the restoration of the Ulster Canal, are now well underway and have the potential to make a huge and positive economic and social impact on the regions they serve.

The Narrow Water Bridge has been a particular priority for me. Located in a place with both great and terrible historical resonance, it will stand as a bold and confident assertion of a new era, a more positive and inclusive and ambitious future. Two communities, cleaved by history, will be connected by an iconic structure that has the potential now to enhance the prosperity and development of both.

We are investing in the University of Ulster in Derry to enhance higher education opportunities for students on both sides of the border.

Research and knowledge

Education and research have been life-long passions of mine. It is absolutely clear to me that the investments we have made in both over the decades are the foundation stone upon which all of our modern social and economic progress is built.

It is equally clear therefore that any conversations about or plans for a successful future for the whole island are not a serious undertaking if they are not addressing this issue.

We have a very well developed and respected academic research sector in both jurisdictions on the island, but historically we have not been good at exploring the synergies between them and pushing to see what can be achieved if they are incentivised and resourced to work together.

Again, we set about changing this. Working with professional and independent experts in the sector, we channelled very significant resources into a process that encouraged academic institutions North and South to engage with and identify appropriate partners across the border.

The appetite for this has been extraordinary, and today serious academic research is being undertaken on a cross-border basis on issues as diverse as cancer care and mental well-being, to the mutual benefit of all.

Alongside this, there has also been a steady and sustained investment in research into the reality of life in both parts of our island. Working through partners like the Economic and Social Research Institute, the Irish Research Council and ScoTens, we are building the first accurate picture of all-island social and economic activity since partition.

Dialogue

Respectful and honest dialogue with and between all traditions on our island has been a central part of the Shared Island Initiative. Thousands of people and organisations have been engaged in a structured series of conversations about all aspects of life on the island. These have included challenging topics like accommodating different national identities and tackling gender-based violence, as well as very practical issues like education, rural development, and tourism, and of course the existential issues of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Through this programme, we are listening to and fostering interactions between all political traditions and communities to tease out how, in practical terms, we can build consensus around our shared future on the island.

Since the beginning of the initiative, a particular focus has been put on how to widen the circle of people involved in the discussion beyond the well- established channels, including young people, those newly arrived in Ireland, and those in under-represented communities.

A new programme for government

Following the recent general election, a new programme for government has been agreed, and I am delighted that the Shared Island Initiative has been further underpinned and embedded in the work of government. We have agreed to double the size of the fund, with an additional €1 billion committed, grow the Shared Island Unit, and, crucially, establish specific targets for all government departments to develop Shared Island programmes.

We are going to continue to provide and broaden funding for the all- island research agenda, including a new North–South statistical series and publication to provide reliable comparable data on economic activity, public expenditure, and wider social and economic measures, including education, housing, and health outcomes.

We are going to work to deepen collaboration between the healthcare systems on the island, building on the model and success of the all-island paediatric cardiac service and the cross-border regional approach to health provision in the north west.

We are going to work with businesses across the island to maximise the opportunities arising from the Windsor Framework.

We are going to build on the very creative and effective cross-border initiatives in the area of climate change and biodiversity of the last five years, with the development of a new all-island plan to improve water basin management, water quality, and nature restoration.

I am committed to doing all these things and much more, because Northern Ireland was the issue that first sparked my interest in politics as a young man, and it has been an enduring passion in all the years since.

The fissures of grief and loss and wasted potential caused by so many decades of appalling violence run very deep, but the Good Friday Agreement unlocked the opportunity to heal and build over those fissures. As a government, we have a responsibility to mind and protect the structures it created, but we also have a responsibility to do more than that.

We must be active promoters and participants in the process of reconciliation that our island needs. We have to engage with the reality of people’s experiences and the reality of their identities, no matter how challenging that might be to our own perspectives and ambitions.

I have always believed that reconciliation between the different traditions on this island is our best pathway to peace and prosperity, and I am deeply committed to it. But I realised long ago that talk about this issue is cheap, and that sloganeering is easy. As the broadcaster Patrick Kielty memorably put it, ‘It’s easier to sing rebel songs about a United Ireland and not have it, than not sing them and have it.’

Real unity requires genuine respect, which in turn requires genuine reconciliation. Not for the first time, Seamus Mallon’s wisdom cuts through all the noise – we have to learn how to share this place. We are still challenged by Seamus’ question and all the further questions that flow from it, but through the Shared Island Initiative, we are, I believe, at least on the right path to answering it.

An Taoiseach Micheál Martin is TD for Cork South-Central, leader of Fianna Fáil, and head of the current coalition government.

Notes

1. Department of the Taoiseach, Programme for Government, www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https://assets.gov. ie/318303/2cc6ac77-8487-45dd-9ffe-c08df9f54269.pdf#page=null

gov.ie (website), ‘Shared Island Initiative’, www.gov.ie/en/campaigns/c3417-shared-island/