ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the considerable extent of change across the main political parties on the island of Ireland. It assesses the motivations behind the diminution of once-fundamental positions on Irish unity and explores the modern all-island perspectives offered by each organisation. The main parties in the Irish Republic, Fine Gael and, to a much greater degree, Fianna Fáil, shifted their approach towards Northern Ireland substantially in the 1990s. This reconceptualisation of relationships between North and South, stressing the primacy of northern consent for constitutional change, was readily adopted by the main northern parties of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the ‘consent principle’ was central to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Having offered initial scepticism, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) also came to accept the bona fides of Irish nationalist political change and accepted the all-island dimensions of the Good Friday Agreement in the 2006 St Andrews Agreement. Most significantly of all, Sinn Féin’s belief in a unitary Irish state embraced the principle of consent within Northern Ireland, a requirement which had been dismissed by the party prior to the Good Friday Agreement as a Unionist or Loyalist ‘veto’ and was once described by the party President, Gerry Adams (1995: 122) as ‘utterly undemocratic both in the Irish and British context’. Yet the dynamics of change were very different within each party and this chapter assesses the variable geometry of the political and electoral motivations underpinning the recasting of all-island perceptions and relationships. For parties in the Irish Republic, rewards for reappraising attitudes to the North appeared modest: interest in the problem was slight, leading to scant electoral benefit, whilst the short-term economic rewards of all-island cooperation were marginal. In the North, electoral benefits for nationalist parties added to the potential political benefits of problem-solving and recasting all-island relationships in a new setting. The chapter examines political, electoral and internal organisational dynamics in assessing the extent of change within each of the major parties and discusses their motivations for movement on supposedly core principles.
