As Sinn Féin proposes its solution to post-Brexit Irish border, a former deputy first minister warns of the risks

A nationalist architect of the Good Friday agreement has warned that consenting to a vote on a united Ireland could renew bloody conflict on the island.

Seamus Mallon, the former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, said a government that acquiesced to Sinn Féin demands for a border poll based on a simple majority would risk provoking a violent uprising by loyalists. As a response to Brexit, Sinn Féin has intensified its demand for a border poll, arguing that a united Ireland could stay within the EU, reflecting the wishes of 56% of the Northern Irish electorate who voted Remain.

Mallon said he feared that a simple “50% plus-1” majority for unity would destabilise Northern Irish society. The net result could be “murderous”, he said.

The Good Friday agreement, secured at Easter 1998, does allow for a referendum on Northern Ireland joining the Irish Republic, but only if a British secretary of state decides the circumstances are right.

Mallon spoke to the Observer ahead of the publication of his memoirs, called A Shared Home Place. He urged Corbyn, Labour and also the Irish government to resist demands for a border poll based on a simple majoritary vote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Seamus Mallon is a former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland and deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour party.

He said: “I know Sinn Féin has been talking to the British Labour party about Brexit. I am saying to Jeremy Corbyn – beware! Because you could be in government, and if they are in power they could call the poll and create the terms under which it is held. I urge them to be careful about such a poll if it is framed in a simplistic 50% plus 1 format. It won’t work and it is dangerous.”

The former deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour party, which Sinn Féin eclipsed electorally in the 2000s as the leading force in Northern Irish nationalism, said he “shuddered” at the thought of a border poll in the current circumstances.

“As bad as Brexit is, and it is a catastrophe, I think that a border poll would be even worse, as there is always a latent threat of violence lurking behind Northern Irish life. Every time I hear people talking in public life about a border poll I have shuddered over it. Because the more often it is said the more people hear it and start believing it within the nationalist community.

“I hear people from the nationalist tradition stating ‘oh it will all be over once we win the border poll’. Now that is frightening, because it will not be over and we will find out then if we are big boys or not. Are you up to doing this right? Because if we do this wrong it will be a disaster,” Mallon said.

The ex-deputy first minister urged the Irish government and the other nationalist parties to embrace his alternative concept of “parallel consent” as an alternative route map towards an eventual united Ireland.

Under Mallon’s plans put forward in his new memoir, Irish unity can only be achieved by parallel majorities for unification in both nationalist and unionist communities within Northern Ireland.

“The 50%-plus 1 is a booby trap, because unless you have parallel consent in each of the communities, and let’s say you got still a large majority of unionists opposed to Irish unity, then that bomb could go off. You would have a very large minority opposed to the outcome of that poll.

It happened to us (the nationalist community) when the state in the north was created after partition and a very large minority were trapped in a political situation they didn’t want in 1921. The last thing we need is for it to happen again this time to the unionist community.”

For a brief few years after the 1998 Good Friday agreement Mallon and his unionist counterpart, first minister David Trimble, personified a new Northern Ireland built on compromise, power-sharing and co-operation.

They put on a united front, whether in Omagh in the days after the Real IRA bomb that killed 29 civilians in the County Tyrone town, or at sporting events such as Ulster rugby’s European cup triumph in Dublin the following year.

Later isolated and politically displaced by their respective rivals – Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists – the Mallon-Trimble double act faded into obscurity.

Seamus Mallon’s A Shared Home Place is published by The Lilliput Press.