Republican political economy and its doubles: Three essays prompted by Sinn Féin’s ‘Economic Benefits of a United Ireland’

Amidst all the political turbulence that has followed the calamitous Brexit referendum, there have, of course, been recurrent claims that the demand for constitutional change is in the air. Republicans and others have insisted that talk of Irish unification is now on everyone’s lips, the mantra repeated endlessly in an attempt to call into being the realities it so innocently claims to describe. November 2020 saw a further critical instalment in that discursive strategy with the publication of a Sinn Féin position paper setting out the ‘economic benefits of a united Ireland.’[i]

Although clearly intended to establish the coherence of a republican political economy, the document serves instead merely to illuminate its many shortcomings. An examination of what is a remarkably lightweight text - even the slick outsized graphics and engorged fonts can only draw it out to twenty-six pages - underscores the fatal weaknesses that mark the economic case for a united Ireland. In this short series of essays, we will examine three of the central failings of republican political economy. We begin by considering the ways in which republicans (mis)understand the political entity they are seeking to talk out of existence.

[i] Sinn Féin, 2020, Economic Benefits of a United Ireland, Dublin: Sinn Féin.