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• Gordon Peters

  Much of the discussion over the break-up of the United Kingdom is about states going their separate ways, free of the Westminster yoke, and more pro-European in the case of Scotland, and Ireland unified and within the EU, with Wales still waiting in the wings. But what would happen if the public polling and referenda processes were now to give people in Scotland and Northern Ireland a choice of not just leaving or remaining in the UK but a third choice of joining a Scottish-Irish Federation, within the EU? And what would be the essential policy adjustments and guarantees of rights, and symbols such as flags, for the different communities which would have to be built into any negotiated settlement?
  
  These are questions that Robert Whitford addresses in The Flight of the Gaels. He goes further than the stock issues of winning the argument and timetabling which are now both extant and topical in public discourse in Northern Ireland and Scotland. This narrative plot spells out processes that would engage public interest – in the Irish Republic as well as in Northern Ireland and Scotland - across political divides and which would administer an accountable transition to the proposed outcome of a Gaelic Federation composed of a united Ireland and Scotland. In this scenario, the ‘UK’ is called the Kingdom of England and Wales. Although the status of Wales, and of the monarchy for Scotland and Northern Ireland are not discussed directly, the assessment and recording of public attitudes are accumulated by Delphi surveys. The latter is a series of questionnaires that allow experts to develop ideas about potential future developments around an issue, in relation to responses given by participants. Key public servants in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland convene and network through their own chains of accountability, with polling returns producing acceptable figures to proceed with moves and demands through political parties for a federation. Guaranteeing continuing responsibilities for pensions, and EU subsidy packages for re-entry in the case of both Northern Ireland and Scotland, are to be part of the project of the Gaelic Alliance which will drive the transition to the Gaelic Federation. This is played out between 2022 and 2025, with a change of government in the UK, amidst the death throes of Brexit.
  
  The putative result is a Federal Parliament, based in Stormont, Belfast, national parliaments in Dublin and Edinburgh, and an elected Federal president. Very few discussions, reports, or indeed invented narratives, combine both a clear vision of a political alternative to the United Kingdom for the islands of Britain and Ireland with a credible, well-worked-out process of how that could be put in place. The Flight of the Gaels does just that and should be very timely reading for any who now contemplates what a positive political future without the UK and still part of Europe could look like.
  
  

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