How Northern Ireland’s parties navigated Europe before and after Brexit

By Dr Conor J. Kelly, Bingham Early Career Fellow in Constitutional Studies at Balliol College, University of Oxford. 

A majority of voters in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, with 56% voting Remain and 44% voting Leave. Yet political parties in Northern Ireland have, over several decades, displayed inconsistent or at times unusual positions on European integration. This can be seen in the respective stances of three of Northern Ireland’s major political parties – Sinn Féin, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

Sinn Féin’s path to moderation on Europe

Sinn Féin initially combined its distinctive nationalist outlook with a more traditional left-wing critique and adopted an outright anti-EEC position when the debate over accession reached its height in the early 1970s. At the time, the party was widely viewed as the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and its hostility to Europe was rooted in concerns around the dilution of sovereignty that the project appeared to entail.

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“How Northern Ireland’s parties navigated Europe before and after Brexit” by Dr Conor J. Kelly, originally published on LSE Blogs, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The featured image has been used courtesy of a Creative Commons license.