Partition wasn't just a demographic exercise in 1921. It was underwritten by material fact: the North was the industrial heartland of the island — Harland & Wolff, the linen mills, the rope works, tied directly into the markets of an empire that at that point spanned a quarter of the globe, priced in a sterling that was the world's reserve currency. The Belfast capitalist class (at a time when they were in the upper echelons of the Tory Party) backed partition and resisted Home Rule for decades specifically because they feared being locked out of that imperial market and yoked instead to a largely agrarian, protectionist southern economy with nothing comparable to offer. That fear was rational (from their position), given the material conditions of the time. It is not rational now, because every part of it has inverted.
The empire is gone. Sterling hasn't been the reserve currency in the relevant sense since Bretton Woods, and Britain's own relative economic position has been in decline for decades — forty years of deindustrialisation and financialisation, the 2008 crash hitting an economy already hollowed out by it, and austerity afterward that produced fifteen years of zero real wage growth rather than recovery. Meanwhile the "empire" worth being inside now isn't British, it's the EU single market — and the South is fully in it while the North is tied to a shrinking economy outside it despite dual access.
Look at what that's actually produced, not as abstraction but as numbers. Life expectancy in the South now runs about two years longer for men and 1.5 for women than in the North — and that gap has been widening, having actually favoured the North until as recently as 2005. Household disposable income is running roughly €3,500 higher per year in the South. GNI per capita in the South hit €63,500 in 2023 against €34,500 in the North — almost double. Population growth in the South ran at 14.8% over the last decade against 3.9% in the North, which tells you plainly where people see their future. And on health specifically — the system the North was once meant to be proud of relative to the South — 86 per 1,000 people in the North are now waiting over eighteen months for treatment, against 12 per 1,000 in the Free State. The South isn't a paradise, Dublin's housing crisis is real and serious, but on the metrics that actually determine a working family's material life — income, health access, life expectancy, whether the economy around you is growing or stagnant — the historic hierarchy has completely reversed since partition was drawn.
That's the materialist case for why this doesn't need to hinge on whether Catholics or Protestants tick which census box. Someone with no inherited stake in either flag, deciding purely on where their wages, their healthcare and their children's prospects are better served, is increasingly looking at an inverted set of facts from the ones that justified partition in the first place. That's not identity politics. That's the same kind of cold material calculation the Belfast bourgeoisie made in reverse a hundred years ago, now pointing the other way.
And it's worth naming plainly where that leaves political unionism, because there's a version of this that isn't defeat for them either. Once a nationalist-plurality Stormont and set of councils genuinely dominates the same way the old unionist majority once did, unionism could find itself facing the same "permanent minority under someone else's rule" position nationalists spent fifty years under — and at that point, breaking out into an all-Ireland state where unionist TDs hold real coalition leverage, in natural alliance with the Southern establishment right — Fine Gael, and parts of Fianna Fáil — starts to look materially rational too, not just for nationalists but for them.
⏩ Packy Carty is an East Tyrone Socialist Republican.
