Divide to Multiply: Irish Regionalism and the European Union

Abstract

The relatively recent phenomenon of Irish regionalism owes much of its shadowy existence to a fortuitous combination of political pragmatism and European funding. The movement toward regionalization in modern Ireland has been a definitively ‘top-down’ process, driven by assessments of national advantage rather than by local pressure for devolved power. The latter stages of this process have been indelibly shaped by the European Union (EU) — the priorities of its integration and the ramifications of its enlargement. The Commission’s (1997) blueprint for the pre-accession strategy of the EU in Agenda 2000 rang warning bells for Ireland that receipts from the EU would rapidly diminish in preparation for the new member states. If it remained a single region in the next round of structural funding, the ‘Objective 1 in transition’ status was to apply to the whole country; the expected consequences of this included a substantial reduction in EU subsidies and a near and firm end date for their removal altogether. The Irish government’s response was to divide the country into formalized administrative regions in order to extend its eligibility for structural funding. The following year (1998), it lodged an application with Eurostat to have Ireland classified into two NUTS 2 regions: Border, Midlands and Western (BMW) and Southern and Eastern (S&E) (Boyle 1999: 738). This enabled full Objective 1 status to remain with a large part of the territory, the relatively underdeveloped northwest. The creation of these Euro-regions in Ireland, in accordance with the definition presented by Wyn Jones and Scully in the introduction to this volume, is a fascinating case study of a state’s response to a perceived overlap between its own interests and the requirements of European integration.

I am grateful for post-doctoral funding support from the Irish Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2005–2007) and wish to thank Colin D. Shaw and Muiris MacCárthaigh for their advice in compiling some of the data contained in this paper. Warm thanks are also extended to the Wales in a Regional Europe Centre, and particularly to Aled Elwyn Jones, for assistance during my study visit there.