In this episode of the Mooney on Politics podcast, I chat with good friend and acknowledged referendum campaign expert Tiernan Brady. We discuss the lessons he learned from directing the successful marriage equality referendums in Ireland Australia, and how they could apply to any further referendum on Irish Unity.
With UK PM Andy Burnham saying a border poll is off the table, for now, Tiernan sets out why fixating on the “when” and seeking a date for a border poll on Irish Unity is a distraction. He urges everyone to focus now on the harder, and much more urgent question: how those of us who want unity start working to persuade of the positive case for Unity.
Here is a link to the University of Ulster report ‘More Light, Less Heat’ Navigating Debate on a Constitutional Referendum in Northern Ireland, which I mention in the discussion.
Here is a link to the podcast on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/tiernan-brady-dont-fixate-on-referendum-dates
I mention in the discussion.
(Yes, I have new theme music via foximusic.com )
Here is a transcript of our conversation
This transcript was partly generated and corrected using AI
Derek Mooney
Well, hello and welcome to this edition of the Mooney on Politics podcast. In this one, I’m recording a conversation with a very old friend of mine — well, when I say old, we’ve known each other a long time. He’s certainly younger than I am, but there you go, who isn’t? This is a very good friend, Tiernan Brady.
The reason we’re talking about this today is twofold. First, it’s to follow up on a conversation that Tiernan had as part of a panel with Colum Eastwood on the Commission on a united Ireland. I think Tiernan made some very important points there that need to be shared. But what actually heightens the importance of these points is the unfortunate comments recently from the British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, while he was in Northern Ireland.
He’s since clarified those in the House of Commons, and Chris Bryant, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, has clarified the comments to say that when Andy Burnham said a border poll was “off the table,” he meant off the table for now. Indeed, even Chris Bryant appeared to say it was off the table for that day, for those conversations. It does bring up the question of a possible border poll, a possible referendum on a united Ireland — and possibly, are we asking the wrong question? Isn’t this about when, or about how — about how we conduct this campaign, and when we start, rather than when we actually vote?
So that’s what we’re going to talk to Tiernan about today. Tiernan, thanks so much for joining me. Delighted to have you here.
Tiernan Brady
Good to see you.
Derek Mooney
Okay, first of all, we need some full disclosure. You and I have known each other for a long number of years, probably back to the time of Ben Briscoe — which would have been the long count in 1992.
Tiernan Brady
Yes, I was just in college at that stage. So it was thirteen days — a thirteen-day count.
Derek Mooney
It was, it was — I can’t remember exactly. Ben at the time famously described us as “the agony and the ecstasy.” I can’t remember how many recounts there were — I think there were three full recounts and a couple of partial counts. It came down to maybe five or seven votes between himself and Eric Byrne for the last seat in Dublin South-Central. But since then — tell people about your own political background, how you got involved, and then, most importantly, walk us through the two biggest campaigns you’ve been involved in, both in Ireland and in Australia.
Tiernan Brady
I enjoyed the Ben Briscoe count. I think it was perfect timing for when you were in college — it was pure high drama. You’re at the centre of this story, which isn’t necessarily going to change the world, but you felt it was, and you put all your energy into it. There was real camaraderie among all the people going in and out every day. And, of course, it was also a great way to avoid lectures, which is what we were both doing at college.
I went home after college and became a councillor up in Donegal. I really enjoyed it. For anybody thinking about getting involved in politics, local government is terribly rewarding — I think it’s still the form of government where the distance between making a decision and seeing something happen is shortest. I decide we’re going to build a playground, and a playground appears. I decide the school needs new rooms, and it happens. It’s a really rewarding part of politics, and I’d recommend it to anybody, honestly.
I did two terms on the council. At the same time, I was director of organisation for Mary Coughlan, when she was a minister — we ran her campaigns in 2002 and 2007. Then I gave it all up and went back to college, because I’d been on the council for ten years, and I’d replaced a man who’d been on it for forty-five. I had it in my head that I wasn’t going to be that person.
But while I was in college, I ended up at a meeting and eventually became a team member of GLEN — the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network in Ireland. They were a very clever, strategic organisation, very focused on how you actually deliver equality for LGBT people in Ireland. That led to the Civil Partnership campaign, which — and we’ll come back to this — I think is such an important part of understanding how change happens. The civil partnership story, whether you’re talking about a united Ireland or Brexit, there’s so much to learn from it, because it’s a story of how you build cross-party support for something in a polarised world — how you actually depolarise a social issue.
That passed and led very quickly to the marriage referendum, where I was political director of the campaign. After the marriage referendum, Ireland became the first country in the world to pass marriage equality by public vote — probably to the shock of the world, since most people think of Ireland in terms of Father Ted and Derry Girls. And yet it became this absolute beacon for how you could get a majority to vote for minority equality — a huge transformation.
From that, I was asked to go to Australia and become director of their referendum, held three years later. I loved that role, and thankfully it was a very successful campaign too. So those were the first two countries in the world to pass marriage equality by public vote. I’ve genuinely enjoyed small-p political life outside of big-P political life — I find it profoundly rewarding. You get as much done, sometimes more, which I’m sure most politicians would understand.
Derek Mooney
It is fascinating. And going back to what you said about civil partnership — you were lobbying from the outside; I was in government at the time. I remember meetings, not with you directly, but with colleagues of yours from GLEN and other organisations. I remember saying at the time, “Listen, we’ve passed civil partnership — the chances of a referendum, the chances of going for full marriage equality, are slim to none.” There was a mainstream political view that we’d settled that agenda for a generation or two. And I think the great skill of the campaign was, very quietly, slowly, methodically, and in a non-confrontational way, building the momentum towards marriage equality. Just in terms of who was involved, and the thinking behind it — how did you actually do that?
Tiernan Brady
I think there are two or three things here. We always believed civil partnership would be a stepping stone to marriage. More importantly, we believed very strongly that stepping stones can be catalysts and accelerators — not just steps one, two, three, four, five, but that the right steps actually pick up the pace of change. That was definitely the case with civil partnership.
It’s such a good example of the type of challenge you face when campaigning for change. On one side, we had a political establishment that thought, “Right, you’ll get this, and that’ll do for twenty years.” They thought this issue wouldn’t come up again for a long while — nobody wanted another social-change referendum. Divorce had cracked it open at huge cost; there’d been three referendums on abortion. Politicians just didn’t want to touch this stuff. On social issue referendums generally, their attitude was, “My God, just leave me alone.” So they thought civil partnership would address the need, temper the demand, and make it go away for a while.
On the other side, and this is true of all campaigns, the vast majority of LGBT organisations were actually against civil partnership, because they said it wasn’t enough. GLEN took a very strategic view that was distinct from both the political parties and the other LGBT organisations, because we believed that people don’t give up on their own equality. When people get one step towards it, they don’t say, “That’s fine, I’ll go home now.” Campaigns have to have faith that people won’t walk away.
It always surprised me how vitriolic the campaign against civil partnership was from other organisations on the LGBT side. Of course I understood that civil partnership wasn’t marriage — but we weren’t arguing for civil partnership alone. We always said, “We know what the goal is — equality for LGBT people. We believe civil partnership is both a stepping stone and an accelerator towards that.” I always thought there was something sad about not having faith in the people you’re campaigning for. I never believed LGBT people would settle for civil partnership and go home. Sometimes organisations lack faith in the very people they claim to represent.
So civil partnership became exactly what we predicted — an incredible moment of transformation, because it created visibility for LGBT people as couples. Decriminalisation had created visibility for LGBT people as individuals, but suddenly our relationships were visible, and visible through a lens people understood: marriage. We owned the language of marriage. People didn’t have “civil partnership moons” — they had honeymoons. People didn’t have “civil partnership engagements” — they had engagements, and weddings, and receptions. When the first civil partnership happened in Longford, the Longford Leader had that photo on the front page — the Leitrim Observer, the Kerryman — these were transformational visibility moments in communities that demystified gay life and made people realise these were just people with the same aspirations as everyone else.
It became this incredible accelerator. The political class thought civil partnership would buy a generation of delay; many LGBT organisations thought it would delay marriage by creating a second-class status that would sap the energy of the campaign. I think both were proved wrong, because people don’t want half-equality — they want full dignity, equal status, and standing, and they don’t give that up. Civil partnership became the accelerator for that visibility, and within five years of civil partnership we had marriage — again, transformational.
I’m not saying GLEN were some unique geniuses — look at the rest of the world. Almost every country that had marriage at that point had civil unions or civil partnerships first. You have to allow people to take the journey of change. If you ask people to jump from zero to a hundred in one go, the likelihood is they won’t, because most people think, “That’s a lot — there are a lot of unknowns there.”
We took a very deliberate view: if you want to win a marriage referendum, get as many things off the table as possible in advance. We got employment law off the table, adoption off the table — dealt with through legislation. We got the big one off the table: the right for our relationships to have any status and standing at all, through civil partnership. Each time, the distance between where we were and full equal marriage got smaller and smaller. Some strategists would say that’s risky — if the step is small, people feel more comfortable rejecting it. I don’t believe that. I think the closer you get to the goal, the less room there is for your opposition to invent unknowns that scare people. Campaigns of change are filled with the opposition asking, “But what about this? What about unforeseen consequences?” By getting almost everything off the table in advance, civil partnership became the golden key that made marriage happen — by shortening the distance and removing the unknowns.
Derek Mooney
Could this be — and maybe I’m reading too much into what you said — but is it fair to say the campaign for marriage equality effectively started long before anyone was even thinking about setting a date for a referendum? So there was no argument at the time about “when will we have it” — the campaign had already started, quietly, focused on removing the obstacles that could otherwise have become stumbling blocks if you’d gone looking for a date first.
Tiernan Brady
There were always voices saying, “We want a date, we want to know what the finish line is.” But we always made clear we were closing the gap while never hiding the fact that full equality was the ultimate goal. You can do both — state your goal clearly, and fill in the journey along the way, knowing that for major social or political change, the likelihood of success increases the more you remove the unknowns. People don’t jump into the dark. Very few of us do as human beings.
Now, this argument sounds like incrementalism to a degree — and it is, to a degree. If you look at the great social and political changes that happened without revolution or bloodshed, most were delivered through successful incremental change. The problem is that incrementalism isn’t a sexy term — people think of it as conservative and cautious. It isn’t. It’s an ambitious, strategic approach: I will get this off the table, I will get that off the table, and in turn those things become accelerators. President Obama talked about “drip, drip, drip, and then the deluge” — you put the small pieces in place to let the dam break.
Nobody runs around with a T-shirt that says, “What do we want? Incrementalism! When do we want it? Gradually!” It’s not a great campaign slogan. But it is how strategic change actually happens — in a way that creates enduring, sustainable, harmonising change that brings people together rather than pulling them apart. For the world we’re living in right now, one of the most important questions when dealing with any major change is how we navigate it in a way that depolarises, rather than leaning into the polarisation.
Derek Mooney
That brings us straight into the topic of your conversation with Colum Eastwood a couple of weeks ago, and what’s happening in Northern Ireland at the moment. The focus seems to be entirely on when there’ll be a border poll — there’s an extraordinary emphasis on that. As you say, the focus should be off the date and onto the groundwork. So what does that groundwork actually look like now, or over the next year or two?
Tiernan Brady
I think there are two things here. First, I would like a united Ireland as fast as humanly possible — everything I say should be understood in that context. When we talk about when the British government is going to name a date, we’re disempowering our own people, because we’re focused on the one thing we don’t control.
The other problem is that support for a united Ireland is currently polling in the mid-40s at best. You’ll see polls saying 40, polls saying 50 — but anyone looking at this honestly would say roughly: 40 percent for, 40 percent against, 20 percent in the middle. Every poll is a variation on that theme. If we had a referendum today, it almost certainly wouldn’t pass, unless we pulled off some miraculous campaign that shifted opinion ten points during the campaign itself. That doesn’t happen — not in my experience of looking at campaigns. Very, very rarely do you see that.
So the real campaign we should be running right now isn’t a campaign to persuade someone else to name a referendum date — it’s a campaign of persuasion. That campaign is alive. We’re in the low-to-mid 40s; our mission is to get past 50 percent. All our energy should go into what that campaign looks like. We can have long debates about the details, but the only game in town is raising that percentage of support. Without that, we’ll either not have a referendum, or we’ll have one and lose it.
The marriage campaign is instructive here too. If we’d asked politicians for a referendum date and made that our number one demand during the civil partnership campaign, they’d have told us 2025 or 2030 — some artificial ten- or fifteen-year date. That would have missed the point entirely: great change campaigns that build support become accelerators for the date of change itself. Even if the British government said tomorrow, “You’ll have this in 2035,” our goal shouldn’t be to work towards 2035 — it should be to keep building the persuasion campaign towards 50 percent. The more we deliver, the closer the date comes. The date is a distraction, because it’s a movable feast; it will move depending on how successful our campaign of building support is.
The real problem I worry about is that the more we focus on the date, the more we disempower people — we shift the focus of the change campaign onto something they have no control over, when the most important change — moving from the low 40s to over 50 percent — happens when people across the region are talking to each other and persuading each other. That conversation has to happen now: not just among politicians, but among neighbours and communities, making the case that a united Ireland would benefit every community — health, education, defence, economics, jobs, all of it. That case has to be made today. We should be empowering ordinary people to have that conversation, rather than fixating on something entirely outside their control — because a referendum will be won by ordinary people, and it will be won in advance of the referendum even being called.
Derek Mooney
So, to a degree, you almost have to win the referendum before you can have the referendum — which is really what we’re circling here. You’re not going to persuade the British government to hold a referendum if they consistently see support for unity stuck at 40 percent. So that number has to move — not this minute, but the work has to focus on it now. Who does that persuading? I accept civic society plays a role, but is it the Irish government? Civic leaders? Political leaders?
Tiernan Brady
The short and easy answer is: it’s all of us.
Everyone. Referendums are won that way. When I went to Australia for their referendum, and it was true in Ireland too, you quickly realise the scale of the challenge — Australia is roughly the size of the continental United States or China. There’s no touring campaign bus that can cover the country; it would take ten years. It’s not just Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane — it’s Wagga Wagga, Wodonga, Toowoomba, Humpty Doo — all these towns across the country. The referendum was going to be won at kitchen tables, in workplaces, in shops — because referendums are won by the conversations people have in their own communities.
So the question is: how do you empower people to start having those conversations now, rather than waiting for a false start to the race? The race is already on — the race to reach a point where you can actually win a referendum, because there will be no referendum until you can already win one.
And here’s the important piece: we imagine referendum campaigns as the “magic six weeks” at the end that grab everyone’s attention. But really, those last six weeks are more about not losing the argument you’ve already built. Especially if you’re on the pro-change side, the other side’s job throughout the campaign is to chip away at your support by picking a hundred side issues, hoping each one peels off a few people — “Oh, I never thought about that regarding healthcare,” “I never thought about that regarding property rights,” “I never thought about pensions.” Suddenly you’re whittled down to 49 percent. Change campaigns tend to lose support in the final four to six weeks; a great campaign holds its support. To win a referendum, you need a support level strong enough, going in, to convince the political class you already have it.
One more thing: you have to know how strong that support is. You might have 52 percent support, but some of it could be soft — movable yeses that can be peeled away, as opposed to hard yeses. The strength of your persuasion campaign matters enormously here. We don’t have to imagine this — after the Australian marriage referendum, the Australian government held a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. It was polling in the high 60s about six months out — higher than marriage had been. But the political class assumed it would be easy, since marriage had passed, so they rushed the campaign, framed it poorly, weren’t confident, and couldn’t hold their soft yeses. They went from 68 percent support to losing two-to-one. They had a campaign with huge support in the polls but crammed everything into the last six weeks and got decimated. Building your yes vote matters, but so does strengthening how convinced that yes vote is — because when the real campaign begins, the other side’s whole job is to peel your supporters away, and your job is to have already built the foundations.
Derek Mooney
What are the old truisms — I remember, just before the marriage equality campaign, giving a presentation to some of these organisations on the history of referendums: it’s always easier to say no, and the default position, when in doubt, is no. So the “no” side always has a structural advantage in a referendum campaign. But it’s not an insurmountable advantage — it’s only decisive if your own side isn’t prepared and hasn’t anticipated the arguments.
Coming back to the discussion about the Commission — there’s an interesting paper, and I’ll link to it with this podcast, from the Ulster University of, which counters the idea that even talking about a united Ireland is harmful. Most of the polling says the opposite. Even among unionists, there isn’t a fear of the conversation itself — because if you’re a unionist who believes the union is safe and that there’s a strong argument for it, you’re not going to fear a referendum, because you’ll believe you can persuade people on the other side. Looking at the numbers: 45 percent say public debate about Northern Ireland’s future is positive for society; only 11 percent consider it harmful. I think there are people on our side — pro-unity people like you and me — who want to say, “No, we shouldn’t talk about this, it only frightens people.” I don’t believe that’s true. The core of the Good Friday Agreement is the recognition that there are two legitimate political aspirations within Northern Ireland, both with legitimacy and authority in the political environment. To pretend otherwise is wrong.
Tiernan Brady
I think there are two things here. I think people want to talk, but people are disempowered and fearful of talking.
I think the reason is that we live in a very polarised world — we only have to open our phones every day to see how toxic it’s become. And alongside that, we’re talking about a former conflict zone, a place that was polarised before polarisation was even fashionable. So there’s always a danger that people fear talking to each other about this topic. We live in a world now where we assume that disagreeing automatically means being disagreeable. Forget the other community — we’re afraid to talk to our uncles at Christmas, afraid to talk to work colleagues, because we expect the wider world’s polarisation to seep into every conversation and become a wedge between us.
So if you believe in a change campaign, first you have to win the argument. Second, having the best argument isn’t enough anymore — you have to create the space where people can actually have that conversation. If you don’t create that space, you can have the best argument in the world and no one will talk to each other. That’s why I think focusing on a referendum date misses the point. The focus should be on how we empower people now to have conversations: what does positive unity actually feel like? What are the issues around healthcare? How could life be better on an island that’s united, where communities have a greater seat at the table than they’ve ever had — and that applies to both communities in Northern Ireland, because right now, neither side has a real seat at any table; they’re both largely ignored, instead of having real power in a country that could deliver better outcomes for their families and communities.
Of course, that’s the argument for it. But to your original point, we have to take seriously how much polarisation is disincentivising people from having normal conversations with each other. If we want to win a referendum, we need people to have those normal conversations. So we have to win the argument, but we also have to create the space where the argument can actually happen — otherwise people stay frozen in their camps.
Derek Mooney
And I think, possibly with the best of intentions, the instinct coming from the government in Dublin is: “We don’t want to talk about this because we think it will upset people — so let’s just do the practical work.” The Shared Island Initiative, without question, is a really positive, strong programme — a huge amount of money spent over a short period, doing genuinely practical things. Nobody can take that away from it. But I think refusing to have the wider conversation, rather than opening up that positivity while also creating the space, is a mistake. Is that not something that comes with a binary choice? Because a referendum is, in the end, yes-or-no — a binary. There’s no third option, or am I missing something?
Tiernan Brady
Yes.
Derek Mooney
And I detect — and this is me personalising it a little — sometimes within the Taoiseach’s own thinking, a belief that there might be a third way. I think there’s a better way of doing all of this, without question. I think framing it in terms of a “fourth green field” is absolutely detrimental. But I’m not sure there is a third way.
Tiernan Brady
Well, the challenge is: if you want to get to a united Ireland, you need a strategic roadmap.
People can disagree on what goes into that roadmap — again, this is exactly like the marriage campaign: we’re going to do this, then this, then this. For a united Ireland, a lot is already happening. Think about it — the Good Friday Agreement, followed by the Shared Island Initiative. There’s also a lot within the Good Friday Agreement that hasn’t been fully realised — whether that’s cross-border bodies or east-west relationships. There are plenty of steps available to create that accelerator effect, to let people see what the future could actually feel like.
So there’s definitely a need for roadmaps. I don’t think any one person is entitled to draw up the roadmap and say, “This is the only one” — everyone’s entitled to their own theory of change. What matters is that people are working towards it, and recognising that if your entire strategy depends on one single leap, the likelihood of success is very small. All social and political history tells us that. So the question is: what are we doing to create steps along the journey that accelerate the change?
The other thing I’d say is you have to celebrate those steps — you can’t do them by stealth. You should always say clearly, “I have a roadmap. I’m pursuing this initiative. I want to focus on east-west bodies, on Shared Island, on cross-border bodies” — but you also have to state the ultimate goal. When we campaigned for civil partnership, we didn’t just say, “We want civil partnership,” and leave it there. We said, “We believe in equal marriage, but we think civil partnership is an essential step forward that addresses real people’s needs now, and it will pick up the pace of change.”
I think anyone in this space — governments, political parties, activists, community leaders — if you’re focused on your next step from A to B, you should always connect that step to the ultimate goal of a united Ireland. People need to see it’s not a misdirection of the journey, otherwise you end up in the same kind of conflict we saw in the LGBT community: is this a stepping stone, or a dead end, or a parking lot where we’ll get stuck? Those conversations are natural in any change process — it’s perfection against progress. But we have to be able to focus on both.
Sometimes we reduce this to an overly simplistic lens: either I’m 100 percent committed, or by taking one step forward I’m somehow selling out the 100 percent. We have to allow people to take steps forward, to design those steps, to use initiatives like Shared Island and any others we can invent, while being clear that this is part of a larger goal. We want to build a united Ireland — we’re not trying to be sneaky about it. But we’re also aware there’s a lot more work, infrastructure, and support needed to convince that 20 percent in the middle that they’ll be better off — as I believe everyone, 100 percent, will be better off in an Ireland working together with shared goals.
Derek Mooney
I was going to ask a final question, but I think you’ve already covered most of it. There are really three things coming out of this. First, it’s a positive opportunity — not many generations get the chance to design what their country will look like for generations to come, and that’s a huge opportunity, particularly for younger voters — we were talking before we started recording about how this resonates with Gen Z. Second, unionists have a case to make too, and engaging constructively with that conversation on both sides matters. Third — why do it by stealth? This is something that can be discussed openly without it being a threat to anyone; it’s something people will ultimately resolve among themselves. But let’s have the conversation — and the work has to start now.
Tiernan Brady
Absolutely. I think if you believe in this, you shouldn’t be asking, “What are other people doing about it?” You should be asking, “What am I doing about it?” That’s where change happens — in your own space. You are the most influential ambassador for change in the circles you move in, so don’t wait for someone else to persuade those circles. You already have the capacity, confidence, and influence to do it now.
The other thing I want to say before we finish is that there’s a mindset shift we need. We tend to think about winning as “beating the other side.” We can’t think about it that way anymore. If we want to win this, we have to understand that winning means winning people over, not beating the other side — because no matter what happens whenever this vote comes, and no matter what happens in the five, ten, or twenty years between now and a vote, we’re all going to still be here. We all have to share the same space, live on the same island. The day after a vote, or the day after the next step towards it, we’ll all still be on this island together.
During the marriage referendums, one of the most important lessons was pulling ourselves away from a polarised campaign focused on explaining to other people why they were the problem. Telling your granny she’s an awful old bigot doesn’t persuade your granny — it’s not engaging. And all too often, that’s how we campaign. When we talk about the future of Ireland, we’ve understood it for centuries through a lens of “us and them,” of beating the other side. If we really want to win in a transformative way, we have to move away from “us and them” and talk about “us together” — even where we disagree — about how we build the island together on the way to the vote, and the day after the vote.
The people who vote no, and the people who vote yes — whoever ends up on the losing side — none of them are leaving the island. We’ll still be together. So what does a shared campaign look like, knowing that in the end, we’re not trying to beat the other side? The people who eventually get this over the line won’t all be nationalists. Many will be people who believe deeply in the strength of union, but who become more convinced by the case for a different union — a union with the rest of the island. It will be unionists, along with unaffiliated people, who ultimately deliver a yes vote. So winning is about how we navigate change together, not how we beat the other side. That’s the great mindset shift we need — and it’s exactly the shift that will accelerate the pace of change.
Derek Mooney
Tiernan, really appreciate you speaking with me today. There’s a lot in that, and clearly this is only the start of several conversations about how this campaign moves forward. But I think the big takeaway is that it’s up to everyone to play their part, not to be fixated on dates or calendars, but on making the arguments and persuading — with persuading being the operative word.
Listen, thank you very much. Talk to you soon — I owe you a pint. Cheers.
[Recording ends.]
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