In the last assembly election, in 2017, Sinn Féin won 27.9 percent of the vote and 27 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly, compared with the DUP’s 28.1 percent and 28 seats. This year, it’s running candidates in 34 constituencies, and thanks in part to internal problems in the DUP, which is expected to lose seats, Sinn Féin is expected to emerge as the largest party. Unionists have lived a large part of their lives fearing constitutional change, by virtue of the fact that we had very brutal terrorist campaigns towards that end,” he said in his office in Ballymena, approximately a 40-minute drive from Belfast. Irish reunification was long deemed impossible. For many it still is, especially because of the long conflict – or war or “Troubles” – between 1966 and 2005, or 1968 and 1998. The dates and names are contested. Yet reunification is now certainly possible, indeed highly probable, though not inevitable – at least, not yet. Mr Thompson, a dedicated follower of Ian Paisley Sr, said that there was an “inevitability” about some form of Irish unity and Unionists needed to “talk to people” about it.

Why are more Catholics disposed to the Union than Protestants to a United Ireland and what can be done to reverse that? The answer is yes, of course I would,” the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) declares from Belfast’s deserted Stormont.For many years, much of the Dublin political class has looked upon the idea of reunification with contempt. But in a kind of technocratic postcolonial revenge, there is a growing tendency for Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and others to pitch the reunification project in sharp distinction to British elites. In a mirror image of the old colonial narrative, they depict those elites as irredeemably naïve, hotheaded, irrational, and susceptible to populist pressure. The most famous Ulster unionist slogan is “no surrender”, still cried at the annual August and December parades of the Apprentice Boys over Derry’s walls – or Londonderry’s. The “boys” are nowadays mostly somewhat-matured men. The slogan means no surrender either to Irish Catholics or to illegitimate British power. O’Leary and McGarry took issue with most of those perspectives, but sensibly insisted that there was no reason to present the subject itself as fundamentally unknowable — a cliché of much journalistic commentary: “Northern Ireland is complex, but its conflicts, and theories about its conflicts, are structured and explicable.” To provide what they saw as a more grounded and unbiased analysis of the region, they placed different ideological modes of thinking under the microscope, including the various attempts to analyze the conflict in Marxist terms. As O’Leary wryly comments, the focus of unionist discourse about the economics of Irish unity has shifted dramatically, from stressing the weakness of the southern economy to emphasizing the reliance of its northern equivalent on financial support from the British state: “‘We’d cost you too much’ became the new unionist line, aimed at tax-conscious southerners.” He insists that the southern economy is robust enough to bear the cost of reunification, which is in any case exaggerated in much of the media commentary. Only the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which advocates for staying part of the United Kingdom, has made Northern Ireland’s political status an issue on the campaign trail, warning voters that casting a ballot for Sinn Féin will lead to casting another one in a referendum on Irish unity.

It’s climate and social justice that gets me out of bed in the morning’ … Eóin Tennyson of the Alliance party Photograph: Paul McErlane/The Guardian Meanwhile, younger pro-Union voters are alienated by the staunchly conservative views on issues such as LGBT rights held by some Unionists. Not everyone who votes Sinn Féin or SDLP will vote for Irish reunification, if and when the Northern referendum happens. Like everyone with a vote, they will want to know what is on offer, and what the benefits and costs are – both for themselves and their families and for their peoples. But cultural Catholics will have a choice, and their votes will matter – with increasingly decisive importance over the rest of this decade. By 2030, the decision will be theirs to make. Privately, some at the highest levels of leadership in Sinn Féin worry that if they were to get into government in the South at the next election, they would come under enormous pressure from their own base to push for an Irish unity referendum. The risk is that a vote could be held before popular support has time to build — with the failed 2014 Scottish independence referendum offering a cautionary tale. For Mr Robinson, the real threat to the UK is the Northern Ireland Protocol and its successor agreement, the Windsor Framework. ‘Doomed Unionism’They feared an Irish republic, but they did not want partition. Ulster unionists preferred to leave Southern unionists behind rather than bolster them in a sovereign united Ireland. As retreating generals do, they cut their losses.

The likelihood of Irish unity will come as a surprise to many Canadians. It was virtually unthinkable in Ireland itself not so long ago. Two things explain the change. First, Protestants and unionists in Northern Ireland have lost their status as demographic or political majorities. Catholics and nationalists are not yet majorities, but the pivotal voters in a future referendum will be drawn from a middle group outside the traditional unionist and nationalist blocs. Second, that pivotal middle group is shifting toward support for Irish unity because of Brexit, the dramatic and increasing prosperity of the Republic of Ireland and the latter’s embrace of secularism and liberalism over Catholic conservatism. Sitting in his campaign office in North Belfast featuring a poster of the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic — the document marking the birth of Ireland’s modern struggle for independence — Sinn Féin’s director of elections, John Finucane, is cautiously optimistic about the party’s prospects. The Government of Ireland Act of 1920, the instrument of partition enacted by the Westminster parliament, was the most enduring gerrymander of the last century. With some truculence, Ulster unionists accepted a six-county Northern Ireland rather than one consisting of all nine counties of Ulster. Their local leaders had made a strategic decision. In the words of James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, they would secure those counties they could control, and thereby create “a new and impregnable Pale,” behind which loyalists could withdraw and regroup to maintain the union with Great Britain. While he is drawing up blueprints for a united Ireland, the campaigning organization Ireland’s Future — cross-party in composition but skewed heavily toward Sinn Féin — is seeking to make gains on the political front. Both embody a form of liberal civic nationalism that is steadily engulfing the intellectual debate on Irish reunification. Academic Statecraft Sinn Féin, once the IRA’s mouthpiece and a political outcast, is now ascendant. In May’s assembly election, it overtook the DUP as Northern Ireland’s biggest party, a milestone that makes Michelle O’Neill eligible to be first minister. In the republic it leads the opposition, is surging in popularity and appears poised to lead the next government, a once unthinkable proposition. Sinn Féin leaders welcomed King Charles to Northern Ireland last month with a flawless show of republican respect – yet another milestone – that impressed even some unionists.If Model 2 is adopted (it is explained persuasively why other models, such as a federal Ireland of four provinces or 32 counties, are unlikely), O’Leary points out that there are still ways to accommodate unionists, although he prefers Model 1. In either Model 1 or 2, unionists could be offered guaranteed power-sharing provisions in Dublin. As one-sixth to one-seventh of Ireland’s population, O’Leary explains, they would enjoy more clout in a united Ireland’s government than they ever did or could in the United Kingdom’s.

The six counties of Northern Ireland could not, would not, and should not fit into the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland. Monarchist, Protestant, English-speaking people could not live in the Republican, Catholic and Gaelic nation-state. The statement was a slogan—a word derived from the Irish for “war cry.” It proclaimed an “impossibility.” He counterposes a failing Britain to a properly planned united Ireland, which he suggests will prove Ireland to be “judged a comparatively better democracy than its immediate neighbour.” But support dips if voters are asked whether they are willing to change the national anthem or the Irish flag. ‘Glorious Twelfth should be celebrated’ Northern Irish citizens are allowed to apply for Irish passports and, if the UK Government agreed, that Good Friday Agreement arrangement could be adapted for those wanting British passports.Although he presents himself as a nonpartisan figure, in ideological terms O’Leary would fit snugly into the now moribund Irish Labour Party — swimming along with the tides of progressive neoliberalism, content with a sort of Fabian incrementalism. It is not that Making Sense offers an ideological roadmap for any reunification project or campaign. Indeed, it is the claim to be without ideology that is likely to presage the tenor of the debate. Pacific Dispositions If there is a referendum, everyone would start fighting again’ … former Ulster Defence Association paramilitary Richard Stitt by a mural for the organisation in east Belfast. Photograph: Paul McErlane/The Guardian The article by Colm Tóibín was the most lucid and thoughtful that I have read about the current predicament in Ireland. Five journalists spent seven years writing “Lost Lives”, a chronicle of the deaths of some 3,500 people killed in the Northern Ireland conflict. Entries include interviews with witnesses to their deaths and with the victims’ families, some conducted decades later. The book is out of print. But a film released in 2020 includes extracts, read aloud and set to music. (It is available via the BBC in some countries.) The film’s depiction of shootings, abductions and bombings, accompanied by photographs and archive footage of families and funerals, many of them for children, is a harrowing and heartbreaking reminder of the trauma experienced by two communities. ■ This way of thinking is increasingly popular among Irish civic nationalists, who see a Little Englander–powered Brexit as the foil to an Ireland that embodies the best virtues of twenty-first century liberal democracy.