How can we integrate Unionism into a possible United Ireland?

Ireland possibly did, however I seem to remember a referendum. Anyhow, we're not discussing ROI. We are discussing unionism. So you say the mainland government disagreed with unionists and went over their heads re abortion services. What's to stop them doing the same with the protocol?

And just to go back to the original point, don't these issues contradict your statement that the UK is the Union? It doesn't seem completely unified to me.

It wasn't a dig at you, Freddie, honestly. More at the DUP and other Unionists who backed hard Brexit and who continue to back it, and yet whinge about the Protocol.

The Protocol exists because hard Brexiters needed it, and still need it. It was their ask. Objecting to the Protocol while still supporting hard Brexit is, at worst, another example of Brexiter have-cake-and-eat-it delusion and, at worst, cynical hypocrisy.

In the 2017-2019 period, when the parliamentary arithmetic gave the DUP some leverage, they squandered the opportunity to use it to press for a Brexit that would minimise harm to NI. That was a serious, serious mistake which, now, they can do little to remedy.

But they should do what little they can, if only because it's difficult to take seriously a stance which objects to the Protocol but continues to support the policies which require the Protocol. This feeds straight into the perception that their professed opposition to the Protocol is not sincere; that it's simply a figleaf to provide cover for a refusal to serve with an SF First Minister and/or a general desire to undermine the GFA.

I listened to it. NI is a basket case.

A horrible incident that should be condemned....but quit the pearl clutching, Blanch. Incidents like this happen everywhere in the world.

It isn't like there's never any hateful graffiti in Blanchardstown.

So, SDLP MLAs display hate as a virtue? Not a serious point, but while this sort of behaviour doesn't make a difference to the hard-core Orange Order guys, it makes them look like victims to the ordinary unionist in the street (and indeed the SDLP).

I never mentioned outreach to the extremes yet you assumed I did, hence the point I made in response. If people want a united Ireland, they need to reach out to the middle ground. Other than Micheal Martin, I don't see anyone on the nationalist side doing that, instead we get the tired old rhetoric of the 1920s from Sinn Fein.

Interesting polls over the weekend

The first indicates that if a referendum were to be held now, the people of Northern Ireland are very likely to vote No to leaving the UK and joining the Republic of Ireland

Interestingly, 21% of NI Catholics would vote to stay in the UK, with only 55% wishing to join the Republic

In an additional poll (which I've read about but don't have links to) it was suggested that the 66% of people in the ROI that would vote in favor of of reunification, drops drastically if concessions were to be made on things such as the national flag or the national anthem.

I actually think this might be one of the final nails in the coffin for this issue.

Factor in taxes and issues around the cost of living and health care and the big one.... "Pensions" (How they kept Scotland) and it's plain to see that the people of NI will never vote for reunification, and nor will the people of the Republic given the fact that we're completely unwilling to make any meaningful concessions what so ever.

100% agree with you!

But with "that" being the environment within which negotiations will be handled, it is highly likely any referendum will be held up for so so so long that the historic issues won't matter to the people that the outcome will effect.

hence what's the point in having it???

G.

Mary Lou MacDonald said on the Late Late Show that focussing on merely symbolic things like flags and national anthems would be very ill judged. The real things that matter would be things like the new health service, how the parliament would work, what would the police force and civil service look like, what would citizenship be etc.

Focussing in on issues like the flag and national anthem and letting those two alone decide whether there should be a united Ireland would be immature and downright childish (a bit like the nonsense in the Treaty debates in the Dáil in 1921 when they spent days debating whether there should be an oath of allegiance to the King).

But think of the message that focussing in on flags and anthems would send out. It would be saying that flags are the only thing that matter : people are largely irrelevant (a horrible message if truth be told). This was the cause of much of the trouble and divisions within NI itself....flags, flags and more flags.

The people who think the tricolour is important are also the people most strongly committed to a united Ireland. They might reject suggestions that the flag should be changed but they are very unlikely to vote for partition in a fit of pique. The whole point of the tricolour is that it symbolises an Ireland in which which Orange and Green are united. Pretty much nobody values the tricolour as the emblem of a 26-county state.

So I'd be interested to see the details of the poll that says that people otherwise disposed in favour of a united Ireland would vote against if the united country were to adopt a new flag. I'm very sceptical.

On the details of the poll that we do have, the headline result is the 50:27 split in favour of the Union. That certainly suggests that a border poll is unlikely to carry in the immediate future.

But equally important is the finding that 23% of the population of NI either do not have an opinion or would not vote in the border poll. Internationally, there must be very few places were so high a proportion of the population have no fixed view on what state they should be in. That suggests that support for the union is much lower than a unionist would think it ought to be, or that would be expected in a country whose constitutional position was settled. So the suggestion that this poll settles the question in favour of the union is definitely wrong; on the contrary, this poll indicates that the question is not settled.