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. ■ Persuading voters to leap into something new – as Scottish nationalists discovered in 2014 – is not easy. It is likely to be even harder if a stable Labour government replaces Tory melodramas. Irish nationalists may find that Northern Ireland, for all its dysfunctions, is not quite dysfunctional enough to sway the non-aligned. They enjoy a relatively low cost of living, job opportunities and a vibrant arts scene. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader, refused to return to Stormont after Sinn Féin, led by Michelle O’Neill, triumphed in Assembly elections in May 2022. If Irish Republicanism, which is by nature a non-forgiving animal, had that ultimate upper hand, I think they couldn’t help themselves but settle scores,” he said.

The German case seems more promising as a model, although Making Sense cites the work of Gerhard Albert Ritter, who has argued that unification in 1990 encouraged a neoliberal turn across Germany as a whole in his book The Price of German Unity. O’Leary sounds a warning about following such a path in Ireland “when the average Southerner may well be turning away from an overdose of neo-liberalism.” At no point, however, does he discuss the practicalities of how we might iron out the worst tendencies of Irish neoliberalism through reunification.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”. It is also easy to see that the proportion of Protestants peaked around the second World War. By 2011, however, Catholics were poised to surpass Protestants in raw numbers, and as this book goes to press almost certainly did so in the past decade. Today, a century after Northern Ireland’s invention, its founders’ descendants can no longer hold it on the strength of their own numbers. Led by Mary Lou McDonald, the only all-island party in divided Ireland won the popular vote in the 2020 Irish general election

However admirable this vision may be, many observers have rightly questioned the idea that European institutions are reformable in this way, and O’Leary himself recognizes that neoliberalism was hardwired into the EU’s treaties. The idea that Germany might one day submit to the sovereignty of the EU’s many smaller member states is quixotic. Yet in this analysis, O’Leary rejected the idea of radical change, favoring instead a tempering of capitalism by the forces of “social democracy, social liberalism, environmentalism, and feminism.” “Seeing Is Believing” And if the Protocol survives for the North, its own economy will benefit from tariff-free access to the EU and British markets. O’Leary believes that a united Ireland will benefit from a larger national market, more closely integrated into the European single market and attractive to US foreign investment – all as part of the most dynamic and largely English-speaking economic unit in the western EU. “The North will benefit most, but the South would make net gains too if the economic modeling described here is broadly correct. A united Ireland may also be judged a comparatively better democracy than its immediate neighbor.” The NHS is one of Unionism’s most powerful arguments for remaining in the UK. Healthcare is not free at the point of delivery in the Republic and prescription medicines are expensive.There is so much in this place that is good and exciting and ambitious,” says Anne McReynolds, the chief executive of Belfast’s Metropolitan Arts Centre, better known as the Mac. The Lyric theatre, the Grand Opera House and other venues are thriving despite savage cuts to arts funding, she says. 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

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 Nobody wanted Ireland’s new million-strong minority of those identifying as British to suffer the same discriminations Catholics had in the past, said Mr Finucane. One way to accommodate unionists, O’Leary argues, is for nationalists to offer to retain an autonomous Northern Ireland within a united Ireland, complete with the power-sharing institutions created by the Good Friday Agreement. In this scenario, described by O’Leary as “Model 1,” a yes vote in the referendums would entail a simple switch of sovereignty from the government in London to the government in Dublin.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.