A reply to Ben Collins, The Irish Unity Dividend (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2025).

Ben Collins has transitioned from unionism to Irish republicanism. That is, from feeling primarily British to feeling exclusively Irish and wishing to change his citizenship on the back of it. From believing that Northern Ireland should remain a member nation of the United Kingdom to believing that it should be dissolved and absorbed into an all-Ireland republic.

Collins began his political activity by campaigning for the Ulster Unionist Party, then becoming a member of the Scottish Conservative party, followed by campaigning for the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland, and has recently alighted on the raison d’être of Irish republicanism.
His conversion to Irish nationalism has been welcomed by Dr Mary McAleese, ex-President of the Republic, who writes the Foreword, and (naturally) by Mary Lou McDonald, President of Sinn Fein, whose substantial endorsement precedes both the title page and the Foreword.  He has also been fêted by nationalist commentators and welcomed on to podcasts.

What readers is Collins hoping to reach?  On unification, the vocal population of the Republic appears to be in agreement already, as it is on most big issues.

How many in the public eye in the Republic, for example, have been reported as saying, “I don’t think we in the Republic actually need a united Ireland”? Or “I strongly support Israel and the Jews and condemn Iran and pro-Palestine terrorism”? Or “There is much in England from which we Irish benefit today, especially those many thousands who live and work there”. Or “Is our economy a wise or healthy one”?

Still, perhaps the author thinks the Southern Irish need an encouraging boost to make unification happen forthwith. I happen to think he’s right on this, for I suspect that south of the border a popular Irish demand for a united Ireland is nominal and largely unthinking and would shrink when economic, constitutional and cultural reality loomed.  The demand is chiefly top-down.  When living in Dublin, I heard Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien saying on RTE radio in the 1970s that TDs were elected with a united Ireland as a plank in their platform on the tacit understanding that once elected they would do nothing about that plank. If the time were to come, Ben Collins might find that true, upending his hopes.

But I infer Mr Collins primarily wants to share his conversion with his ex-fellow unionists that they will follow suit, once they read about the inimitable advantages coming their way in a united Ireland with nary a downside.

Hence, perhaps, the first biographical detail being that the author came from “a strongly pro-unionist and pro-British background in East Belfast”. Is this written in hopes that the Northern Irish unionist reader will say, “Mm, if someone from the loyalist heartland of east Belfast is for a united Ireland, count me in”.

However, although “east Belfast” normally connotes loyalism and the working class (into which my own parents were born in kitchen-house east Belfast), Collins attended C.S. Lewis’s alma mater, Campbell College, a voluntary grammar school in a leafy suburb and functioning also as a prestigious boarding school for paying pupils. This narrows the socio-ideological gap a tad between his earlier and later positions.

Either way, having one’s book endorsed by Sinn Fein/IRA that waged a terrorist war against unionists for thirty years is not a smart move. Nor is book-ending one’s argument for unification with the goals of those who staged the 1798 rebellion: “the United Irishmen movement can provide a pathway to the future”; of this he is every day “more convinced”. Channelling, perhaps unwittingly, Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902) in a Rip Van Winkle moment, Collins thinks (oddly shifting to a southern republican perspective) that it’s important to reclaim Ireland’s “fourth green field”.

No smarter is a book-length rubbishing of the UK for the benefit of any unionist who picks up the book. His problem is, unionists regard themselves as British in foul weather or fair so the own goals in the book find the net like clockwork.

Indeed, an almost attractive naivety characterises Collins’ book despite its myriad data and scenarios across public sectors, not to mention 525 endnotes, a Timeline and Glossary.

And despite, too, his sober professional CV, with degrees in political communication, law (New York State) and business administration, and jobs in a communications consultancy, public affairs agency, housing associations, the Urban Land Institute (where he was an executive director), and the Northern Ireland Office (where he was a press officer).

However, the book’s carefree enthusiasm for a united Ireland barely disguises (and fails to distract this reader from) what is at base the Sinn Fein playbook. Collins blueprints a united Ireland in which there would be no Northern Assembly – no unionism and no unionists by definition.

True to the playbook, the book’s premises are flawed, the strategy unwise, the evidence often groomed, inadequate or irrelevant, the inferences invalid.

I read on out of sheer exasperation with the whole unification campaign, the disabling features of which (and not just from a pro-Union standpoint) I decided warranted dwelling on.  This is nothing personal, and I acknowledge Ben Collins’ fervour and effort in his new cause.

The book’s first premise is that “Northern Ireland isn’t working . . . Stormont has never been able to operate effectively”. I concede the malaise is evident in both regards. But what is its root cause? Let me ask Mr Collins if for an answer we need to go much further than the following facts, which he oddly avoids mentioning, as an explanations of dysfunction. Like all unificationists he sidesteps all serious objections to unity under prevailing circumstances.

Among those who must be included in the governance of Northern Ireland, according to the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement (1998), are parties that do not wish Northern Ireland or Stormont to succeed. The largest such nationalist party, Sinn Fein, relentlessly machinates for the state’s extinction. Even in co-governance, even in the person of the current First Minister, they won’t condemn IRA terrorism or utter the name of the jurisdiction but instead refer in republican parlance to “the North”, an irredentist code-phrase and a studied insult to unionists.

For nationalist activists, this negative imperative takes precedence in legislative and executive obligation, thought and action over making Stormont and Northern Ireland succeed for the good of the whole people.  Their needle points obstinately south. They are not entirely here or present.

It’s understandable that for the first few decades after partition in 1921-22, nationalists refused to pitch in to make Northern Ireland a success, since they hoped that partition would soon be reversed and thought abstention could speed the day. Circumstances in Northern Ireland were still unsettled even up until the Second World War and after – there was an IRA bombing campaign in England in 1939  and another IRA campaign in Northern Ireland in the 1950s.

During these three decades, both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland became, for purposes of security and reciprocity, states with notable sectarian features. Many Protestants left the former. W.B. Yeats, famous poet and senator, protested fruitlessly in 1925 over the new Catholic laws. In Northern Ireland Catholics grew increasingly estranged as the society grew more defensively Protestant and there was anti-Catholic discrimination, mostly informal, and mutual self-segregation in everyday walks of life.

There was détente spearheaded by Taoiseach  Sean Lemass and Prime Minister Terence O’Neill in 1965. Ironically, however, a combination of that high-level détente and at ground level the first graduating beneficiaries of the Education Act (NI) of 1947 deepened and articulated Catholic disaffection in employment and the franchise which alas morphed (for reasons and in ways that have been much debated) into historical armed republicanism.

In delayed response to the physical-force campaign, the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) was signed and in 1998 the GFA, when unionist and national co-governance in Northern Ireland was institutionalised, and avenues opened for peaceful development in the longer run towards either greater Britishness or greater Irishness. The conflict by degrees became cultural, not physical. But the demand for the end of Northern Ireland survived unrelentingly.

The demand intensified after Brexit (2016) and surged after the Windsor Framework (2023) that keeps Northern Ireland economically entangled with the EU.  Northern Ireland and Stormont still must go asap: it is immutable nationalist dogma.

It could all have been very different after 1998 when, equality inside Northern Ireland having been fully achieved and with input from the Republic already acceded to, unionists conceding what a short time before would have been unthinkable, the objective of a united Ireland could have been openly postponed or dropped for the foreseeable future. The nationalist hope for unification over time through cross-community consent would have still been intact, but Northern Ireland’s body politic and body social would have been allowed to heal.

Do we need a further explanation as to why Northern Ireland and Stormont don’t work as they might, should – and still could?  Collins cites inherent incompetence and inefficiency which he thinks a united Ireland would rectify. But these deficiencies can also be explained in a way that darkens the notion of unification.

The goal of the three-decade terrorist campaign by the IRA, through the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, was not just to drive the British army from Northern Irish shores and then sooner or later all those regarded as “Brits” (“Brits Out!”) – the offensive against unionists living along the border was already under way. The objective was also in the meantime to unravel the public fabric of life in the province in order to demoralise the unionist population and wreck the economy.

At the level of political participation, to a large degree the campaign succeeded. Whether or not it deliberately sought the bonus of making democratic political representation too hazardous an activity to be undertaken by many unionists, that was one of the results.

Political representation by first the Protestant gentry and then business people and  professional middle class generally, fell away. The high political profile of both had been traditional in industrial and commercial Northern Ireland from the late 18th century until the outbreak of violence in the 1970s when they became “legitimate targets” and many kidnapped, murdered or bombed.

There is a harmful disconnect between the unionist population and their political representation in terms of social class, professional stature, and breadth of perspective. This is the chronic result of thirty years of terrorism. Professional and middle-class unionist representation should have recovered after 1998 but it hasn’t; a cultural rupture had occurred.

When the toxic dust settled, the intimidating sway of the IRA and Sinn Fein largely dictated who from the Catholic population inherited and entered into political power. My understanding is that the Catholic professional and commercial middle classes were likewise under-represented in the new Stormont. Loyalist paramilitaries enjoyed a sway far more geographically restricted than the IRA’s but the same result ensued and renewed representative activity didn’t move up the social scale to previous levels.

Collins and his endorsers assume without any analysis that the terrorist campaign has been, or can be, forgotten and that unionist reticence beyond loyalism is evidence of acceptance of  unification’s inevitability. It isn’t.

Indeed, there is a counter-claim that “civic” (i.e. middle-class, non-political) unionism is busily and vocally debating a possible united Ireland with itself. It isn’t. Yet this is McDonald’s false premise and also Collins’ second premise.

Collins’ third premise is the hoary one that partition was imposed by Britain in order primarily and vengefully to tear the Irish nation asunder. This assertion makes a “re-unified” Ireland a natural reversing of an unnatural severance.

Yes, the nation of Ireland was partitioned. But it had been a nation only because it was inside the greater nation of the United Kingdom and inside the British Empire and thus was a province or region as well as a nation, like Northern Ireland or Scotland today. Nationalist Ireland wished the island to secede in toto from the UK knowing it was a goal dividing wishes and affiliations on the island, but 1916 republicans hoped to suppress division by armed coercion.

Britain decided the imposition of Home Rule on Ulster, with the likelihood of Ulster’s armed resistance to the Crown and/or the outbreak of all-Ireland civil war, was the greater of two evils. Partition was accepted by the Irish negotiators who agreed that twenty-six counties were to form the Irish Free State, a resolution solemnised in the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921-22). The possibility was left open, however, that partition could be peacefully reversed down the line.

Despite any past British malfeasance (and indubitably there were wrongs committed against Ireland historically; and there was legitimacy in Catholic or native Ireland wanting to break with Britain), I don’t believe partition was a perfidious British plot to destroy pre-emptively an Irish nation. Britain was forced by the fervour of Ulster resistance to accept that the national wholeness of Ireland per se was at the time illusory and could not justify imposing Home Rule on Ulster unionists.

Until matters change, chiefly in the Republic, this illusion is still out there and Ben Collins  embraces it with virtually no scrutiny.  Nationalists like Collins speak positively of re-unification and unionists negatively of unification: what weight that prefix bears!

North and South Ireland had been different in many respects since the 17th century (socially, culturally, religiously) and the differences grew during 19th-century industrialisation.

And the differences were sophisticatedly and culturally trumpeted from the South by the leaders of the Irish Cultural Revival in the 1880s-1920s period, led in its artistic department by Yeats who despised the Ulster Scots.  The Revival has had cultural influence to this day, long after it itself drew to a close a decade or so after the Irish Free State came into existence and rejected the non-Christian vision of the Revival’s literary branch.  Indeed, republicans in Northern Ireland are today engaging in a reiterative version of the Irish-Ireland movement of the early years of the twentieth century, performatively declaring its essential cultural difference from unionist Northern Ireland. Co-existence, much less unity, is not in the calculations.

Those differences beyond art were enacted after partition when the Free State (later Eire) chose an anti-British, Catholic theocratic route (complete with censorship and the church’s moral dictation) and Northern Ireland chose a pro-British, Protestant-inflected secular route. The respective shaping of the Catholic and Protestant populations was profoundly different.

My experience growing up in a lower-middle class unionist portion of Belfast was a chiefly secular one in a laxly Protestant society, the religious authority and overt influence of which I and my cohort quietly cast off – with no resistance from parents, family, church or school.  By the age of sixteen, rock ‘n roll, reading of  literature uncensored by the state or any Protestant church (including in my case Darwin and evolutionary theory), birding expeditions, smoking and guilt-free, if usually fruitless, manoeuvring after girls filled my churchless days. Contrast mine with a Catholic boyhood in Eire, of which I’ve read countless reminiscences and sociological accounts.

What happened on the island invalidates Collins’ fourth premise: that unionists and nationalists are both identically Irish because they inhabit, or come from, the island of Ireland and therefore should constitute one nation. Indeed, should compose a nation constitutionally sundered from the country, Britain, that gives unionists in Northern Ireland their political and cultural identity, something Collins pays no attention to or is unaware of.

Actually, Collins invalidates his own premise when he tells us that he grew up thinking of himself as British and Irish but that when he lived in Britain “my sense of Irishness increased while my sense of Britishness dissipated”.

So it was a personal zero-sum game for Collins, “dissipate” meaning “gradually vanish”.  Well, deep cultural influence can’t vanish. In contrast, my personal experience of my Northern Irish Britishness has been quite the opposite to Collins’, even after a half century of immersing myself in Irish literature and culture.

All on the basis of a highly personal transition, Collins advocates over hundreds of pages  a constitutional rearrangement of citizenship, governance and cultural identity (unmentioned) that he insists will be good for all his ex-fellow unionists.

It is also unmentioned by unificationists, and not by Collins, that a united Ireland would require Northern Ireland citizens to be suctioned from a constitutional monarchy and deposited in a republic. Presumably nationalists would welcome this but many unionists are constitutional monarchists. And even before the political implications would be explained, a form of presidential administration, partisan, meddlesome and over-bearing, currently and recently personified by President Donald Trump and former President Higgins, might prove occasion for hesitation.

Because of his premise that “We are all Irish”, Collins persists in using the self-incorporating first person plural pronoun “We” throughout his book. As in “We are liked around the world”.   Or “the border on our island . . . was imposed on us”.  Or “we were pulled out of the EU against our will”.

What do you mean, “We”? I found myself responding, Tonto-like, to all these. It wasn’t against my will I was pulled out of the EU. I voted Leave as a UK citizen, wishing my country to escape the tentacles of a giant bureaucracy puppeteered by unelected officials. The UK, not Northern Ireland, was the context in which I voted. Had it been otherwise, I would have been voting I suppose as a Northern Ireland unionist but that would have been to answer a question not asked by the referendum.

Of course there is enormous cultural and social overlap between the two parts and populations of Ireland. My own long career as a literary and cultural historian in Irish Studies is my own testament to it. It’s an understatement to say I’ve had happy relations with the people of the South. In addition to my Southern friends, I have lived in Dublin and made countless visits, and have held visiting posts in Southern universities.  I admire in many ways those whom Myles na cGopaleen called (tongue in cheek) the Plain People of Ireland, as well as the distinguished writers it’s been my privilege to know.

But the politicians and policies of the South, and some of the mainstream cultural values and readings of history out of which they spring, the animosity towards unionists – these are insuperable barriers to my willingly becoming a citizen of that state. So the cultural overlap and the admiration don’t in 2026 begin to justify for me constitutional unification or to induce a wish to separate from Britain. But the border-poll nationalist campaigners don’t care: the unity imperative is oblivious to all but obedience to it.

And by the way: the old nationalist shibboleth that unionists who regard themselves as British suffer from a false consciousness is simply that; ours is a very authentic consciousness. The false consciousness accusation was either gaslighting or an indirect declaration of the dominance of a pre-existing Irish consciousness.

Collins’ use of the pronoun “we” is another symptom of the a priori thinking characterising much of his argument.  He assumes what is to be proven, a common fallacy in argument. In another case of cart before horse, “Irish Unity” and “United Ireland” are capitalised from the get-go, with no rivals, as though they are not something he wishes but something already very real and incontestably desirable, Platonic ideals materialising before his eyes.

Reform of the existing status, or radical change in a direction other than that of unification, or in very early Southern preparation for possible unification in the future – these are never considered, but with those I’ll end my essay.

The Irish governments have quietly reverted to the name of the state (“Ireland”) in the 1937 Constitution and dropped the name “Republic of Ireland” that became official in the Republic of Ireland Act of 1948 and common usage thereafter. This seems like its own stroke of a priori politicking, a form of diplomatic foreclosure probably to make up for having to seriously amend Articles 2 and 3 of the 1937 Irish Constitution during negotiations of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

What is to be proven by Mr Collins is the across-the-board superiority of the Republic of Ireland to the whole UK and especially Northern Ireland and, second, the wisdom of unionists shedding their Britishness (as if they could).

Mr Collins believes he offers proof abundant through his “metrics” that measure  public sector data in education, housing, healthcare, the economy, and climate change (come again?).  However, the metrics are assessed with zero attention to their cultural matrices. I’m no social scientist but let’s take a brief look.

Parading the superiority of  Southern “education and skills”, Collins considers funding, reading ability, drop-out rates, academic selection, and the Irish language. These comparative metrics may well be correct though they would need to be examined by an education specialist; some of the inequalities involve apples and oranges.

Collins’ answer to the metric disparities that discredit Northern Ireland is integrated education across the whole island in a united Ireland, though he doesn’t use the word “integrated” or linger to tell us that he envisages (which is obviously the case) a flat all-island education system apparently neutrally unrelated to the values, customs and history of the surrounding society, i.e. to culture.

In Northern Ireland, integrated schools are legally multi-faith. The (revised) Integrated Education Act (1922) envisages a 40%:40%: 20%  religio-cultural ratio (Protestant, Catholic, Other [religions]). At the moment, 90% of primary schools in the Republic are patronised by the Catholic Church. Would the Catholic Church accept a united Ireland in which Catholicism is relegated to being merely one pupil component and curricular option?

In Northern Ireland, Catholic schools have always fiercely defended their autonomy even while being subsidised by the Northern Ireland government. At an Easter 1916 centenary commemoration I attended in Belfast, the headmaster and headmistress of two major Catholic schools told me that there would be no total integrated schooling in Northern Ireland if they could help it – the inculcation of the Catholic ethos in Catholic schools was a red line. Behind their entrenched attitude lie culture and history.

Catholic Church entrenched power and resilience in educational administration seems not to have occurred to Mr Collins.  The equivalent in the Republic of Integrated schools are the Educate Together schools. As of 2022 these made up 5% of primary schools and 2% of secondary schools. Does Collins foresee a rapid surrender of patronage by the Catholic church in a warm embrace of integration in a united Ireland, all to welcome those northern Protestants?

Nor, astonishingly, in his idea of a united Ireland, has he considered the most important element of education – Curriculum! In schools are taught the corpus of knowledge, beliefs, values, skills and cultural productions deemed essential or desirable in the society and nation in which the schools function.

In Northern Ireland, unsurprisingly, schools are where the contending narratives are taught, be the schools “Controlled” (state-run) or “Catholic Maintained”. However, where history is concerned, an imbalance has appeared recently, in lock step with recent nationalist emboldenment.

For some time, in the arts subjects (and indeed in arts practice in the wider society) the nationalist narrative has become dominant in a Northern Irish version of wokery in the western world, with past and present oppression, villains and victims, dominating the narrative.

For the teaching of GCSE history in Northern Irish schools, for example, I  recommend as an  example of the importance of syllabus and of political implications Dr Paul Kingsley’s data-laden article “The Distortion of  History” (News Letter, July 2020); see also Professor Henry Patterson, “GCSE history students are being given an inadequate account of post-partition Stormont rule” (News Letter, September 2025).

So what will be the likely history curriculum in Collins’ united Ireland? Has he checked with the teachers’ unions in the Republic, the teaching colleges and the Catholic Church, Sinn Fein, Fianna Fail or Fine Gael? Irish history in the Republic is dominated by what I’ve called The Story, in which the British and unionists are assigned the roles of  villains. How is the curriculum in the united Ireland to accommodate radical revision?

I have a suspicion that since in Collins’ eyes a united Ireland would be raising poor Northern Ireland up to the current standards of the Republic (this is asserted for all of the public sectors he discusses), the unavoidable conclusion is that what is taught would be what now pertains in the schools of the Republic. If not, let him tell us what would be taught in, say, history and social studies (including politics), and what would need to be altered in the dominant narrative and value system now taught in the Republic.

One of the reasons Collins gives for a united Ireland is that it is the natural place for unionists to learn the indigenous language of the island. He forgets that a united Ireland is the goal for those who wish to retrieve indigenous Ireland from the planters and thereby culturally supplant them, so there would be a certain cultural masochism involved in his scenario.

In the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (or Mexico, Argentina etc.), where there are indigenous languages, there is no obligation (yet) on the descendants of settlers to learn languages that have never been deeply theirs, culturally, or been exalted to constitutional primacy as in the Republic (where English is the second official language). So is compulsory Irish to be dropped in a united Ireland? Has Collins checked this out?

He wonders why few unionists want to learn Irish while the Welsh want to learn Welsh and the Scots to learn Gallic. (How many do?) One answer is paramount: the Irish language is currently, once again, “the nationalists’ weapon of choice” (Ann Marie Hourihane, The Times, February 2018), and Irish republicans are very different in determination and power from Welsh or Scots nationalists (the historical resort to physical force is one striking difference)..

Collins is exasperated by those who think the Irish language would endanger them “in some way” since learning Irish “stimulates your brain, increases your attention span, and it boosts your creativity”. (Is this his personal experience by learning Irish?)   French, German and Spanish apparently don’t cut the mustard. I recommend to him my essay “Beachheads and Wool” in my book Ireland Out of England and Other Inconveniences (2024) as an elementary guide to the “some way” he professes not to know.

He claims that the Irish language gives you a better understanding of Irish culture and history, yet I learned nothing about either from his book, only stats about public sectors and current geopolitics.

This chapter is full of readable suggestions and statistics, as befits a former CEO of the Northern Ireland Federation of Housing Associations. But these suggestions are contributions to some other book, Housing Shortage and Solutions in the Western World, perhaps.

His topics include affordable housing, housing and health, housing and inequality, social housing, etc. The problems he claims a united Ireland will solve beset many other places far richer than Northern Ireland, e.g. the United States, Canada, and Britain, and are problems that are entirely independent of partition so can’t be solved by its removal.  He does bring in housing solutions in other places, Toronto, Bordeaux, Barcelona, Germany, but weirdly they are supposed to rouse our enthusiasm for a united Ireland.

It becomes surreal: “British Columbia announced a housing plan in February 2024 to provide low-cost government financing to build affordable homes using surplus public land”. So?  Quite how what happens in a Canadian province 6000 miles away and more than twice the land area of Britain is a rationale for a hypothetical united Ireland is beyond me.

Collins has confused his universes of discourse here and elsewhere in his book: the dogma is wagging the tail. “Partition is damaging housing delivery” he says. This can be true only if you a) assume that Ireland is already a united nation or b) mean that whatever obtains in the Republic isn’t obtaining in Northern Ireland but should. More circular reasoning.

There is a housing problem in Northern Ireland; there is a (different) housing problem in the Republic, therefore there should be a united Ireland to solve them.

This is the faulty logic we see again in his absurd claim that “Partition has been an economic disaster for Ireland, particularly for the region that is currently Northern Ireland”.  In 1922 there was no comparison between the economies of industrial Ulster and the agricultural South; the South remained a poor country until after joining the EU in the 1970s while Northern Ireland was part of the UK. How could partition have been a disaster for Northern Ireland during those fifty-odd years? By then partition, in any case, was an extinct factor.

As for an all-Ireland infrastructure, the Republic of Ireland through its Shared Island Initiative has jumped Collins’ gun, investing strategically in Northern Irish infrastructure and even seats of learning. The initiative is impossible to separate from the desire of Good Cops Fine Gael and Fianna Fail in the Republic to see a united Ireland before too long, but not by aggressive rhetoric (much less violence or its threat) à la Bad Cops Sinn Fein; rather by soft incursion; a case of – in old hippie lingo – take it easy, but take it.

I’ve suggested in an essay that the SII is a miniature all-island version of the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative (Ireland Out of England); I’m unable to think that any infrastructure investment will not come with a price: the proximation of a united Ireland. Collins tells us that “the reunification of Ireland [will be] led by the Irish government” and that the “70 million [Irish] people around the world” will be “leveraged to help amplify the voice of the Irish government”. A happy prospect for his former fellow unionists!

Collins sees the loyalist ex-paramilitaries as a main obstacle to enhanced infrastructure in Northern Ireland through their practice of intimidation. He is right to call out loyalist intimidation. However, he uses the liberal progressive tactic of accusing loyalism of being “far right” (and all unionists potentially so), but doesn’t name-check the far left (or whatever we want to call aggressive republicanism, which ceased to be leftist since its manifesto of 1973).

He also absurdly thinks Kemi Badenoch is far right and is imitating Donald Trump. Oddly he never mentions the years of IRA intimidation and decades of particular intimacy between IRA bombs and infrastructure. How come? Wouldn’t it strengthen his case for the connection between housing, infrastructure and happiness?

And while he accuses loyalism of being anti-immigration he somehow forgets to mention the contemporary anti-immigration riots in Dublin and elsewhere and the incendiary response to asylum-seekers’ accommodations in Galway, Dublin and Louth that puts “far right” opposition to illegal immigration in the UK in the ha’penny place.

This is a reminder that you can build the houses but that leaves the question of who lives in them, a can kicked down the road like building and amalgamating schools without mentioning what is to be taught in them.

Another ground on which Collins argues that Northern Ireland should want to leave the UK is the superiority – overwhelming as he sees it – of healthcare in the Republic. His book is for unionists a counter-productively grim read because he must trash repeatedly Britain and Northern Ireland; it must have been a symphony to Mary Lou McDonald’s ears.

His comparators include lifespan, wait-times for medical attention, cancer death rates, staff pay, health funding, etc. (I don’t think he mentions free GP consultations and free prescriptions in the UK.)

Collins is probably currently right on some comparisons (e.g. lifespan) but the rest of his book warns me that his stats and citations need checking by a non-partisan medical analyst since he needs a black and white picture to make each argument.

As with housing, the UK and NI healthcare problems he lists are faced by other places (including the Republic), for example faraway British Columbia, including finding a GP and extended wait-times for operations. BC patients can avail themselves of some services in adjoining Washington State but I have heard no British Columbian suggest BC should therefore be annexed by the U.S. or that the two medical systems should be merged.

Collins bemoans the duplication of services, in medical research and practice, but that’s unavoidable when two national jurisdictions and medical cultures are involved. Actually, there is already cooperation between the South and the North, for instance in cardiac services, and when he was NI Health Minister, Mike Nesbitt of the Ulster Unionist Party encouraged more of it.

But the question is how far cooperation can go before it infringes on the autonomy of the respective national systems.

The funding and administration of medicine are societal activities interconnected with scientific organisation and with the national economy. So too are practice and treatment. The NHS, for example, was a British vision of the 1940s that was opposed by some physicians because they feared challenge to their exalted status, autonomy and fees.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Patterson tells us that in Northern Ireland fierce opposition to “socialised medicine” came from the Catholic hierarchy and Catholic doctors on religio-cultural grounds.  The hierarchy’s opposition doomed a very limited scheme of free health care for mothers and children in the Republic and forced the resignation of the Republic’s Minister of Health (an admirer of the NHS) in 1951.

When the Catholic hierarchy declared that the scheme was contrary to Catholic doctrine, the Minister, a Catholic (and weighing political honour against religious obedience and unwillingly sacrificing what he knew to be medically and socially wise), said that he “immediately accepted without hesitation” the hierarchy’s decision.

Things have changed enormously in the Republic (abortion recently became legal, a thing once – dare I say – inconceivable) but my point is that these cases are reminders of the intertwining of medicine with social values, priorities and – to this day – politics and religious doctrine.

And unavoidably these can shade into politicised culture since medical practitioners and administrators are also citizens.

A doctor’s political opinions normally have no bearing or reflection on the scientific integrity of  medical research, the professionalism of diagnosis, prescription, surgery and post-operative treatment, or patient care. But they may have a bearing on organisation, prioritisation and administration, with bias being conscious or unconscious.

The distinguished Northern Ireland doctors Collins cites in support of all-Ireland medical units or even an all-Ireland medical system are of “a nationalist background” (the most distinguished a surgeon who is a Dubliner by schooling and training) and it would hardly be a surprise if their advocacy of significant all-island research and treatment had some biographical input.

One of Collins’ distinguished doctors, Tom Black, addressed in Belfast on June 2024 the British Medical Association in which he has performed distinguished service (as BMA’s GP Committee Chair) and spoke in relaxed form of “the four nations” of the UK, emphasising the NHS’s state of disrepair in Northern Ireland. Nine days earlier he had addressed an Ireland’s Future “summit” in Belfast.  Ireland’s Future is an all-Ireland body actively pressing for the absorption of Northern Ireland into a newly constituted Republic of Ireland.

On August 16 he told the nationalist newspaper, the Irish News, that the Republic’s health service was so good he likened the difference between the two health services to West Germany (the Republic) and East Germany (Northern Ireland), an unfortunate but probably not unthinking political metaphor with the unavoidable subtext that reunification would be the answer. He is advertised as a speaker on a public panel hosted by Sinn Fein to explain on February 12, 2026 how a united Ireland will deliver a “world-class health system”.

We mustn’t be squeamish about what is happening; too much is at stake. Dr Black grew up in Derry and operates a medical clinic there. He attended St Columb’s College in Derry, a Catholic grammar school, and graduated from University College Dublin. In Northern Ireland, biography and political opinions, regrettably, largely converge. Is it cynical to consider that health service considerations might not be the only factors in Dr Black’s desire for a united Ireland?

Even though ignoring borders in medical emergencies or obvious need comes with being a doctor, I’m having difficulty finding practising Northern Ireland doctors of “a unionist background” publicly coming out in favour of significant and open-ended all-island medical initiatives, much less a united Ireland sundered from the UK, though that might be my lack of information.

Doctors, after all, tend to keep their political opinions private. Still, any talk of cross-border initiatives, medical or other, unavoidably has a political ring to it. Unfortunately, cross-border initiatives, even when benign and welcome per se, have to be put in the context of the ongoing vigorous nationalist push for a united Ireland from the Republic and inside Northern Ireland, thereby, naturally, cloaking initiatives in suspicion.

A case for cross-border medical cooperation is not a case for an all-Ireland health service, which is what Collins wants, and which would make sense only in the event of a united Ireland, a political eventuality unionists won’t accept. Those who wish to see more medical and other cooperation should petition for the border poll demand to be dropped.

Of the eight or more social fronts on which the campaign for a united Ireland operates, the economic is one of the most active. The economic case for a united Ireland has been made most vigorously by the Economic and Social Research Institute (Dublin) and by Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South (ARINS, co-sponsored by the Royal Irish Academy and the (Catholic) University of Notre Dame, U.S.).

Collins claims that “Ireland is much wealthier than Britain” and that the Republic’s GDP per capita is more than double that of the UK. Ergo the Republic can easily afford a united Ireland in which what was formerly Northern Ireland would no longer receive a fiscal subvention from London. Unionists should seize the chance to ditch their British citizenship and become well-off Irish citizens.

Economists outside the Republic paint a different picture, not being influenced by nationalist bias, aka The Story.

The GDP figures have been wholly discredited as a result of the distortions caused by what the American Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman calls “leprechaun economics”, a feature, he says, of all tax havens (“Leprechaun economics”, Wikipedia, a 21-page entry with 123 footnotes). Even the Irish Times (St Patrick’s Day, 2018) admitted that “Nobody believes our GDP numbers any more, not after a 26 per cent jump in 2015, which was famously derided as ‘leprechaun economics'”.

A Google overview sums it up: “Ireland is a prosperous nation, but its economic strength is concentrated in sectors influenced by MNCs [multinational corporations], not necessarily widespread wealth. Adjusted figures place Ireland much lower in European prosperity rankings, often between 8th and 12th place, rather than near the top.”

As Dr Graham Gudgin, honorary research associate at the Centre for Business Research, Judge Business School, Cambridge University, concludes: “Currently, the Irish Government is offering to share a small part of its ill-gotten tax revenue gains with Northern Ireland. . . . If Northern Ireland were to go further in future and integrate its economy with the Republic it would expose itself to the financial dangers of a tax-haven economy. Much better to remain a subsidised region of the much more financially stable UK economy.” (“Smoke and Mirrors: beware the Republic of Ireland’s scam economy”, News Letter Mar 15, 2024).

As for the widespread wealth, in a recent report by the Tax Foundation (available online), Ireland has been ranked among the worst countries for the income tax burden on workers. (See also Laura Perrins, “Where is Ireland’s Thatcher?”, Laura’s Substack, Nov 3, 2025).

I suggest Mr Collins also peruses Bob Lyddon, “The Celtic Paper Tiger. How the Irish economy is not what it seems”, Global Britain, Feb 15, 2024; Hans Van Leeuwen, “Relief for looming tarifffs has only highlighted vulnerabilities at the heart of the Irish economy,” The Telegraph, Aug 26, 2025; and Esmond Birnie, who disputes`Southern calculations that the Republic could afford unification: “Here We Go Again – dubious economic claims to push an all-Ireland,” News Letter Jul 4, 2025.

In short, Collins’ case for a united Ireland on the grounds that unionists would be better off out of the UK seems to be a beaten docket. And this is not to factor in Collins’ call for the Republic’s defence system to be expensively built from the ground up.  And by the way, in October 2017, the UK health-care journal The Lancet reported that leprechaun economics was distorting the understanding of comparative Irish health spending.

In the end, I don’t believe these metrics much matter as proof for the wisdom of a united Ireland; they are too contestable to do so. Besides, clinchingly – since the unmentioned culture trumps all, Mr Collins is barking up only one tree in a large wood.

On an endless roll, his fifth premise or given is that the Republic of “Ireland is the second-best country in the world for quality of life”. How does he know? Remote.com tells him so. Remote.com, Google tells me, “is a global HR and payroll platform that helps companies hire, pay, and manage talent internationally by acting as the legal employer (Employer of Record or EOR) in foreign countries, simplifying compliance, onboarding, taxes, and benefits without needing local legal entities”.

Collins throughout his book draws exclusively on “the metrics that reveal quality of life” and obviously health, education, housing and finances have an essential bearing on the quality of life; he’s right there and that people care about them. A recent LucidTalk poll reports that the state of the Union was sixth in current unionist people’s concerns, below healthcare, the economy and education.

Unionists are foolish to put it so low, since the unity campaign is sleepless, but then I suggest that were a border poll in the offing, number six would shoot to the top of the hit parade. In any case, Collins’ choice of public sectors is fine in theory, save for climate change to which he devotes an entire chapter thinking that a reversal of climate change needs a united Ireland!

Mary Lou McDonald calls his a “nuts and bolts” book with all the answers about being better off or not. Aside from the laughableness of  this endorsement coming from the head of a party that was lethally interested for thirty years only in one large mirage and tried its best to melt all the nuts and bolts that got in its way, all the answers are not in fact here, because all the questions aren’t here.

For what else does quality of life require? For Collins, the quality of life is quantifiable. He ignores customs, history, social capital and cohesion, tradition, music, literature, art, values, laws, commemorations, heroes and villains, victories and defeats – all transmitted as heritage and legacy and re-lived in the present –  all the truer indices of our cultural experiences and identities, commonalities and differences.

He records no cultural origin or effect of his own conversion. There is nothing about what might have characterised his growing up in Belfast and induced him to change cultures.  Was Collins’ background merely “pro-British”? Or was it British without scare quotes?

Society for him is understood through services, bureaucracy and PR, and all those “metrics”. Unionists like nationalists are in his book primarily pupils, consumers, employees, patients and rate-payers in one country or culture or another, it doesn’t matter which; it is not content that counts, merely the efficient formal administration of whatever content there is.

There is one sole paragraph on Irish culture, and the quality of that culture is measured solely by its commercial success – three Catholic actors from the Republic successful in England, an increased demand for Guinness in Britain and America, three award-winning Catholic authors, and – this one sure to woo unionists away from the UK – the anti-Israel, Irish-language-singing, tricoloured balaclava-wearing trio Kneecap whose name they took from the IRA custom of kneecapping or maiming by bullet or baseball bat those they disapproved of. He includes sport, but it, too, is about tourist attractions and investment dividends.

Irish culture is a brand to which unionists should transfer their consumer loyalty and, to mix metaphors, ride its coat-tails: “This Celtic revival and promotion of Irish culture, in all its wonderful diversity across the island”. In fact his book is culturally bereft to the extent that it undermines all the preceding “metrics” even if they were to be proven accurate.

Collins should remember that Catholic Ireland in 1922 was prepared to endure poverty rather than stay British, and did. Hats off. Culture and identity in their broadest sense were the deciding factors.  Yet no cultural case for a united Ireland is made in this book. In any case, as things stand, it can’t be.

Collins’ sixth premise is that the Republic is a diverse, outward-looking, welcoming state. There is a rollicking optimism to this premise and to the prospective future awaiting the transitioning unionist and that the author paints in lively detail.

As for diversity: even after the Anglo-Irish and Belfast Agreements, when co-existence,  tolerance and mutual respect (“parity of esteem”) were newly invested values, unionists (with their ethnic and religious colorations) were never acknowledged, much less celebrated by southern (or northern) nationalists, as components of the wonderful island diversity that Collins applauds.

Unionists were just as disinclined to turn suspicion into a cordial embrace, many considering these Agreements as threatening concessions to the Republic.

Show me from the South an account by an author from a nationalist background of Ulster unionists or their culture written with empathy (if not even sympathy), composed with broad knowledge (if not intimacy); the distinguished historian Ruth Dudley Edwards  comes to mind in lonely reply. (To stave off the “whataboutery” interjection, I can say that my sympathetic literary criticism has been on more Catholic writers than Protestant, more Southern than Northern.)

Most inhabitants of the Republic know next to nothing about unionists or northern Protestants, and for many their interest stops at prejudged dislike. (Indeed, I never found much regard for northerners as a whole when I lived in Dublin.) Nationalists sincerely promoting a truly united Ireland would obviously explain why they wish to unite with unionists and would present unification as a re-union devoutly to  be wished. They would identify the virtues of unionists and demonstrate how in unification the whole would be larger than the sum of the two positive parts. I have read no such call to unity.

Ben Collins might have told us what draws him to nationalist culture (and, unavoidably, to nationalist history) with the enthusiasm his extensive Acknowledgements suggests he should be able to exploit. But he doesn’t.

When Mary Lou McDonald (perhaps to please Mr Collins) writes that a new Ireland must reflect “diversity, especially (sic) the unionist and British cultural tradition”, implying that that tradition is a good thing, I goggled at her brazen mendacity. Moreover, there’s great unanimity in the Republic among the parties and media on Northern Ireland and on many substantial issues; diversity of opinion is not something I associate with the Republic, other virtues notwithstanding.

I’m less surprised at McDonald’s covert assumption that a unionist and British tradition is something so small it can be fitted as a minority into a republic of five million people. In fact, the Northern Irish have an extensive cultural complex and hinterland which those who are called unionists relish (and those who are called nationalists choose neither to acknowledge nor relish), which is Britain and its worldwide historical being.

Northern Ireland while being expressive of British culture is also expressive of distinctive regional inflections of British culture, for example in music, be it of silver, flute and pipe band music, or of jazz.  Non-British Ireland, north and south, has its own immensely rich culture but overt nationalism is a set of blinkers restricting sympathetic views of the culture beyond the national (and nationalist) self.  George Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism (1945) explains the ideology.

This void extends into academia and the larger demographic picture. I have read the Irish sociologists on multiculturalism and whereas all the immigrant ethnicities come under the shelter of the multicultural umbrella, unionists, Ulster Protestants, call them what you will, do not. They don’t qualify for the respectful, sympathetic, even admiring attention of the proponents of multiculturalism; they are not candidates for that generous policy.

In a united Ireland of the foreseeable future unionists would be regarded not as welcome additions to diversity but as inconvenient outsider-insiders on the island (even if for four hundred-plus years), presenting a difficulty for integration, much less assimilation. They would be regarded not as partners in unity (the word is disingenuous) but as a formerly misguided minority nominally now at heel.

Those who demand a 32-county republic separated from the UK know full well it is not about “union” from their standpoint except in the coldest jurisdictional terms. “Union” implies consent and equality (and sensitivity and respect in its achievement), but this union, let’s face it, is about annexation. Rather like the original union of Great Britain and Ireland to be fair; but what’s done’s done, and two wrongs, as they say. . .

What Collins says on his first page is telling and is Sinn Fein dogma: “Reconciliation can only be fully achieved through reunification”. Reconciliation between nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland is not a nationalist priority, preceding a possible unification of the island. It should be, but can’t be from the republican perspective, because it would be interpreted as giving legitimacy to Northern Ireland which they mustn’t do; it might even help Northern Ireland flourish, and perish that thought.

No: we get unification first, even if against unionist will, and then the former unionists will become reconciled to their fate. That is the meaning of “reconciliation” for republicans, a meaning very different from its generous meaning in, say, Canada where reconciliation between Indigenous people and all the other Canadians is ongoing pro-actively.  Reconciliation in Canada means mutually contented co-habitation in the same country after the divisive issues have been tackled and lessened to the best of mutual ability. (Even there it is proving difficult with the best will in the world.)

Collins speaks of  “protecting and cherishing all people equally” in a united Ireland. Ever since it appeared in the republican Proclamation of 1916, the word “cherish” has had an unfortunate ring to it. When I read it, I know I’m reading either a lie or a trip off the tongue.

Mr Collins repeats his uncritical hymn to “the wonderful diversity which exists across Ireland”. It’s lucky (or unlucky) that his book was published before the spectacle of what greeted the Monaghan candidate for the Irish Presidency.

Heather Humphreys, former deputy leader of Fine Gael and the only Presbyterian in the Irish parliament, was abused during the campaign for being a Protestant tainted by a family association with the Orange Order. Mark Hennessy’s Irish Times article, “Sectarian abuse directed at Heather Humphreys will leave a bitter aftertaste” (Oct 28, 2025), is the best summary of the episode.

It was, by all accounts, a minority of  nationalists who abused Humphreys but it seems that while many non-abusers could entertain a Presbyterian TD, they couldn’t thole the thought of a Presbyterian President. It is, alas, naive to underestimate the sectarian animosity between many Protestants and Catholics in both jurisdictions of Ireland. Collins doesn’t clock it.

In the recent anti-immigration riots in the Republic, some of the protesters held up placards reading “No Plantation”, an allusion to the Pale and the Ulster Plantation. The protesters regard themselves as Irish patriots or nationalists and would likely have little time for unionists (planters) in their midst, no attempt to discredit the epithet having been made by the government or activists.

There are anti-Catholic Protestants in Ulster but luckily for everybody, their anti-Catholicism doesn’t coincide with Northern Ireland’s desire to annex the Republic while declaring the virtues of unity. An important distinction that in no way exonerates ugly Protestant sectarianism. However, that sectarianism is a dark indicator of what resistance to unification might ensue should the unity path be followed at its present velocity.

In the Republic, sectarianism also takes the form of anti-Semitism. I’ve summarised some salient historical points of this and cited some recent articles in an essay in The Critic (“Hypocrisy: The crack beneath Ireland’s craic”, Apr 4, 2025). Before that, Ian O’Doherty wrote “Ireland has become a hostile environment for Jews”, (Spectator Australia, Oct 20, 2024); since then, Rory Hanrahan has published “Dublin is quietly becoming a Jew-free city” (The Spectator, Dec 1, 2025) and Michael Higgins wrote about the Chaim Herzog affair in Channel Israel (Dec 5, 2025).

Meanwhile, loyalists have flown the Israeli flag for years, seeing (nonsensically or intelligently) Israeli Jews and Ulster Protestants as both settler societies under siege.

Together, sectarianism and anti-Semitism seriously cloud Ben Collins’ blue-sky encomium to the Republic’s “wonderful diversity” by which he assumes Northern Ireland unionists will be tempted (he foresees no objections) and welcomed with open arms into the Republic.

In the case of anti-Semitism, this religious and cultural prejudice seems inseparable from the  Republic’s policy on Israel and the Middle East. It is in this political context that the Republic has been called the most anti-Jewish country in the EU. Its fiercely anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian policy has caused its divergence from much of the West including the United States and the UK.

Behind Irish policy often lies the deep past, cultural prejudice, and the national narrative: the Story that helps characterise and unify the nation. (And a stirring story it is, which I and some of my Protestant cohorts in the 1960s celebrated in song.)  Among the chief motifs of the Irish Story are the past oppression by England, and, closer to home, anti-Catholic discrimination by the unionist governments in Northern Ireland; the Irish as victims (and resisting heroes), and the historical consolations of Catholicism The oppressor-oppressed binary is the reason Irish politicians have given for their anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian position. Indeed, Israel may be said to be Ireland’s latter-day proxy for England.

Ulster unionists have an entirely different, often contrary, narrative that encourages them in the contemporary world to be on the whole pro-Israel, pro-UK (naturally), pro-West. Collins pays this no heed.

Another rooted difference is unionist respect for the British armed forces and their history and traditions.  Collins exhibits no such respect and apparently expects unionists in his fictional Ireland to follow suit. Throughout his book, all his ducks are in a row long before unification is to be unveiled in the real world.

For their part, Irishmen of a nationalist background have also served for centuries, but since the Great War (coinciding with the Home Rule crisis) they have been regarded with suspicion and often with hostility which prevented mutual deep British-Irish experience in war from bridging the two cultures. The Story doesn’t permit such violation of Irish patriotism as service in forces of the Crown, despite the reality of the employment opportunity the British Army has offered to poor Irish families for centuries.

The specific antipathy to Britain in its British army guise was once understandable and surfaced explosively during the Troubles. But the dangerously changing geopolitics that the West finds itself in the midst of renders that antipathy foolish.

For despite this animosity, the Republic, dependent on NATO for its protection, is especially dependent on the UK whose Royal Navy and Royal Air Force secure the skies and waters around the British Isles. The Republic in these dangerous times is now being increasingly resented for its defence and security freeloading, spending next to nothing on its own defences.

Irish neutrality seems honourable (and in ordinary times, prudent) but was originally a way of distancing Ireland from England and has remained so. In times of war or crises the Republic has been helpful to the traditional allies, but it would probably gall the Republic (and even provoke serious civil unrest), even at this late in the day, to find itself as a military partner of the British army.

And certainly the Republic (and of course Collins) do not wish to see British defence military  in Northern Ireland even to guard the Western Approaches as recommended by the Policy Exchange report, Closing the Back Door: Rediscovering Northern Ireland’s Role in British National Security (Hendriks and Halem, Feb, 2024).   Again, prejudice masquerades as policy and trumps security concerns.

The Republic of Ireland has been neutral since inception of the state in 1922 but of late its neutrality is causing friction with its EU co-members, all but three of which are members of NATO.

This is exacerbated when the Republic nevertheless has the gall to intervene in NATO matters, as when President Higgins recently deplored the call for more NATO military spending. The former president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, objected to this sanctimonious outburst. “Do these people have any sense of self-awareness, their privileged geography or the appropriateness of even commenting as the beneficiary of implicit NATO security?” (Quoted in my essay in The Critic.)

In a late chapter, none of this fazes Ben Collins. So what is his solution to a geopolitical crisis that, like many another in the book, has nothing to do with a united Ireland per se, the nut that apparently asks a sledgehammer to crack it?

He like Higgins has no time for NATO, which he thinks is on the way out. Rather, his unswerving faith is with the EU which will welcome a re-united Ireland, and anti-EU unionists be hanged. One might think that the secessionist aspirations of Catalonia and Scotland might give the EU some pause. And whereas Collins all along assumes Great Britain will be delighted to hand Northern Ireland over to Dublin, the Chagos experience might give Whitehall pause too.

The EU should be, and will be, he says, militarised to defend the continent in place of NATO and Ireland will play its full part. But what about the Republic’s policy of  neutrality? Can we rely on it to keep “us” safe? he asks. He implies not, even though “we are liked around the world”. But never fear, he’s not ditching it. We Irish can invest billions of euro in defence while keeping “the traditional approach to neutrality”.

He would bar British forces from Northern Ireland but, hey, no worries. “Britain will work constructively with the EU to provide security for the continent”. There is simply nothing on Mr Collins’ runway to obstruct take-off.

The roots of all these differences are deep but Ben Collins doesn’t sense them or the cultural and political outgrowths that render his enthusiasm for “unity” arid. He sees no real differences between unionists and nationalists that aren’t transactional or material. Thus he is freed from any examination of differences between them before trying to bridge them.

However, unionists like me are products in positive feeling and thinking, consciously or unconsciously, crudely or sophisticatedly, like it or not, of the Reformation, historical Scottish-Ulster interconnections, the plantation of Ulster, the Glorious Revolution and yes, the defeat of James II, the Enlightenment, the British Empire, the Industrial Revolution, Dissenter Protestantism in city and countryside, the Great War and the Second World War, the three levels of the British education system (and in its Northern Ireland inflections) – and simply the long domestic and daily experience of growing up British. In that heritage can be found some of the Ulster Protestant vices as well as their virtues.  (As well as, it goes without saying, of the powerful influence of twentieth-century America which we do share with Catholic counterparts.)

The civilisational roots and trunks (if not all the branches) of nationalist Ireland are quite different. Through the centuries it was the Catholic imperium (with Rome at its centre and European colleges and monasteries as its arterial connectors) that was the heaviest and most ubiquitous influence. Its demanding theology and its reach into society beyond the churches and cathedrals (including, crucially, education) made Catholicism’s moulding influence over the centuries pervasive. Seamus Heaney in his autobiographical recollections in Stepping Stones (2008) ruminates on the doctrine he imbibed from childhood and whose influence never left him. (James Joyce had already fictionalised his imbibing, and his only-partially successful resistance to it, in A Portrait of the Artist, 1916).

For the church’s reach as recently as the 1980s we have Claire Keegan’s novella, pellucid in prose, oblique in meaning – Small Things Like These (2021). And during the late shapings of Catholicism came the exploration and adaptations, in the 18th through the 20th centuries, of Celtic civilisation from the Iron Age through the Middle Ages and after.  Active revival of ancient sports and the invention of new Irish sports came with the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884). The revival of the Irish language came with the Gaelic League (1893). The Irish Cultural and Literary revival began shortly thereafter. Emerging from it all were movements of ethno-political nationalism, various in their moderation and extremism, constitutionalism and illegality. The revolutionary tradition won out and founded the Irish Free State and then Eire in 1916, 1919-21, 1937, 1949, becoming the national Story still told today.

Thinking of the malign influence of Britain on Ireland, the Irish-Ireland champion of the early twentieth century, D.P. Moran, called it “the battle of two civilisations”, a phrase F.S.L. Lyons used as a chapter title in Ireland Since the Famine (1971).

These vital influences are not just dusty legacies but issue in reflexes, instincts, perceptions, feelings, belongings. Mr Collins should read Seamus Heaney’s poetry and his  autobiographical reflections to see them operate in a nationalist Northern Irishman and imagine if he can their unionist counterpart.  The poetry of John Hewitt or the histories of A.T.Q. Stewart would be a modest starting-point for him.

He needs also to understand the engrained differences between Protestants and Catholics even after belief has receded. They are not in theory insuperable and friendship can. dissolve them, but the respective Stories would need to be revised radically, a two-way street that is not in view in 2026. Multiculturalism the policy and the reality, while diversifying much of Anglo-Canada, has failed to unify and assimilate the two founding Stories, those of the French (erstwhile Catholic) and the English (erstwhile Protestant) populations. The post- Catholic Quebecois are more nationalistic than ever, now referring openly to “the Quebec nation”, and might declare sovereignty any day now. The Republic strikes me as resembling Quebec in its entrenched cultural and political nationalism, rooted, at least nominally, in language (as the firmest nationalism requires) and not at all resembling the Rest of Canada (ertswhile British Canada).

The differences between the two populations in Ireland can be recalled in microcosm in the history of the United States. More than a century before the urban enclaves were formed in the 19th century and early 20th century by immigrants from Catholic countries (notably Italy, Ireland, Poland, Spain, France) that integrated but kept their ethnic identity by not wholly assimilating), the Ulster Scots were co-founding ethnicities in British North America, in what became the United States and Canada, part of the mainstream and dispersing as it flowed west. They are remembered now chiefly as pioneering frontier presences in the westward expansion.

Marco Rubio, the American Secretary of State in his speech to the Munich security conference on February 14, 2026 reminded the European audience: “Our first colonies were built by English settlers, to whom we owe not just the language we speak but the whole of our political and legal system.  Our frontiers were shaped by Scots-Irish – that proud, hearty clan from the hills of Ulster that gave us Davy Crockett and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.”

Timely and good for unionists and nationalists alike to remember,  But in fact, the Scots-Irish (when abroad), the Ulster Scots (when at home) provided a good deal of the sophisticated culture of the emerging and youthful American nation – in law, education, theology, philosophy and science (including evolution).  Documentation and citations available on request.

To no avail, Senator W.B. Yeats told the Catholic nationalist Irish senate in 1925 that the Anglo-Irish, having Catholic laws foisted on them, had given Ireland much of its modern culture. We are, he told his fellow senators, no petty people. Yeats by his stature commanded respect and there was a degree of respect for his people. By contrast, nationalists believe (or affect to believe) that Ulster unionists of Scottish origin, indeed of any origin, are a petty people. If your concentration is on science, democracy, and individualism, the Scots-Irish in the United States disprove it and the Ulster Scots of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries likewise disprove it at home. In the Republic of Ireland, however, individualism has been no match for collective thought, as James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett and other writers found out and sought exile as a result. Yeats spent much of his time in London.

The glib phrase “of a unionist background”, or by the same token “nationalist background”, implies heritage as mere shiftable stage scenery, but a cultural present and cultural heritage are deeper than that, downstage as well as upstage, then and now; we’re talking about the cultural equivalent of hard-wiring.

Culture is richest when one is fully participating in a society not as a labelled minority in the polity but as part of the mainstream. In a few respects, unionists are not as integrated into British society as they might be (a regrettable but understandable devolutionary mindset has hindered that; some Scots could say the same) but in terms of root values established over centuries, they are more integrated into United Kingdom society than they could ever be into Republic of Ireland society.  Of course, the shared English language and day-to-day habits and customs connect all the Irish (the most watched TV programme in the Republic has long been Coronation Street) but on crucial occasions of life, the deeper value system and belief system assert themselves.

The cultural challenge to unification has never been acknowledged by nationalists who are convinced (or pretend that they’re convinced) that they’re dealing only with bonfires, marches, and egregious working-class loyalism that can all be kettled into a “new” Ireland, thereby hiding nationalist irredentism behind a wilful ignorance.

It’s possible, of course, that the young of unionist culture, born when the IRA ceasefire in 1994 was receding into history, could lose their opposition to a united Ireland as their sense of provincial British identity is untaught or dissipated by competing cultural allurements and noise through social media. Such loss could possibly be helped through the civic “Irishising” process attempted currently by Belfast City Council.

A unionist frame of mind receptive to a united Ireland would require a collective unionist amnesia from within, or cultural reassignment to a political end from without, or a plunge in morale and cultural capital through attrition as happened to Yeats’s Anglo-Irish in the aftermath of Irish independence.

And in the middle term it might happen if unionists have their distinctive cultural identity “minoritised” (a qualitative as well as quantitative eventuality and a goal of Sinn Fein), as also befell Yeats’s Anglo-Irish.

As Lyons recounts in the chapter I’ve mentioned, the activist Irish nationalism that founded the state kept running up against the realities of the English language, the modern world, the contribution of the despised Anglo-Irish to the Irish consciousness.  Moran’s contemporary W.P. Ryan wanted “a new Irish civilisation quite distinct from the English”. From the early decades of the Irish Free State, perhaps taking off in the 1940s, Irish state nationalism resolved this dilemma by battening the hatches of nationalism at home and  outsourcing the modern world to Britain.

There are in fact two “Catholic” or “native” Irelands: one at home and one across the water. Communication between them is strained and redacted.  The two, though in cahoots, are barely on public speaking terms. They can even exist in the same person, in the southern Irish who commute each Monday to London and return each Friday to Dublin.

So despite the anti-Britishness of public Ireland, the Republic tacitly accepts that its citizens are disproportionately dependent on the UK for employment, career opportunities and artistic fulfilment – for instance, in theatre, publishing, scientific work, universities and other higher as well as lower walks of life. England, where a large fraction of the Southern Irish population lives or works, is the Republic’s biggest employer and showcase and London its metropolis. Until the 1980s or so, England was also a convenient escape from the suffocating omnipresence of the Catholic church.

The government and commentariat in the Republic must show no gratitude for this, of course. Decades ago, one TD thanked England (the Irish nation’s building site, according to one wag) for helping to solve the Irish unemployment problem and was hounded for his lack of patriotism. I provide a generous sampling of the Republic’s extraordinary cultural and career-fulfilment dependence on England in the title essay of my book Ireland Out of England and Other Inconveniences.

In a curious way, this lack of courteous recognition says something about the undeclared intimacy between England and Ireland: a dog that refuses to bark. Ireland’s foreign policy towards England is actually in part a self-harming domestic policy: the Republic resembles a family member who dislikes but envies, imitates and rivals an older sibling and in the process locks down some of their own potential by repressing it all.

Or put another way, the official dogma, promulgated and defended most vigorously on the island, contradicts the cordial personal and professional relations enjoyed to mutual benefit across the water, in the land of the ancient enemy. Hypocrisy is at work on the home front.

But it is at work too in a silent way on the battlefront for success and achievement, i.e. England. The Story makes it unwise for the successful Irish in England to celebrate their success and thank England for providing a generous runway for lift-off; they remain silent on the subject, never contradicting the Anglophobia back at home. Laura Perrins is a lonely exception (“The Irish Diaspora. Give it a rest”, Laura’s Substack, February 4, 2026).

It would be a useful experiment to ask the wonderful actors from the Republic flourishing on our screens and stages and living in England – currently including Jessie Buckley, Cillian Murphy, Sharon Horgan, Andrew Scott, Niamh Algar, Paul Mescal – what they think of England and its role in their careers. But with this proviso: tell them their answers will be published in Dublin.

Successful Southern Irish in England are allowed by Irish public opinion to integrate professionally but not to assimilate. Brendan O’Neill, first generation English (a category the Irish in England won’t admit to, opting exclusively for the evasive “second-generation Irish”) eloquently lamented this in a unique essay in Spiked (September, 2018).

My point is that the idea of removing Northern Ireland from the UK in order to complete a sovereign Ireland while after removal the unacknowledged intimacy between the Irish and the English continues (it may even deepen) – while estranging probably for generations the British Irish of Northern Ireland – is absurdly ironic and offensive.

For our experience with the Irish in England suggests that a united Ireland would not be the end of the story; it wouldn’t satisfy the Irish appetite for an impossible historical redress. Under contemporary circumstances, the unification campaign is an oblique expression of the lopsided and unhealthy Irish fixation with England, to which Northern Ireland is in the end a sidebar.  A border poll would not be the High Noon showdown united Ireland campaigners seem to think it would be. The umbrage would abide.

The united Ireland campaign is not at all about all-island “unity” with unionists (“our unionist brothers and sisters”, as Collins calls us, in a faux stroke of republican ventriloquism). It is, legitimately, about re-union with northern nationalists so as to complete the 1916 project, as one of the most prominent unificationists described it while standing speechifying at the border; unionists are thereby to be returned to the same year of 1916. That is why the current united Ireland campaigners have no real interest in unionists except as anonymous baffles; there is zero intention to win them over. A united Ireland is to happen with or without them.

In Collins’ scenario, the Republic need hardly change in the event of unification. In his scenario, the existing superior infrastructure essentially remains. No national debate or soul-searching is necessary; let the “civic” unionists up north do that.

In fact, myriad features of the Republic’s society would need scrutiny, and many of them radically changed. If a united Ireland neared, there would be bound to be fracturing debates in the Republic. These features I’ve inventoried in “A Debate on Irish Unity? Some Items for the Agenda” (Ireland Out of England).

The debates would be about the national flag, the national anthem, educational patronage, the new police force, the current iconisising of post-1922 physical-force anti-British, anti-unionist republicanism, national commemorations, equality across all the public sectors, school curricula and textbooks, the national Story, neutrality, government attitudes to the British armed forces, foreign policy that doesn’t offend a major sub-population, sincere strengthening of the east-west strand of the by then defunct GFA.

The cart is before the horse, then, in this other sense. The debate that McDonald thinks is happening among unionists needs to be shifted south and conducted first before the second item on the agenda could even be a united Ireland.

However, I don’t think the viability of the unity campaign would survive an honest debate in the Republic. But it could still be game-changing positively for the Republic if Ireland’s relations with England (at present amounting to a kind of national cognitive dissonance) enjoyed a collateral analysis, debate and a possible re-fit for purpose.

This particular re-set would give public permission to Irish citizens, both at home and across the water in England itself, to acknowledge to what extent Irish and English culture overlap without endangering the extent to which (ex) Catholic or native Ireland is, in Clifford Geetz’s honorific sense, its own “thick culture” that can survive, and even grow thicker, with the fully acknowledged English-Irish ties. The modern intertwined culture of Ireland and Britain could be acknowledged as a marvellous thing and celebrated by the Irish. The Irish-EU relationship shrinks by comparison in cultural richness, past and present.

Irish journalists would be released from the routine Schadenfreude they enjoy at England’s expense (a vestige of O’Connell’s “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” dictum).  Schadenfreude, after all, is a mean feeling of hollow pleasure.

The candid re-set would also involve acknowledging some past official Irish errors, wrongdoing and misguidance. The current and ongoing Troubles legacy issue is such a pretext at hand. Time for some Truth and Reconciliation work in the Republic, including investigating possible Irish government and forces of law complicity during the IRA campaign, 1970-1994, either by turning a blind eye, refusing extradition of suspected terrorists, or collusion. The Republic is badly in arrears in that audit.

Warm relations with England would surely lessen the sense of alienation from the Republic that northern nationalists feel, as they see the old enmity between Ireland and England recede and mutuality foregrounded. Warm relations would help to close the gap between nationalist and unionist in Northern Ireland and expand any centre ground that exists between them. The unionist and nationalist middle classes could return to representative duty. Stormont could be made to work for all.

They would encourage unionists to feel, or express, the degree of their Irishness without it appearing a kind of disloyalty to the UK or collusion with the force of Irish nationalism. In the broad sense of culture, Britishness and Irishness would not be the ruthlessly stark and often lopsidedly hostile binary it has historically been and that the current unification campaign will eventually intensify.

Meanwhile, in Ben Collins’ book this unionist foresees no dividends worth the loss of his British identity.

John Wilson Foster, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia
Author, Ireland Out of England and Other Inconveniences (2024); co-editor, The Idea of the Union: Great Britain and Northern Ireland (2021); author, Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction (Oxford UP, 2008).