I love chatting to people who I disagree with. There are some people, usually in the Unionist community, who always get angry when they are wrong; while I always get angry when I am right; and as you can imagine we are frequently angry with one another. Personal feelings don’t come into it, we are a society too focused on emotions at the expense of ideas. Regardless of how you feel, I want to know what people think and why; particularly those who believe in something or someone.

On this basis, I was having a conversation with quite a senior Unionist politician who said a few revealing things to me. They confided their knowing that reunification in Ireland is a game of time and numbers; an inevitability over a possibility, guided by changing demographics and economics. But the really interesting thing about this conversation was them stating that in a reunified Ireland, absolutely everything would have to be different. I’ll explain what they meant by this.

We were talking about the 1937 Constitution of the 26 county state, and how it wouldn’t be acceptable to Protestants, with its overtly Catholic ethos. It is not the sort of constitution which a united Ireland would have had, particularly under the men and women of 1916. In the North, you had a Protestant state for a Protestant people. And in the South you had the catholic equivalent to that, albeit not an acutely sectarian dominion. Neither of which though was a pluralist republic, modelled on the ideas of Revolutionary France and the secularism of American freemasonry.

As our conversation developed, so too did the confessional nature of it. They agreed that in the event of a border poll favouring reunification, there would be an election to an all-Ireland body to compose an all-Ireland constitution. This, having been admitted, would mean deciding which systems of health, education, welfare, housing, agriculture and the economy, are best to live under. It would involve both the British state and the European Union providing Ireland with a contingency plan of finance revenues, to build a genuine all-Ireland nation in the way Helmut Kohl did with German reunification. And it would involve an objective international organisation being recruited to oversee the process, including strict scrutiny that the whole ordeal was fair and equitable to every tradition. Religious safeguards would become law and the Loyal Orders would have a protected place in Ireland’s constitution. All the precedents of Magna Carta would become emulated in this new-found Republic.

They told me that the Irish people would be given the choice of having an elected President alone or opting for a Crown Republic, where both the British Monarch and a President share the powerless role of ceremonial Head of State – with all legislative authority residing in the elected parliament and office of Taoiseach. Likewise, there would be the possibility of a Federal Ireland, with regional parliaments in each Province and Federal government in Dublin, just like in Germany, so Ulster may retain some of it’s individual ethos but within the framework of a national Bill of Rights for all Irish citizens.

It struck me that this person knew that what they were describing would be immensely better for not just their people but all citizens of this island – we would a much more prosperous, stable, settled and happy nation. And so I asked them, why would you not advocate for that then? To which they elaborated that they are too used to arguing against it that to do such a U-turn would not be compatible with their own electorate. They also added, that eventually Unionist people would get over it because it’s hard to imagine any party in Dublin having the numbers to form a government without them. It struck me like a brick. Here was a Unionist ideologue realising Pearse’s prophetic judgement that it would be better for the Orangemen to be part of a Dublin government they could influence than sitting on the periphery of a London parliament which isolates them.

I asked them when they think this will happen. To their credit, they paused for a minute and then explained that there are years when nothing happens and weeks when everything happens, with Brexit being a prime example. Therein, I asked them “so it could happen soon?” And they responded, “that dear boy depends entirely on you and your generation. The young people, who care less for tradition, will decide what sort of country they want to live in.”

Most people in republican circles are familiar with the song lyrics “the IRA will set them free”. Well, there is also a sentiment in that song referencing the Protestants/Unionists/Loyalist people denying their Irishness; but that when Ireland becomes a single nation with a single people, the radical Protestant republicanism of Tone and Yeats, will melt the ice around Orange hearts. Indeed, it seems that many Unionist thinkers already know that the ultimate freedom of the Irish people means the total liberation of the Protestant conscience from British economic tyranny, to help resolve the inequalities and needs of this country once and for all.