Last week on the same day I was involved in two very interesting conversations about the way forward for this island. I had lunch with a young Belfast-born, Dublin-resident solicitor called Ross Neill. Neill is that rare thing: somebody from a unionist background who now lives and works happily in Dublin and calls himself a nationalist (an SDLP-style nationalist).

In particular he is an admirer of John Hume. He quotes Hume in America saying “the most amazing thing” about the USA was “that it’s one country.” I recalled a similar quote from the great SDLP leader: “You Americans probably take this for granted. There’s a commonplace saying, a saying so famous in America you’ve probably forgotten about it – E Pluribus Unum , ‘From many, one’. It’s so commonplace in America that you have it on your smallest coin, here on the back of a penny.” He went on: ‘That’s what we’re striving for in Northern Ireland, from our diversity to create one nation, E pluribus Unum, which has long been the American national slogan; something we’re striving towards even today – to create one nation of equal citizenship among all our diverse constituent communities.”¹

This provoked a discussion about coming up with a ‘big idea’ that might help to bring together the people of the island. Currently ‘New Ireland’ is just another way of saying ‘United Ireland’, which is why Sinn Fein use it so much, and why unionists are so uninterested in it. But could a ‘new Ireland’ come to mean something different: an island that, whatever its constitutional make-up, could come together slowly around values common to the people of both jurisdictions: peace, democracy, the Christian tradition in all its forms, a strong sense of community, the English language and even European-ness (since Northern Ireland is still connected to the EU through the NI Protocol and the Windsor Framework). Should we be coming together to discuss what we have in common through our shared values before we move on to the difficult business what divides us because of starkly different views on constitutional futures?

20 years ago I reviewed a book called Conflict and Consensus: A study of values and attitudes in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, by leading sociologists and political scientists Tony Fahey, Bernadette Hayes and Richard Sinnott.² It was based on analysis of the Irish data from the 1999-2000 European Values Surveys and the 2002-2003 European Social Survey in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The authors concluded that both societies on this island had been blessed over the previous decade by a combination of benevolent circumstances which made them highly unusual in European, not to mention, world terms.

I wrote, summarising the authors’ findings: “They [both societies] enjoy high levels of income, welfare provision, individual life satisfaction and social capital. They are both stable democracies governed by similar legal systems which have withstood the tests of time. The old divisions based on religion seem to be fading as both societies are edging – and the authors emphasise the word ‘edging’ – towards a more secular, post-Christian future.”

I then voiced two contradictory thoughts which ironically both led in a positive direction. Perhaps, this study suggested, “secularisation could play a role in the future in creating cultural divisions that cut across the ethno-national divide and so reduce polarisation.” One of these, since magnified by referenda in the Republic on gay marriage and abortion, could be the division on family and sexual issues between liberals and conservatives of all denominations.

Or (in contradiction) perhaps those conservative Christian family values which many Irish Protestants and Catholics still share – and which make them unlike their fellow citizens in Britain and Europe – might provide some of the basis for understandings which go beyond and deeper than those reached between unionists, nationalists and republicans in 1998.

The authors concluded: “The two societies and the two traditions are characterised by major similarities as well as by self-evident differences. Put another way, the grounds for consensus within and between the two societies are almost as extensive as the grounds for conflict.”

Could this consensus be a basis for a wide and compelling all-Ireland discussion that would bring in elements of society in both jurisdictions far wider than the political parties, including significant Northern Protestant groups? A kind of re-run of the New Ireland Forum of the 1980s or the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation of the 1990s (a better name if we want to involve unionists) with no limit on what issues – economic, cultural, religious, environmental as well as political – that people participating wanted to raise. Anybody could appear before such a forum to raise any issue concerning the future well-being of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Reflecting our hugely changed technological times, it would have to have both face-to-face and online dimensions. It could be a development of the Irish Government’s Shared Island Dialogues, and, like that exercise, would have to take place in both Irish jurisdictions.

Such a forum would be a great place to raise and discuss radical new ideas. It would be the opposite of a Sinn Fein-proposed Citizens Assembly to discuss Irish political unity, aimed at reaching one conclusion only. I know smart unionist-minded people who would have no problem in taking part in such an open-ended exercise: politicians and ex-politicians, religious leaders, youth and community leaders, writers and artists, business people. I believe this is the time – when the Irish government’s coffers are overflowing, with another billion euros approved for Shared Island – to mount such an innovative and open-minded initiative.

I only hope that the new government in Dublin has the vision to embrace such an idea in the spirit of the new post 1998 Article Three of the Constitution, that it is the will of the Irish nation “in harmony and friendship [note those important words] to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island.”

That constitutional article was central to the second conversation I witnessed that evening: between former SDLP leader Mark Durkan and Professor Graham Spencer of University of Portsmouth, who has done Irish history and politics a significant service by interviewing in great detail a wide range of politicians and officials who played a role in the Good Friday Agreement. His latest offering is a book-length interview with Durkan, a man I have always liked as one of the smartest and most open-minded of Northern politicians.

Durkan said successive Irish governments had made a mistake “in not developing that [Article] so that the terms of any discussion, or understanding, around a united Ireland are very much rooted in the spirit of Article Three that is directly sourced from the Good Friday Agreement. Perhaps the best way in which to take these matters forward would be if the Irish government did something like reconvene the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, or another body like it, but specifically with the idea of developing new understandings and appreciations in relation to Article Three.” He said that the 1994-1996 forum had allowed the parties and people involved to get away from fixed positions and to be creative and future-looking. Such a body could help to ensure that “thinking becomes less partisan, because it is shared, where it is informed and stimulated by other parties’ opinions and by expert opinion”, he said last week.

He also has an unusually nuanced view of what an eventual Border poll (a term he doesn’t like) should aim to do. “We are going to have to address far more issues and many more arguments, questions and uncertainties rather than just talk about the border if we are going to win support for a united Ireland. Also, when I talk to some of my unionist friends, their support for the Union doesn’t mean that they particularly want a border in hard or awkward form. They don’t want anything like that imposed. Their support for the Union is natural. It is instinctive and they would see it as positive, so they think that under the Good Friday Agreement you can have a relatively borderless island.”

Durkan said when it comes to a Border poll “the question shouldn’t be a united Ireland, yes or no, but the choice between two equally legitimate aspirations as affirmed by the GFA. That is, remaining part of the UK, or becoming part of a sovereign united Ireland. There should be two questions and two options, so that both sides of the argument have to present a strong, compelling and positive prospectus for what is on offer and for what the result favouring that outcome would mean. If you don’t have both sides campaigning positively and it’s a united Ireland, yes or no, well you’re almost typecasting unionists into a ‘no’ camp and yet again it becomes easy for one side to just basically run a negative narrative about what the other campaign is offering.”

He called for a healthy debate about “answering the honest questions that people have, whether it’s the shape of public finances, how well rights are guaranteed, public services, or whether it’s just about how the transition would be handled if the vote is for a united Ireland. If it were to be a united Ireland, would it be one big bang of integration of all public services, or more of a phased approach? Would there be some element of devolution and continuity? Would it be a case of using, or saying, that a lot of the structures for the Good Friday Agreement are still there and that we use the review mechanisms of the Agreement to make a lot of the adjustments internally in Ireland?

“On the other side, if the result is not for a united Ireland, but for remaining in the UK, are there assurances that people are not going to abuse that result to say we can proceed to dispose of things like the European Convention on Human Rights as promised in the Good Friday Agreement, or we can do things just whatever way the UK want and that people should take what the Westminster parliament throws at them, with the GFA somehow relegated? We need to make sure that people who have doubts about either option and about how the result for either side would be treated or mistreated, will be addressed.”

This is fiendishly complex stuff and there was almost nothing about it in the very threadbare section on unity in Sinn Fein’s recent election manifesto. This is a long and difficult journey and we haven’t even started on it.

¹ John Hume in America, Maurice Fitzpatrick, p. 50

² ‘Proof the Belfast Agreement is resting on firm foundations’, Irish Times, 14 April 2005