Planning for a united Ireland

Sir, – Mark Hennessy reports (“What’s in Fine Gael’s plan for a united Ireland?”, Politics, November 7th) that the authors of the yet-unseen draft Fine Gael document do not want “to speak about anthems, flags or identity”, but rather “about what unification might look like, and how it would benefit people, or not”.

This is a variation on the old trope that unionists are more concerned about the half-crown than the crown. In other words, “unification” is all about concrete things like money, economic development and so on.

For far too long we smugly suggested that by dangling enough goodies in front of a grateful unionist people, all we had to do down here was wait until they saw the error of their ways and fell like ripe apples into Cathleen Ni Houlihan’s capacious apron.

But working out an economic modus vivendi is the easy part. Much more difficult are the cultural aspects, and these are precisely those of identity, exemplified by anthems, language, flags, currency, miles per hour and traffic-light sequencing.

We can learn, though, from the accommodation that southern ex-unionists eventually came to with an independent Ireland. They were able to do so by still seeing much of the “old Ireland” around them until at least 1949.

That gave them cultural comfort – a “gradualness of inevitability” as Ireland approached the end of formal links with the crown. As the party responsible for that last severing, Fine Gael should bear that in mind.- Yours, etc,

IAN D’ALTON,

Naas,

Co Kildare.