Northern Ireland​ is the most unstable part of the UK, where local battles escalate into draining crises for the British state. Although it has a reputation as a political volcano, between eruptions its internal dynamics are usually ignored in Britain and the Irish Republic. People in both countries are resentful that a place accounting for less than 3 per cent of the population of Britain and Ireland combined should play such a pivotal – and generally toxic – role in their affairs.

‘It says a great deal for the power which Ireland has, both Nationalist and Orange,’ Winston Churchill complained in 1922, that it could ‘lay [its] hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics … year after year, generation after generation.’ He gave Britain a free pass when it came to responsibility for this, putting the blame on nationalist Catholics and unionist Protestants obsessed with ‘the integrity of their quarrel’. He described ‘the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ – two border counties more or less equally divided between Catholics and Protestants – as a symbol of this never-ending territorial dispute, which had re-emerged unchanged after the deluge of the First World War. That quote has been much cited since by patronising commentators to signal the pettiness, self-absorption and venom of Irish feuds over the northern part of Ireland. From the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, which first partitioned Ireland, to the Northern Ireland Protocol in 2019, which kept the North inside the EU single market for goods by means of an open border to the Republic, the question of Irish unity or disunity has never gone away. But although nationalists have always opposed partition, only recently have most seen ending it as a feasible option. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 mandated that the UK secretary of state for Northern Ireland must call a referendum if he or she believes that a majority might vote to leave the UK and join the Republic, which must also have a poll on the issue. At that time, even had such a vote been called, nobody would have expected it to go against the union.

Over the last ten years the question of Irish unity has moved to the centre of the Irish political stage. This surprisingly rapid change has been driven by demographic and economic trends, to the advantage of Irish nationalists both north and south of the border. The impact of these long-term trends was accelerated by a series of gross miscalculations by the largest unionist party, the DUP. In a spectacular act of political self-harm between 2016 and 2019, it tried to use Brexit to roll back the Good Friday Agreement by re-establishing a ‘hard border’, enforced by police and customs officials, between the North – which as part of the UK was to exit the EU – and the Irish Republic, which would stay in the EU. In the event, something like the opposite occurred: the UK left the EU but the North stayed in the EU single market, with a new trade border running down the Irish Sea. Instead of strengthening the union with Britain, the DUP had managed to weaken it. Betrayed by Boris Johnson, whom they had naively trusted, the unionists were appalled to discover that their traditional allies, the Conservative Party and the British state, no longer cared very much whether or not Northern Ireland remained part of the UK.

The surprise wasn’t only on the unionist side. For all the supposed centrality of Irish unity to Irish nationalists, they had never thought much about what it might look like. According to a survey in 2023, only 29 per cent of people in the Republic had made more than a single day trip to the North since 2017. A higher proportion in the North have travelled south, but most are likely to be from the nationalist community. Knowledge about what happens on the other side of the border is just as limited in Belfast as it is in Dublin. In Northern Ireland itself, the preoccupation is rather with the centuries-old struggle for supremacy between the Protestants/unionists and the Catholics/nationalists, even if not all Protestants are pro-union and not all Catholics are against.

What would happen if these two very different societies were united, when their institutions and attitudes have evolved in such different ways? What are the political, economic and social advantages and disadvantages of unity? How do their health and education systems compare? How different are wages and welfare payments on either side of the border? And how likely is it that unity, or even the prospect of unity, will provoke renewed violence? ‘I can live with unity or Union,’ the Northern Ireland editor of the Belfast Telegraph, Sam McBride, writes. ‘Even if the economic claims turn out to be wrong, I can live with being poorer. But I don’t want to live, and I don’t want my children to live, with civil war or anything approaching it.’

Together with Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, McBride is co-author of For and against a United Ireland, a lucid and highly informed study of the issue. Each has written two long essays – one for and one against a united Ireland – in order to present a non-partisan picture of the pros and cons of unification. What gives their essays special value is that as well as their own experience of Irish politics they draw on surveys, opinion polls and specialist studies – produced mainly by Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South, established by the Royal Irish Academy and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana – that rarely find an audience outside academia.

What comes across most clearly in these essays is the different trajectories of North and South since partition, a distinction that has become especially stark over the last twenty years. The once impoverished, agrarian and clerically dominated Republic of Ireland is now a wealthy, highly educated, largely secular society. In contrast, Northern Ireland, once the most developed part of Ireland, has deindustrialised and fallen behind the South according to all development indices. Life expectancy in the Republic exceeds that in the North: the current figures are 81.1 years for males at birth and 84.6 for females in the Republic; 78.8 and 82.6 years in Northern Ireland. Productivity per worker was 40 per cent higher in the Republic than in Northern Ireland in 2020. Only 23 per cent of people in the North have received tertiary education compared to 47 per cent in the South. Unemployment benefit in the Republic is twice as high as in the North. On many indices, the Republic surpasses the UK as a whole, ranking tenth among countries with the lowest rates of child poverty; according to Unicef, the UK stands in 28th place.

Cumulatively these statistics are proof of a failing North and a successful South. The reversal of roles is dramatic: in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Belfast was home to the biggest linen mill, the biggest rope works and the biggest tobacco factory in the world, as well as the busiest port in the UK after London and Liverpool. The York Street linen mill alone employed four thousand workers. Ships launched from Belfast shipyards were the largest moving objects on the face of the planet. Yet today the economy of Northern Ireland is smaller than that of Lithuania and its GDP is a tenth the size of the Republic’s (though foreign multinationals, attracted by low rates of corporation tax, account for about half of the Republic’s GDP).

Like many of Britain’s devastated industrial regions, the North has become reliant on subsidies from central government. With annual tax revenues of £19.3 billion and expenditure of £33.7 billion in 2021, it received about £14 billion in subsidies. A unionist argument against Irish unity is that the South simply can’t afford to take on this burden. In area after area, the North has fallen behind. Once the NHS in the North was one of the few institutions seen as providing a better service than the confused private/state healthcare system in the South. But now, McBride writes, the NHS in Northern Ireland ‘has become an elaborate fiction. It promises to treat everyone free at the point of need, but can’t … some people wait a decade for a hip replacement.’ Instead there is a two-tier health system, with the better-off buying private health insurance ‘while the poor are left to live in agony and die before their time’. The problem isn’t just lack of money – Northern Ireland spends more per person on healthcare than any region in the UK aside from Scotland – but that the system is badly run.

In education, too, the disparity between North and South is evident at every level: the rate at which young people leave education early in the North is almost double that in the Republic. University fees are lower in the South and some 17,000 students from the North were in universities in Britain in 2019, of whom only a third returned. ‘For all its many faults,’ O’Toole writes, ‘the Republic’s system has been much better than that in the North at providing equality of opportunity – especially the opportunity for working-class kids to move’ from secondary to tertiary education. There has long been a deeper acceptance in the South that high educational standards are essential for economic progress.

These comparisons flatter the Republic because in many areas it too has done badly – just not as badly as the North. The Republic too has its deindustrialised factory towns with boarded-up shops in empty high streets. Its health and education systems are an unreformable mix of private and public, religious and non-religious, all reluctant to work together, so any ambition to integrate the Republic’s health system with the NHS in the North is wishful thinking. O’Toole concludes that the upside of ‘the possibility of a united Ireland is that most of what needs to be done to prepare for it is good for everyone whether unification happens or not.’ In some respects, the economic situation is more not less challenging in the South: the lack of affordable housing in Dublin was a dominant issue in the last general election, in 2024, though similar complaints are frequent north of the border too.

Surging prosperity in the Republic doesn’t necessarily make an end to partition more attractive to unionists in the North. What used to be called ‘the Ulster Question’ or ‘the Irish Question’ has never been driven by economic profit or loss. At one time, Tory governments vainly tried ‘to kill Home Rule with kindness’ – but Irish nationalists weren’t won over then, any more than unionists will be won over now to the idea of a united Ireland through promises of prosperity. Moreover, that prosperity might be torpedoed by a destabilising crisis over unification. ‘From a Southern perspective,’ McBride writes, ‘there is the very real possibility that having to integrate Northern Ireland would drag down a successful society.’ This fear is realistic. ‘Most people in the Republic want a united Ireland,’ O’Toole writes, ‘but only if it does not involve them making any real compromises on their own symbolic attachments.’ Much is written by liberally minded Irish and British pundits about ebbing sectarian and religious animosities since the end of the Troubles. But McBride warns against being ‘blind [to] the depth of anti-British sentiment that remains in Irish society’. In the North, some unionists have moved to the centre politically but a greater number have become even more militant in their refusal of compromise with the nationalists as they seek to defend what they fear is a foundering union with Britain.

Irish​ unity is not solely, or even mainly, about the binary relationship between North and South. That’s because there aren’t two but three groups contesting the direction Ireland will take: beyond the Northern Protestant unionists and the Southern Catholic nationalists there are also the Northern Catholic nationalists, who have a distinct political, cultural and historical identity. Even before partition they had their own political leadership, and they were never just Southern Catholics cut off in the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster. Over the last fifty years, the Northern Catholics have been the most energetic and combative force in Irish politics, as they struggled successfully to overthrow and replace the Protestant and unionist supremacy, sometimes called the ‘Orange state’. The conflict started with the first civil rights marches in 1968, and since then it has passed through several phases, most notably the Troubles – the deceptively mild name for a savage low-level war lasting thirty years. The Good Friday Agreement ended this violent phase by recognising that the North contained two political nations – Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists – which would henceforth share power within a single system. The violence ended, but power-sharing produced paralysis rather than co-operation. Friction between the two communities is never-ending: ‘We have moved on from killing each other, but we have not moved much further than that,’ a high-court judge in Belfast said last year, commenting on a dispute between nationalists and unionists over whether the city’s Grand Central station should have Irish as well as English signs.

Concrete barriers blocking roads along the 310-mile-long border may have disappeared, but not the 25-foot-high ‘peace walls’ separating Protestant from Catholic districts in Belfast and elsewhere. The balance of power had been shifting slowly towards the Catholics until about six years ago, when the process sped up. The 2021 census showed that for the first time people with a Catholic background were in the majority in Northern Ireland, which had been designed as a Protestant state. Out of a population of 1.9 million, 805,000 or 42.3 per cent were Catholic; 711,000 or 37.4 per cent were Protestant. Electoral outcomes reflected this demographic shift, as Sinn Féin became the largest party in the devolved assembly in 2022 and in local councils in 2023. Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s vice president, became first minister in the power-sharing executive at Stormont in 2024. This gives her no more authority than her DUP deputy, but the change symbolically underlined the demise of the old order and the days when unionists often referred to themselves simply as ‘the Majority’.

Sectarian geography has also been changing in a place where territorial loyalty is intense. Almost everywhere in Northern Ireland, Catholic nationalists are advancing and Protestant unionists are in retreat. Of the four Belfast MPs, only one is a unionist; only 17 of the 60 members of the city council are unionists. In affluent Malone Park in South Belfast, Catholics now own the mansions where they were once cooks and servants. Census figures show that Protestants are concentrated in the eastern counties of Antrim, Armagh and Down, with a declining proportion of the population west of the Bann in Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry. Queen’s University Belfast is these days seen by unionists as very much a nationalist institution, with many unionist students choosing to study in universities in Scotland.

Unionist power has declined, but the balance between communities remains unstable. Territorial differences are automatically weaponised. Prince Andrew’s name is being removed without fuss from streets everywhere in mainland Britain from Birmingham to Broadstairs. But nothing so friction-free is happening in Belfast, where the council has begun a process to rename Prince Andrew Park and Prince Andrew Gardens, which lie in a Protestant part of South Belfast. The DUP has protested loudly against the removal of the discredited royal’s name, a controversy that comes on top of a row about putting Irish-language signs beside English ones on the sides of municipal vehicles.

For many unionists, Irish unity means political checkmate at the end of a four-hundred-year conflict that began with the Protestant plantation of Ulster by James I. In a united Ireland, Protestants would be a minority of less than a million, engulfed by Irish with a Catholic background. A proportion might reconcile themselves to the new state of affairs, but by no means all. The political scientist John Whyte pointed out that ‘for civil war to break out, it is not necessary for a majority of inhabitants to desire it.’ Small groups can carry out sectarian assassinations that provoke reprisals and counter-reprisals. Protestant paramilitary groups currently have the reputation of being criminalised, with heavy involvement in the drug trade, and of being infiltrated by the police and MI5. But though there may be no general insurrection, at least some armed unionist resistance to any decisive move towards unity seems unavoidable.

Politics in Northern Ireland always has a whiff of gunpowder about it. The local comedian Tim McGarry once noted that the highest praise for a public event in the North is to say that ‘it passed off peacefully.’ Anti-immigrant riots have become increasingly common in Britain, but in Northern Ireland they carry an extra charge of violence, despite the fact that only 3.2 per cent of the population belong to a minority ethnic group, compared to 18.3 per cent in England and Wales. In Ballymena, a town known as ‘the buckle in the Protestant Bible Belt’, anti-immigrant rioters burned out Roma immigrants from Romania during six nights of street violence in June last year. The Roma took refuge twenty miles away in a leisure centre in Larne, but they were again attacked by masked men and the centre was set ablaze.

Anti-immigrant feeling in Britain has combined lethally with traditional sectarian hatreds in the North. In the Protestant village of Moygashel in County Tyrone, a boat containing a dozen life-size effigies of migrants in orange life jackets was placed on top of a huge bonfire as part of last year’s 12 July annual celebration of the Protestant victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Below the boat were signs reading ‘Stop the Boats’ and ‘Veterans before Refugees’. This year the village, which has a population of about a thousand people, of whom 98 per cent are white, put up a placard by a children’s playground declaring Muslims ‘not welcome’. Police took it down twice, but each time it was replaced.

On 8 June this year Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese asylum seeker, stabbed Stephen Ogilvie, a disabled man, in North Belfast. By the next day there were well-organised attacks on people believed to be immigrants in Protestant districts. On the Newtownards Road in East Belfast, a bus driven by a man of Indian origin was set ablaze by masked men dressed in black. Police rescued a passenger of Somali origin found hiding between the seats. The rioters went on to McMaster Street and Lendrick Street, where they set fire to cars and some of the neat terraced houses, originally built for workers in the nearby shipyard, believing they housed immigrants. The same happened in the Crumlin Road area of North Belfast, always a jigsaw puzzle of Protestant and Catholic enclaves. Some 26 families, intimidated or burned out of their homes, sought emergency housing from the Housing Executive; others took refuge with friends and relatives. Shops were wrecked and looted, while people of colour said they no longer felt safe walking to and from work. A Nigerian nurse who had lived in Belfast for five years and worked in a care home had a stone thrown at her and said she felt she had no choice but to return to Nigeria.

The rioters were directed to demonstrations by social media and brought sledgehammers to break up pavements to make concrete missiles to hurl at the police. Given the Belfast tradition of street fighting, such preparations do not necessarily prove the involvement of Protestant paramilitaries. But Newtownards Road is a stronghold of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and it is unlikely that mass rioting could take place against its wishes.

There​ was support online for the anti-immigrant demonstrations from far-right activists such as Tommy Robinson and from Restore, which pledged that, once in government, it would ‘put murderous third-world savages to death’. But these new allies do not compensate for the loss of the guaranteed support of the British state, which until recently helped unionists to maintain their supremacy. In 1981, Margaret Thatcher told the House of Commons that ‘Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, as much as my constituency [of Finchley] is.’ No British prime minister could say that now: Finchley doesn’t have an open border with another state and a trade barrier between it and the rest of London. Once, the Irish border ensured the subordination of the Northern nationalist community, isolated in a unionist one-party state firmly anchored to Britain. But today Michelle O’Neill is in the strange position of heading the executive of a Northern Irish state which she says ought not to exist. ‘Irish unity’, McBride writes, used to be seen by nationalists as ‘the only way to get rid of the worst excesses of unionist dominance’. But that dominance has disappeared. In the North, deindustrialisation disproportionately hit Protestants, who thanks to sectarian bias were over-represented in the shipyards and engineering plants. A change in the constitutional status of the North away from Britain and towards the Republic would benefit the Northern nationalists less than in the past because the political, economic and social currents are already running powerfully in their favour.

‘In the Republic,’ McBride writes, ‘it is increasingly difficult to argue that partition is seriously damaging.’ In fact, the downsides of ending partition are evident. Even if dire things don’t occur, the political geography of the Republic will be transformed with unknown consequences. The population of an all-Ireland Republic would grow by 35 per cent, climbing above that of Norway or Denmark. Sinn Féin, as the largest political party in the North and the largest opposition party in the South, would be much strengthened. The two historical governing parties in the Republic, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, would find their century-old near monopoly on power capsized. They are predictably unenthusiastic about forcing the pace of unification, but they can’t prevent the issue becoming the new political reality. Even though the country is less Catholic and more socially liberal than it was, a strong sense of Irish national identity has not notably diminished. In line with economic success, Irish self-confidence and self-belief has soared. A united Ireland might be a leap in the dark, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

A dangerous wild card in the future of Ireland is the chronic failure of the unionists to adopt a feasible political strategy since losing their old dominance. Their political parties do not know what to do next, and the DUP may be badly damaged by the conviction on 22 June of its former leader Jeffrey Donaldson for sexual offences against children, including rape. The Good Friday Agreement gave unionists the opportunity to foster a state in which they genuinely shared government with nationalists. Successful power-sharing might have rejuvenated the union with Britain and ensured that a united Ireland was a less attractive alternative for nationalists. But refusal to compromise – summed up in the old unionist slogan ‘Not an Inch’ – is at the heart of unionist political culture. The anti-Catholic Orange Order is no longer the force it was, but with some 28,000 members it hasn’t disappeared. Some unionist politicians understand that this knee-jerk intransigence plays into the hands of Irish Republicans, who see a functioning and successful Northern Ireland as an obstacle to ending partition. Yet any unionist leader who tries to sell this to the unionist electorate has invariably suffered marginalisation or defeat.

The DUP, which first opposed and then only grudgingly accepted the Good Friday Agreement, displaced the Ulster Unionist Party as the largest unionist party in 2003. O’Toole writes that the DUP supported Brexit in 2016 in ‘the hope of a double exit. Brexit would not simply mean the UK’s departure from the EU. It would also be an act of separation from the Republic. It would reverse the slow drift towards integration on the island.’ In the event, the DUP’s gamble failed disastrously, accelerating the integration processes it was intended to reverse. Undeterred by this debacle and under pressure from an even more hardline party, the Traditional Unionist Voice, the DUP may hope that it will have better luck with a future Reform government in the UK. Ideologically, the DUP’s and Reform’s brands of British nativism have much in common. Yet, as happened after Brexit, this might prove another dangerous game for the unionists, since Reform could feel that Northern Ireland leaving the UK is a price worth paying for a deeper British separation from the EU.

‘A united Ireland would not mean bolting Northern Ireland onto the Republic,’ McBride warns. ‘It would mean dismantling both states and creating an entirely new country.’ Arguing for Irish unity, O’Toole says that the case for reunification is highly problematic only if seen as a single explosive event – inviting an equally explosive opposition – and not as a process, one which is already underway.