Once the home of Edward Carson, the Ulster Hall never saw a night like this

Here was unmistakable symbolism. One thousand people streamed into that bastion of unionism, the Ulster Hall on Belfast’s Bedford Street, on Wednesday night for a meeting supporting Irish unity

Unionist leader Edward Carson assembled in the hall with hundreds of other unionists 110 years ago to oppose Home Rule, before departing to Belfast City Hall to sign the Ulster Covenant, along with half a million more in the days afterwards, some inscribing their names in blood.

A few came to the Ireland’s Future gathering with open minds, but the vast majority want a united Ireland, and soon. Barely a dozen protesters gathered dourly across the road.

A few PSNI officers stood by the loyalist group who did not want to speak to The Irish Times. “Go away, we have nothing to say to you,” said one man, suppressing a deep anger.

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The organisers were well aware of the symbolism of meeting in the Ulster Hall, with singer Frances Black, chairwoman of Ireland’s Future, describing it as “momentous”.

Some believe the organisation’s push for a unity referendum is “divisive”, she acknowledged. But they were wrong, she said. “Talking never hurt anyone.”

All the Northern parties were invited, but no Democratic Unionist Party or Ulster Unionist Party member attended. Neither did anyone officially from Alliance.

Sinn Féin, however, was well represented, its former leader Gerry Adams the most prominent republican present. And there were a few SDLP faces in the hall.

‘Hun bastards’

Every contribution was supportive, but not every contribution was easy listening for republicans, or, especially, former IRA members present, especially one from retired Shankill businessman Glenn Bradley.

Bradley, a relative of the late Progressive Unionist Party leader Hugh Smyth, was five years old when he was injured in a 1972 no-warning IRA car bomb on his way to Sunday school. Afterwards, his classmates called him “Scarface”.

In secondary school, he and others were taunted with “Die, you Hun bastards” by republicans during the 1981 hunger strikes as they travelled on their school bus. In Belfast, “Hun” is as insulting for Protestants as “Taig” is for Catholics.

In 1990, his uncle, Louis Robinson, a police officer suffering from depression, was abducted, tortured and executed by the IRA as he made his way home from a Kerry fishing trip.

He was killed despite a television appeal by his wife Anne for his life to be spared. Speaking of the Troubles, Mr Bradley said: “If it was a war, then plenty of people were guilty of war crimes.”

Proud of his ‘British culture and Protestant tradition’, Bradley told the Ulster Hall crowd that that identity ‘does not make me any less Irish than anyone else’

Later, he joined the British army, serving five tours in Northern Ireland, because he wanted to “take the war” to the IRA. “I had enough hate in me to kill and destroy the world”.

So, how does a man like Bradley now come to favour a united Ireland?

Through discovering “my denied history”, he said, especially the Protestants’ involvement in the 1798 rebellion and learning that his Ulster Volunteer Force and Covenant-signing great-grandfather was a fluent Irish speaker.

Such discoveries, “that type of myth-busting, that type of rising above propaganda”, caused him to question his thinking. “[But] the big game-changer was Brexit,” he added.

‘Tricolour’s true meaning’

Proud of his “British culture and Protestant tradition”, Bradley told the Ulster Hall crowd that that identity “does not make me any less Irish than anyone else”.

“The only people I can see who are denying that those conversations are taking place, and the potential of what that can then deliver, is political unionism,” he said.

Ben Collins, an East Belfast Presbyterian and a former Northern Ireland Office civil servant, has been influenced, too, by the United Irishmen and learning the “true meaning of the Tricolour” – the reconciliation of Orange and Green.

The Good Friday Agreement meant that he could embrace “my Irishness”, he said, but Brexit made his change of direction an “urgent necessity”. Equally, however, he would not be “bombed into a united Ireland”.

Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar is “much more open” and “more bullish” about unity than Fianna Fáil’s Micheál Martin, he said, hoping that Varadkar would call a citizens’ assembly next month.

Sociologist and writer Claire Mitchell, from a Quaker family of CND and anti-apartheid activists, evangelical charismatics, trades unionists and environmentalists, spoke of “alternative Protestants” who are “open to a conversation about a united Ireland”.

‘Many Protestants are at least asking the question why Westminster does not want us’

It was a call repeated by others. Political unionism had stuck its “head in the sand” on the unity debate, but “civic unionism is already engaging”, she believed.

Denzil McDaniel, former editor of the Enniskillen-based, unionist-supporting Impartial Reporter, believed “middle-ground” Protestants and unionists will decide the issue.

“Many Protestants are at least asking the question why Westminster does not want us,” he said, quoting Ernest Hemingway’s line about the two ways of going bankrupt: “gradually then suddenly”. That set people thinking.

Offensive tweets

Solicitor and former victims’ commissioner Patricia McBride said the “route back to the European Union was through reunification”, a theme echoed by others. The EU does not have to be neutral in this debate, she said.

Though tightly organised, the Ireland’s Future gathering did not run totally smoothly, since one heavily advertised young Protestant, Andrew Clarke had to pull out after the Belfast News Letter reported on offensive tweets he had posted about the DUP and its voters.

Saying he despised unionist “supremacism and confused victim-narratives” Clarke also tweeted about the current incidence of Sinn Féin members suing journalists and politicians.

“Sinn Féin aren’t bullying D4 newspaper columnists into silence through legal threats, but at this stage I wouldn’t be that unhappy if they did. Years after Ireland is United, these weird people will be studied and written about as a bizarre quirk of Partitionism.”

He subsequently pulled out of the meeting, saying his online posts were “not reflective of the work that Ireland’s Future is carrying out”, though his limited contrition did not stop him criticising the News Letter online subsequently.

Saying he was from a “culturally unionist background” Oxford history student, Peter Adair said he saw himself now as leaning more to nationalism, partly influenced by Brexit.

But nationalists will have to make compromises in a new Ireland, not just people from his community: “Unionists must be reassured their opinions and identity will be respected,” he said.

‘Let me send a very, very clear message from this hall, on this platform tonight: all armed groups in this society need to disband, decommission and give us peace’

Queen’s University Belfast academic and senior Ireland’s Future member Prof Colin Harvey, who has faced online abuse and threats recently, received the warmest applause. Some people stood to do so.

“Let me send a very, very clear message from this hall, on this platform tonight: all armed groups in this society need to disband, decommission and give us peace. They need to get out of the way of this constitutional conversation,” he said.

Coyly silent

Just hours after the UK Supreme Court had rejected the Scottish National Party’s bid for a second Scottish independence referendum, its president, Michael Russell, addressed the gathering.

Saying he wanted a second referendum, Russell was coyly silent about supporting one in Northern Ireland. On independence, the Scots must look after themselves, but the same was true for the Irish, was Russell’s implied diplomatic and cautious position, especially when he reminded the audience that “no one has suffered a nosebleed in the cause of independence”.

Despite fears that the Ulster Hall gathering would run past midnight, it finished shortly after 9.30pm, at which point everyone departed happily and confidently into the night. Outside, the loyalist protesters had departed, but somehow their mood of sullen anger lingered.