There is a tendency to forget the "remarkable" recent growth of practical cross-Border co-operation, a summer school was told last night.
Speaking at the opening session of the Aughrim Summer School near Ballinasloe, Co Galway, the founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, Andy Pollak, said this was because the co-operation "is so quiet, non-controversial and low-level".
"There are now over 700 civil servants from both jurisdictions working in the North-South area; seven or eight years ago there were probably fewer than 50," he said.
Mr Pollak said that "practical" unionist politicians - especially those from a business background - can see that it makes good sense to co-operate in mutually beneficial ways among the five-and-a-half million people on the island.
It was no coincidence that the first sign of Rev Ian Paisley "showing anything other than hostility" to North-South co-operation was when he praised a cross-Border consortium of farmers for stepping in to save a potato-processing factory in his North Antrim constituency from closure two years ago, he said.
A year later, Mr Paisley declared that "no one has anything to fear from . . . an accountable North-South relationship of equal partnerships."
"For those of us who have spent half a lifetime studying the bigoted and ferocious antipathy to Irish Catholicism and nationalism which is the bedrock of the DUP leader's belief system, this is the stuff of which miracles are made," Mr Pollak said.
He also cited the observation of historian Prof Paul Bew that unionist willingness to co-operate across the Border provided that the South recognise the principle of unionist consent goes back to the early 1920s, when this served as the basis for the short-lived pact between Michael Collins and unionist leader Sir James Craig in 1922.
However, Mr Pollak warned against expecting miracles from this process, saying it would be "a painstaking process to persuade our unionist fellow Irishmen and women that the people of the South no longer have any ambition to rule the North, but only want what is best for the people of the island, North and South, whatever constitutional arrangements that involves."
The annual Aughrim Summer School, under the theme "Shaping the Future of Ireland", continues until tomorrow. The panel of speakers includes Rev Earl Storey, a Church of Ireland clergyman who is director of the Hard Gospel Project, Bishop John Kirby of Clonfert, and William Logan, Grand Master of the Royal Black Institution.