Persuading unionists that a united Ireland would benefit them should be the focus of a new campaign for nationalism, the SDLP leader and the North's Deputy First Minister, Mr Mark Durkan, said last night.
In an address to the Oxford University Union, Mr Durkan indicated that the IRA's campaign to achieve unity through violence was consigned to the past."I see a genuine persuasion exercise of the merits of an integrated agreed Ireland as an essential defining part for new nationalism," he said. "I do so with some hope."
With the Belfast Agreement bedded in and working, Mr Durkan, MLA for Foyle, stressed the need to look to the future. "It provides the template not only for the present in Northern Ireland but also for a future moving towards an agreed Ireland."
Since the IRA's terror campaign was halted, unionists appreciated that nationalists could be motivated by vision rather than vendetta, he told the union.
Pointing to the SDLP's role in the new Policing Board set up under the Patten reforms, he added: "Irish unity is not about the entrapment of a new minority. Working the agreement in full, including on policing, we can show that nationalists are not congenitally subversive."
Mr Durkan hailed the Belfast Agreement's strength as providing unionists with the same guarantees where Ireland was the sovereign government to those for nationalists under British rule.
"We now know Irish unity will be legislated for once there is a majority in both parts of Ireland," Mr Durkan continued. "We are honest to unionists about unity. We have been consistent in our commitment to unity by consent.
"It is as set out in the Good Friday agreement. There can be no higher threshold for a united Ireland than there is for a United Kingdom."
Earlier yesterday, at meetings in Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, the Sinn Féin president, Mr Gerry Adams, called for the creation of an "alliance for Irish unity", a coming together of like-minded individuals and organisations who sought an end to partition and a united Ireland based on equality and justice.
Mr Adams also spoke on student poverty, grants access to education and accommodation.