FRANK FITZPATRICK,
Sir, - Anyone interested in Ireland's future must have read with concern some recent articles by leading unionist intellectuals in The Irish Times. They raise some disturbing questions.
Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, unionists have gained a series of very considerable benefits. Physical force republicanism has been marginalised. In a wholly novel and groundbreaking step, the main body of the IRA has begun to decommission. Articles 2 and 3 of de Valera's Constitution have been recast as statements of aspiration, underpinned by consent. These steps have been massively endorsed by Irish nationalists and even by most republicans, north and south of the border. Moreover, the new political arrangements will protect unionists even if they cease to be a politically effective majority in Northern Ireland itself.
These changes occurred in a context in which demographics had made defunct the old "Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People". Two sovereign states are committed to securing justice and peace in Northern Ireland, and vastly the more powerful of them contains many influential and committed unionists. The future for Northern Ireland looks brighter than for many years.
What, to judge by recent contributions, has been the unionist response? Dennis Kennedy takes the view that even the aspiration to unity by peaceful means is a threat. Paul Bew wonders if Britain has lost the will to protect the "settlement". (Is it the case that even the most sophisticated of unionist commentators still feel in some way like settlers in Ireland?) Steven King writes of a community culturally incapable of responding to leadership and a population large sections of which are underperforming in education.
Is there no positive vision in unionism? Is there no real confidence in its creativity and capacity to compare with that of Irish nationalism? Have unionists engaged in the kind of self-criticism and often painful self-analysis that Irish nationalism and to some degree even Irish republicanism has undergone? Are they confident that their leadership has been of the same quality as nationalist and republican leadership - or has it been hamstrung by the cultural deficits that Steven King describes?
Is it simply the case that equality, mutual forgiveness and tolerance are too much for unionists to countenance? Can anyone say what the authentic hopes and fears of unionists are? And, most importantly, what can be done to assuage Ulster unionists, without reversing the gains in human and political rights of Northern nationalists? - Yours, etc.,
FRANK FITZPATRICK, St Kevin's Parade, Dublin 8.