Tom Holland: belief

Transcript context

…But isn’t Irish unification, in particular, almost inevitable, and we should just rip off the Band-Aid and get it over with? Again, I think that the complexities of psephology in Ireland, and specifically Northern Ireland, is way beyond my pay grade. It is incredibly complicated, and my understanding is that, as sectarian identity — the proportion of people in Northern Ireland who identify as either Catholic or Protestant — fades, it doesn’t translate automatically into a desire, necessarily, to remain in the union or to join a united Ireland, but that there is a solid core, nevertheless, that prefers remaining in the UK to joining Ireland. I think that that is further complicated by the fact that in Ireland, Northern Ireland is now much poorer than Ireland itself. As I say, I’m not an expert on the psephology of this, but my hunch is that there would be nervousness on the part of voters in Ireland, as well as in Northern Ireland, about the costs, the challenges, the problems of doing it. I agree. It is often cast as though there’s a kind of inevitability, and if that is what people in Northern Ireland want, then that is absolutely what people in Northern Ireland must have. But I think it’s less inevitable than the way in which the Protestant population is in decline. The Catholic population is growing. I don’t think it necessarily follows quite to the degree that I would say that anything about it is inevitable. The Church of England so suffuses your government. Is it stable in the long run to have 5 percent or fewer of the population attend that church, and in some ways have Islam as the most influential religion in, say, Britain? How’s that going to work out 30, 40 years from now?…

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