Roy Foster: belief

Transcript context

…As Northern Ireland becomes at least as much Catholic as Protestant, does that increase or decrease the chances for a single Ireland? To say that it would increase them is to perhaps assume too much that people’s political vote follows their ethnoreligious identity. It used to be so; it’s less so now. I think you get far more middle-class Catholics who will admit to believing in the union now than you ever would have before. You get, on the other side, I think, more — especially in the younger age cohorts — you get far more people from a Protestant background prepared to envisage a united Ireland. Partly, of course, because the Republic with which they would theoretically be uniting is such a younger, more outward-looking, less priest-ridden, more fashionable (to use the word) entity than the country that their parents or grandparents would have averted their gaze from. At the same time, I think there’s much talk at the moment of a border poll and how it would go — a border poll meaning a vote for reunification. I think intercommunal tensions are so high at the moment in Northern Ireland — and that again brings us back to Brexit or has a lot of its origins in Brexit — that I think it’s the wrong time for such a poll. If it narrowly turned out in favor of a united Ireland, I think it would be fairly catastrophic. If it turned out narrowly the other way, it would probably be catastrophic too. I think at the moment things are too finely balanced to push it. I suspect, and here I’m pushing the boat out a bit, that in about 30 years’ time the governing opinion in the six counties of Northern Ireland might well have shifted much more towards uniting with a European Republic of Ireland to the south than staying with what will by then be a sadly diminished England. But that’s just a personal opinion. In a scenario of that kind, does Belfast become Ireland’s second city? Or is it too deindustrialized? Is it ultimately going to be Cork in the South? How do you see the urban landscape of a united Ireland evolving?…

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