Mr. Mark Bassett:

On the point about the Constitution, there is a lot to admire about the Irish Constitution. It takes in fundamental rights and judicial review from the American tradition. It has features of parliamentary democracy, which we can see have been taken from England. A central feature of the Constitution is that it was drafted, adopted and amended with unity in mind. Some of the most important features of the document are now Articles 2 and 3. They can accommodate a united Ireland, subject to some specific amendments. A vote in the North for reunification should be seen as a compliment. For the most part and in the main, the State has been a success. There are some aspects of the Irish Constitution that are very much admired in the North. Participation in the referendums on the repeal of the eighth amendment and on same-sex marriage, and going further back the contribution of the electorate to approving or rejecting European treaties, was not something that was available in the UK with its different constitutional set up.

We must keep in mind that with the UK vision for Northern Ireland we can see the priorities of Britain are very different to the priorities in the North. The vote for Brexit was not replicated in the North. The form of Brexit that was chosen primarily by English MPs and the current UK Government could not be replicated on the island of Ireland. The mitigation of that is the Northern Ireland protocol. It is nobody's first choice. Nobody would design this from first principles as the best way. Northern Ireland is outside the European Union. There is a lot of unionist unhappiness with the practical outworkings of the protocol. Next year there will be an assembly election and two years after that there will be a vote on certain limited aspects of the protocol, particularly its rules on the free movement of goods, internal taxation, state aid and so on. If there is an assembly that votes to reject those aspects of the protocol, we are still left with the conundrum that it is an EU and Irish priority that there is no hard border on the island. It is a UK priority also. Articles 5 to 10 that are in the protocol now will have to be amended, but something similar is going to have to come back and it is going to have to get the same sort of outcome. There were opportunities for less divergence in Britain but there is no political support for that. The future for Northern Ireland, the vote for union is a vote for being outside the European Union but in a protocol. As Professor Harvey has said, the task is for those of us who do believe in Irish reunification to come up with something more attractive than what is on offer from the current status quofor the medium-term future for Northern Ireland.