Mr. Seamus Hanratty:

In my submission I told a story of how when I was at college 17 years ago, I met a young man from a loyalist background who grew up believing that all us southerners wanted to kill them and how, one night, as we were being chased by a sectarian mob, this young Orangeman fell into a river and it was my hand, a southern hand, that saved him. I was the best man at this Orangeman's wedding 15 years later.

In my submission I raised concerns about ramming a tricolour down the throats of unionists. In the context of this submission I have some suggestions that might help to alleviate these concerns. Vast quantities of money must be pumped into impoverished areas to pacify some of the more extreme elements within the Six Counties. The right of people within the Six Counties to call themselves British and to be legally entitled to a British passport must be copper-fastened and enshrined in any new Ireland. Constitutional protections for unionists and their culture are vital. As has already been touched on, we must forego the national flag in Ireland, which will be a bitter pill for many republicans to swallow. In the event of a new Ireland, some kind of temporary joint rule would be necessary to demonstrate to unionists that we are not the great bogeymen who seek to destroy everything they hold dear.

Some of these suggestions will no doubt be anathema to many traditional republicans but the very utterance of the words "united Ireland" are abhorrent to many unionists. Ultimately, in this great fire-dance of nationhood, we can only hope economics will trump political ideology, compromise will trump dogmatism and empathy will trump small-minded egoism. Finally, I encourage people here to go out and talk to somebody from the other side, rather than living in the echo chamber of their own minds, which this forum could be considered to be.