Mr. Andrew Gallagher:

I thank Senator McDowell for his kind remarks earlier and for making my opening speech for me. I think I got confused with my distant cousin sitting in front.

I could go on at length about many things that have been brought up but I will focus on one particular issue I consider important. Most proposals for a border poll as it is commonly understood, will run into a kind of constitutional trilemma, which is that unionists will not help to design their own downfall, nationalists cannot deliver an inclusive settlement without unionist input and Brexit has taught us to never vote on anything before we know all of the details in advance. Any grand plan for unity I have read has always fallen short of one of these requirements and this problem is fundamentally unsolvable. We have to work around it instead.

The workaround is to treat unity as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular event at some point in the future. This means we need to make many changes within the constitutional system we already have, well in advance of any poll or even if a poll is never called, as well as deferring many of the difficult changes until afterwards, when we can get more input from people who perhaps voted no on the initial question.

The border poll will be a critical step in the process but it is a relatively small one compared with the other things that will take place around it.

It is incumbent on the Republic to make itself compatible with unity in advance. It should perhaps even do so unilaterally, if necessary, because getting things done in Northern Ireland is more difficult than it is here. This means eliminating practical impediments to unity and, more importantly, eliminating perceived barriers to the inclusion of non-nationalists in any future conversations. Many people in Northern Ireland, not just unionists, look across the Border at the Republic and at Dublin and they do not necessarily have animosity towards it but they do not see themselves reflected in it; they see something that is other. That needs to change in advance of any talk about constitutional change and a Border poll. We need to move beyond a narrow transactional relationship between North and South and between unionists and nationalists. We need to think in terms of generosity and about being generous towards each other. This is enshrined in law in the North, where it is required to demonstrate parity of esteem between traditions. That was all part of the settlement of the Good Friday Agreement. This is not necessarily a requirement in the Republic, but the Republic should voluntarily introduce parity of esteem with unionism. That would be a valuable contribution to reconciliation. Then, if a Border poll does or does not happen, it would just change relationships that have already been built and rebalance things rather than being a full new constitution in one go. Afterwards, we can have the long-term discussions about what kind of constitutional future we want to build.