Mr. Andrew Pollak:

The thing I had to leave out for space reasons earlier was the list and it is a rather long one. If we are going to have a successful united Ireland, there will have to be shared institutions and symbols. I have an indicative list and I will quickly go through a few of them: the power-sharing regional government and Parliament in the North, with all of the safeguards enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement must continue; Irish membership of the Commonwealth; the reactivation of the British-Irish Council which has been largely unused up to now, so that Britain and Ireland can work together on issues such as climate change; an agreement with London that a number of northern politicians will continue to sit as British legislators, perhaps in the House of Lords, for which there is a precedent after the setting up of the Irish Free State; a reversal of the Anglo Irish Agreement so that there is a clause to protect unionists interests, as I mentioned earlier; an overhaul of the Irish Constitution to tone down or remove any remaining elements influenced by 1930's-style Catholicism; a new flag, and I suggest the symbols of the four Irish provinces; a new non-military national anthem, perhaps the all-island rugby anthem: "Ireland's Call; a new system of non-sectarian State education; and a new free single tier health service.

I could go on and on but these are things we need to talk about. What is the new Ireland going to look like? Let us talk concretely. I was at the Ireland's Future rally in the 3Arena recently but it was all generalities. It was all demagogic. Nobody asked what this new Ireland will look like. We have just spoken to our unionist friends here. I am not a unionist, by the way, but we have just heard from our unionist friends that they want to see what it is going to consist of and I ask nationalists and republicans to tell us concretely. As Senator Clonan said, Northern unionists are rational people. They do not want to read between the lines. They want to read the lines. They want to be told what a united Ireland is going to look like, in detail.