Professor Peter Shirlow:

I think this is the very point, that is, on whether we have moved to a better Northern Ireland. I made the point earlier about the NUTS 3 regions. There are 179 in the UK and Belfast is seven. The only places above it are in the south-east of England, mostly in London. It is a phenomenal performance. We know that is driven by fintech, cybercrime and cultural production. That has shaped and framed a different city.

Nobody is saying there are not structural weaknesses or difficulties. Agri-business in Northern Ireland feeds 10 million people in Great Britain. It has dramatically improved its quality, its marketing and all that. When we reach the point where nationalists and those who want a united Ireland can accept it is a better place, that will be a true and proper political shift. When we reach a place where unionists can accept that the Republic of Ireland is not the place they were told it was, we will have reached a level of political maturity. The point the Senator picked up is a problem of a lack of political maturity. People can say Northern Ireland is an improving and better place and still want a united Ireland. We are tied to this 100-year-old approach of the Orwellian "two legs good, four legs bad". Any time I point out the positive things about Northern Ireland people just say "if" and "but". It is like having a row with your partner. Nobody is going to give in. It is the same with unionists. They always point out the problems in the South, like the issues of housing or the working poor or whatever. Then people in the South will say "Well, we have more of this or that". That masculinised type of conversation - it is not a debate - very much reflects the type of politics we live in. Facts do matter. We are the only society in the world that has had a successful peace process and we do not celebrate that success because sharing power with Sinn Féin created successes and acknowledging North-South relationships created positives. For republicans, of course, Northern Ireland cannot be a positive place because it is a colonial construct and an artificial society. Politicians are very good at claiming success when it comes. There is nowhere else in the world where they have failed to actually grab the successes of what they created and delivered. We are caught in this constitutional binary and that constitutional binary defines the protocol and the reaction to it.