Professor Peter Shirlow:

I will respond generally to the question of the pro-union community. As Brexit and the protocol has shown nearly every day through social media, one of the significant challenges which all of us share is to challenge the entrepreneurs of sectarianism and identity politics. Those who act in a way to destabilise must be challenged. There are several ways of illustrating that. Certain entrepreneurs have created this idea among both unionists and non-unionists that the unionist community is in economic free fall etc. Of the 100 most deprived places in Northern Ireland, 72 are Catholic, 18 are Protestant, and the rest are mixed. Unionists, Protestants or people with those backgrounds still maintain a greater likelihood of owning their own homes and of having soft capital such as a home, investments etc. Both unionists and republicans play into the myth that the unionist community is on its back foot, is intransigent etc. That is something we need to respond to, going back to the point about evidence. I grew up in a council house and became a professor. It has not been a bad life and there are many more people like that.

One then gets to picking up the idea of educational disadvantage. There is an issue there for a very small number of people and it is an important issue but issues are picked up all of the time that this unionist community is in decline, that it does not make a contribution, that it is not part of civic society and that it does not have community groups.

In Lisburn, former UDA paramilitaries set up what is now one of the most successful social economy projects on this island. This goes back to the point that, I believe, Senator Chambers made earlier, on knowledge about these issues. The pro-union community is as likely to support marriage equality as those who wish for a united Ireland. The pro-union community is more likely to support abortion. With all of the things I am talking about here, especially when I come to this part of the island, I have to explain this deep-seated lack of knowledge of who I am. I receive questions such as to ask whether there any Protestant poets or writers or do I take a drink. It is as if we all sit at home, wearing a sash and a bowler hat and do not engage with the modern world. We have to remember that the forces of history have forged ideas and identities about people and sometimes unionists dig into that negativity of themselves to present themselves in exactly the way that sometimes nationalists and republicans present them, with the Jamie Bryson types etc. suggesting the game is up and everything is open.

There are barristers, lawyers, business and tech people. Not everybody is living in a council estate and shouting, “No Surrender”. There is a bigger project and I believe this kind of conversation is healthy and it is very important that we have it, as we have not reached the point where we know each other as people. We have allowed stereotypes to be used to form a great deal of our political discourse. There is a point I made earlier on, which is that 100 years on we are still talking in ways which are unimaginative. My wife is called Oonagh and my children are called Aoife and Ruairi. That is an increasing trend in our society; which is of people marrying or living in adult relationships across the sectarian divide.

My final amusing point is that when I married in 1993 in the Catholic church in Derry, and when the altar boy rang the bell, all the Protestants ran out because they thought it was last orders. There are more imaginative ways for people to engage and ways in which people are breaking down these barriers and these relationships but we have a media and political discourse which tells the opposite to actually what the reality is.