Mr. John Bruton:

No. Unfortunately the issue of the Brexit protocol has polarised opinion in Northern Ireland to a degree that is no longer fully rational. Unionism is not behaving rationally at present because it is so exercised by the very high theoretical concept of sovereignty that it has and any EU legislation applying in Northern Ireland is somehow totally unacceptable. Governments throughout the world have entered international agreements where rules made elsewhere apply to them. They have been doing this all the time.

As I said earlier, there is a view of sovereignty and the interpretation of sovereignty that is peculiarly English. I believe Dicey wrote about it. He was a unionist by the way. It has a distorted opinion and has made people fixated on the theory of sovereignty when, in fact, in continental Europe there is multilevel sovereignty. There are all sorts of arrangements whereby people have different allegiances in parallel with one another. They do not conflict but they are not the same. We need to move into this. I remember John Hume speaking about the parallel whereby people can be Spanish, Catalan and European at the same time. Unionists need to think that they can be Ulster unionist and adhere to the covenant while being Irish, British and European all at the same time. This is not an impossible task for the human mind to encompass. This is what we must do. With regard to whether we can persuade them, I am not so sure we have to be formally a persuader. They are more likely to persuade themselves than we are to persuade them. This is the way it works. People are rarely persuaded by others. They are persuaded by themselves.