Dr. Claire Mitchell:

Míle buíochas le Deputy Tully for her question. There are a lot of elements to that. It is a really important question. What is the fear? For the people who are already quite persuaded about the merits of reunification, the fear is that their safety would be threatened. For everybody who participates in Ireland's Future - the Protestants - there is that conversation around the kitchen table about whether they are prepared to relocate, if people are going to find where their children go to school and is it safe. When I express that fear it is from members of my own community. Beyond those fears of the already convinced, there are wider fears in the Protestant community. A friend expressed it to me like he felt the guy ropes had been kicked away. Everything that he had loved about British culture was crumbling and he could see that after Brexit. He could see Britain was changing but he could not define the hope and the offer or the vision that would replace it yet. In the absence of an offer - I do not mean that has to be pinned down now - but in the absence of hope and vision that is perhaps occurring at the moment because of concrete unity planning or specifics, what then fills the vacuum is the hurt of the past and post-conflict issues. We talk about flags because we should be talking about healthcare, and I really think that is what people want to be talking about. Then the hurts of the past then come in and there is time to dwell on them in the absence of something to be very excited about instead.

The fear in private conversations is vastly diminished. I am the political nerd in the family and an election or two ago, I had people call me up who were extremely afraid that a Sinn Féin member would be the First Minister because this is how a lot of election campaigns have been run. These same people have rung, after recent elections, saying "Mary Lou seems great". Somebody who is known to me even used a couple of words of Irish for the first time and said they felt so much less afraid. That context is really changing and those fears are diminishing but that is happening in private. People are not ready to bring that kind of conversation into the light.

Has my book eased people's fears? It has certainly eased my fear. I have spent my entire adult life quite afraid to speak. I wanted to call the book "Do not fear to speak" almost as an encouragement to my own self. In finding 20 people to walk beside all of us who have felt alone and that we were the only radical in the village, we realised this is actually just a history that has not been erased in a Machiavellian way. We have almost erased it within our selves because of our own fears. It was finding that community to walk beside. The book has impacted a lot of Protestants and provided that self-recognition that they are not alone. Their question to me then after reading the book is what they do now? They are asking what they join and I do not have a really good answer for them on that yet. I tell them to do something local in their community, to do something positive and to do things that make them feel uncomfortable. That is as far as I have got but I look forward to the day when I can suggest a really viable, exciting positive reunification movement that they could look at.