INSIGHT ?

John Manley’s article in the Irish News about the so-called “softly softly” approach to unity taken by Micheál Martin defies the word “analysis.” If this is the best a political correspondent can muster as analysis, he is sadly lacking in political insight. So, if Micheál’s approach is softly, softly, what would Mr Manley call Sinn Féin’s approach to Irish unity? Would it be fair comment to call it gaslighting and selling economic, political, and social utopias? Let us not forget Colm Eastwood’s incoherent rants about Irish Unification and the papers alter ego, the SDLP, whose analysis is also unsurprisingly incoherent, a bit like the overused and under-explained phrase a “New Ireland”

 Just to remind you that in a recent ‘Ireland Thinks’ poll, Irish Unity did not figure among the top 15 issues for voters in the 26 counties. In addition, let us not forget that equalising public sector pay and welfare payments would cost billions annually, and Ireland spends 27% more per capita on healthcare. Ireland has 10 civil servants per 1000 of the population, and Northern Ireland has 15. Plus, 15% of Ireland’s workforce is employed in the public sector, in Northern Ireland, it is 27%. I could go on and on. So, Turkey’s not even nationalist middle-class ones in the six counties will vote for Christmas. So, maybe John would want to assess his softly, softly insight as, pragmatically, pragmatically.

 Jim O’Callaghan’s comments at the recent SDLP event where he stated that, in the event of a majority wanting Irish unity, the 6 counties could keep the PSNI, keep Stormont, no loyalty pledge to the new nation and keep your British identity. In effect, the addition of Northern Ireland to make up a 32-county Ireland would be like adding “a pig with lipstick”.

Finally, John is right that the majority of the people in the 6 counties are opposed to a border poll in the medium term, but he fails to understand that many of them are middle-class Catholics who have the same underlying principles as middle classes generally. Those principles are: What’s in it for my family and me, how is my standard of living and my wallet being protected, am I going to have to pay more tax, and what will my healthcare and pensions landscape look like. To be fair, that is how all normal people think, other than the ones with shamrock-tinted glasses.

The current system of governance here is broken and irreparable, and why anyone thought that a “mandatory coalition” was going to work anyway, is beyond me. Our current political representatives are on a political welfare system where outcomes are irrelevant and where our electorate fails to punish incompetence. So, if you want a united Ireland, let’s sort this place out first.

Suneil Sharma

25th August 2026