Settlement for NI must involve space for Irishness, says unionist academic

A SETTLEMENT of the Northern problem needs to involve creation of a society in which there is space for Irishness as well as Britishness, a unionist academic has told the Dail Sub committee on Northern Ireland.

Mr Norman Porter, a member of the Ulster Unionist Party and author of a book, Rethinking Unionism, said he had rejected many of the conventual attitudes of mainstream unionism.

These included an overriding obsession with "the union, the whole union and nothing but the union" and a pretence that Northern Ireland was as British as Kent or Surrey.

The "inescapable fact" was, he said, that Northern Ireland was "neither as Irish as Galway nor as British as Finchley." It was a place where British and Irish influences intermingled and there needed to be proper, institutional recognition of this in the context of any settlement, with "at least some consultative role, for Dublin."

But he added that each identity should be given "due recognition" rather than parity of esteem. While the majority of the population considered itself British, "then politically Britishness has to count for more.

Mr Porter, who was introduced by the chairman, Mr Jim O'Keeffe, as a man who had publicly abandoned his former stance as "an extreme unionist and an explicit Protestant bigot," stressed that he did not speak for his party. His views had been criticised as "off the wall" by his party's, leader, Mr David Trimble, he admitted.

But he believed it was unionism's "very narrow, overly procedural approach" that prevented compromise. Unionism was continually "drawing lines in the sand" and decommissioning was the latest one.

There was an obsession with "slippery slopeism," he said: "It's as though if we give way on this issue, we're giving way on something much larger."