Sir, - Recent opinion poll results in the Belfast Telegraph show support for the Union in Northern Ireland at a mere 56 per cent, which should not surprise anyone who has followed the startling decline of the pro-union vote in recent elections, where parties/candidates espousing a categorically unionist manifesto have sometimes found themselves with less then 55 per cent of the votes.
If the trend of a 13 per cent decline in support for the Union over the past decade continues throughout the next 10 years, then unionists will possibly begin to poll less than 50 per cent of the votes, five years from now. Quite literally, unionism could become a minority affiliation by 2005.
Such swift decline indicates a more radical problem for unionism than the well-recognised but gradually decelerating growth-rate of the Catholic community.
In fact it may well be that unionism itself - schismatic, internationally unpopular and slow to reform itself - is losing its appeal for a whole range of voters. We live in an era when membership of the United Kingdom is bringing almost no perceived economic benefits to most Ulster people, including poverty-stricken farmers, redundant textile workers and former shipyard employees. Voters can look south and see a prosperous multi-cultural Republic which is embracing the new, global knowledge-based industries with confidence and verve. No wonder unionism seems like yesterday's creed.
The one hope for unionists must surely be to offer the promise that economic innovation, social reform and commercial renewal can happen swiftly and effectively in a Northern Ireland stabilised by consensus and local government. To that end, it is unionism and not republicanism which should be lamenting the suspension of the Stormont Assembly and working every hour that God sends in order to find an answer to the decommissioning impasse.
If it becomes clear to the outside world, over the next few months, that consensual government of Northern Ireland is not going to be established, then international investment in the region is simply not going to take place. It will become the saddest backwater of the United Kingdom. The attractions to the voters of the next generation, of affiliation with the European Republic which is next door to them on the island, will become even greater.
Unionism has, perhaps, five years to ensure the survival of Northern Ireland. Perhaps, in a more urgent sense, it has merely a few weeks to decide (as the prime advocate of The Northern Ireland state) that it must be the one to make the necessary strategic compromises, so as to make a Northern Irish local assembly work, and with it the whole edifice of the Belfast Agreement. Otherwise, both in the eyes of the world, and in the eyes of the local voter, the ultimate economic failure of Northern Ireland looms.
Unionism is in the last-chance saloon, and the tragedy is that, despite the evidence of the opinion polls, a lot of Unionists still do not seem to recognise it. - Yours, etc,
Philip Orr, Chairman, New Ireland Group, Downpatrick, Co Down.