John Bull's Other Island

The Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey is out for another year, indicating, to the surprise of no one who pays attention, that while forty per cent of Catholics are Nationalists, forty-seven per cent are Unionists, even if they might have their own reasons for disliking the term or for voting SDLP.

But, of course, voting SDLP can be an act in favour of the Union, without which nothing Social Democratic or Labour would be possible in Northern Ireland. Both Catholic schools and the legal protection of unborn children are also now far safer in the Union than in the Republic, where the first are certainly doomed and we can only pray that the second is not. The Irish language and its culture are also a lot better off, and increasingly so, within the Union; that will surprise no one who really knows the history of these things.

The Civil Rights Movement was explicitly for equal British citizenship, not for a United Ireland. Even the old Nationalist Party, never mind Sinn Féin, was permitted no part in its early organisation. It was classically British Labour in identifying education, health care, decent homes and proper wages as the rights of citizens, who are demeaned precisely as citizens when they are denied those rights. The fruits of Catholic Social Teaching, indeed.

And the British State is of continuing importance in protecting Northern Ireland's Catholic interest against Protestant domination, whether under devolution pursuant to the Good Friday Agreement, or within such federal Irish structures as may ever be acceptable to a Dublin Establishment at once profoundly unconcerned about Northern Ireland's Catholics and profoundly influenced by the theory of two nations with an equal right to self-determination.

You don't have to take my word for these things. Just ask forty-seven per cent of Northern Ireland's Catholics, as against only forty per cent who take the other view. No wonder that nearly one in ten of them want to restore direct rule.