Malachi O'Doherty

People continue to frame the problem of Ireland and Brexit around the potential for a hard border triggering violence. That may happen but it is not the bigger picture as I see it.
The offensive part of Brexit for many is the presumption that the NI majority for Remain has no meaning, that our votes simply pool in with the UK’s as a whole. This ignores the fact that NI is already a semi detached part of the UK, that unlike in other parts, the entire population is entitled to EU citizenship and passports; that NI is not as British as Finchley, indeed that international treaties like the GFA have been created to acknowledge the Irishness of all in NI who choose to identify as Irish.
It follows from this that people so affronted by the disregard for their vote and for their special status within the UK might react. The greater likelihood is not that they would be violent but that they would insist in other ways on their EU membership being acknowledged. They have at their disposal something which no other grouping in the UK has, the option of voting themselves back into the EU through a Border Poll.
Theresa May says she fears that ‘moderate nationalists’ may break up the UK. And she is right to identify ‘moderate nationalists as a greater problem now – a greater imponderable – than militant republicans.
But there is another problem within NI and that is the veto which Evangelical Christians exercise over social reform through the DUP. This prevents Northern Ireland modernising alongside the rest of Britain, Ireland and Europe. It condemns us to being a redneck backwater.
This also has, potentially, the same remedy as Brexit, a border poll that would merge us with the Republic inside the EU where social progress could continue according to the will of the majority and free of the drag of religion.
Until recently it would have seemed absurd to seek social reform on issues like abortion and same sex marriage through joining the Irish Republic, but now the republic is liberalising faster than we are and many here want to be part of that change too.
That creates the possibility of a border poll being seen as a solution not just by ‘moderate nationalists’ but by secular minded, liberal thinking people in the ‘Protestant community’, people who loved their Britishness for the sake of its secular character in preference to ‘Catholic Ireland’ and will be held back in NI now in a way that they would not be in the Republic – or in GB if it ultimately made more sense to them to move there.