could it really happen?

(From Irish Independent)

undertaking that the British government will legislate for Irish unity if 50pc-plus-one of the North's voters want it. The last census in April 2001 categorised 43.76pc of the North's 1,685,267 citizens as Catholics and 53.13pc as Protestants. There has been a 2.26pc increase in the proportional number of Catholics since the 1991 census, continuing a steady pattern over 40 years. At that rate, the Provisional movement considers a bare majority achievable sooner than the body politic had anticipated.

The sums, however, make no allowances for the ifs, buts and maybes of human nature. A recent opinion poll found that one-third of Northern Catholics do not want to be reunited with the Republic.

"It's unreasonable to expect everyone to jump towards unification where there is no great urgency and when everyone has been waiting for seven years for what happened this week," believes Fianna Fail senator Martin Mansergh, one of the most enduring participants in the peace process, having worked on it with three Taoisigh. "I would be against looking at it in purely demographic terms. About 41pc of the North's voters vote for Sinn Fein and the SDLP but up to 20pc of the Catholic population are happy enough with the status quo. All the evidence is that the numbers of Protestants in favour of a United Ireland are very small; about 3pc in the opinion polls. But, if you ask them, 'Do you expect it to happen within the next 50 years?', nearly half say yes. So there is an expectation.

"John Hume had it inserted in the Downing Street Declaration that it is for those who believe in a United Ireland to persuade those who don't. I wouldn't like a United Ireland that was based entirely on 51pc Catholic support, 49pc Protestant opposition. In the New Ireland Forum, the Alliance politician, Robert Glendenning, said that the way unionists achieved their self-determination had deprived nationalists of theirs. We have to bear that in mind."

Sinn Fein's seduction strategy got underway in earnest immediately after Monday's announcement with Gerry Adams exhorting republicans to show understanding towards the unionist community. Anyone who thinks it pie-in-the-sky that sufficient numbers of unionists will grow to favour a single-state Ireland need only recall the brouhaha as recently as the 1997 presidential election when leaked Department of Foreign Affairs documents recorded Mary McAleese's expectation that middle-class Catholics in the North would start voting for Sinn Fein. In fewer than seven years, it has eclipsed the SDLP as the biggest nationalist party.

Martin McGuinness has predicted that Ireland will be one State by the time of the Easter Rising's centenary in 2016. When asked, after his speech in Brighton, how soon he expected it, Conor Murphy replied: "I wouldn't be one for fixing dates. Firstly, it could happen sooner than ...