Foster would have done well to highlight the links Britain and Ireland have shared throughout years

I WAS less enamoured than Nelson McCausland (Comment, May 24) with the speech Arlene Foster gave to the Policy Exchange Conference on the Union.

She could have talked about the history of the interrelatedness of these two islands, both Britannic (that is, Celtic of a sort), as Aristotle and the classical geographers referred to them.

There has always been movement within and between them — what eventually became a United Kingdom (with Ireland having 100 MPs at Westminster) was an institutional expression of living together. In 1922, there was never a full separation between what was designated as the Irish Free State (with Northern Ireland alone retaining the term “Ireland”), when 26 counties of Ireland moved outside the UK.

The Common Travel Area (allowing for free movement) simultaneously came into effect, so that, in effect, thethen Irish Free State never fully left the United Kingdom.

It did later impose tariffs (with disastrous consequences for Eire, as it had become), until Sean Lemass reversed that in securing a free trade agreement in 1965.

Today, the interesting opponent of a balkanisation of the Britannic islands — that is, a divisiveness — is that of the Dublin government, fearing as it does a “hard border” and all that may result from it.

That, surely, is a unionist position that Arlene Foster might have engaged with.

W A MILLER Belfast