What the commentators said

Growing up in Belfast at the tail end of the Troubles, the idea of a United Ireland was never more than “hypothetical”, said Siobhan Fenton in The Irish Independent. “Simple mathematics meant it would never happen.” But that was then. After last week’s result, unification looks “credible – and perhaps inevitable”: Sinn Féin now has only one less seat in Stormont than the Democratic Unionists. One reason for the dramatic electoral shift to the hard-line strand of nationalism is the utter indifference shown by Tory politicians towards Northern Ireland. It was barely mentioned during the Brexit campaign, even though it’s the only part of the UK with a land border with an EU state. What appals many is the prospect of a “hard border” with the Irish Republic, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. No one wants a return to the queues, frontier checks and “violent tensions” that made life so miserable in the Troubles. It was no surprise that 56% of voters in Northern Ireland opted for Remain in the referendum, or that about 70% of first-preference votes went to anti-brexit parties in last week’s Stormont election.

At a deeper level, long-term changes in the “sectarian headcount” are working against unionism, said Jon Tonge in The Belfast Telegraph. Just a third of voters now identify as unionist – and a mere 20% of 18- to 24-year-olds. And it’s not as if unionists can depend on unqualified support from London, said Adam Boulton in The Sunday Times. Since the 1980s, Westminster has made plain that it has “no selfish, strategic or economic interest” in keeping the province inside the UK. Indeed, the 1998 Northern Ireland Act makes specific provision for a referendum if ever it seems likely a majority of voters want “to form part of a United Ireland”. Preoccupied with Scotland’s separatist ambitions ( see page 25), the Government seems “barely aware” of what’s happening across the Irish Sea. Yet it could well be the “six counties of Ulster” that “jump the queue to be first out of the United Kingdom”.