Nowadays it's impossible to follow what's happening or not happening in politics without thinking about a united Ireland. Everyone has an opinion about how, why and when it will come about and they have a right, even a duty, to speak out.
First of all, I don't remember a time when the great debate was more important or relevant. It's back at the heart of all political discussion, mainly because of the twists and turns of Brexit but also because of the Stormont boycott.
If devolution is dying, because unionists don't like the terms of the Brexit they voted for, what is the future for this part of the island and the increasingly disunited kingdom? Neither unionists nor nationalists (or Alliance undecided) think the present limbo will continue.
A new terrible beauty has been born, thanks to the bunker mentality of political unionism, which may force the Westminster government to think of a Good Friday Agreement mark 2. Does it clasp the errant child closer or does it use the inalterable Windsor Framework to push it further away?
The DUP have gambled everything on the Tories doing as they have always done, and throwing enough scraps of legislation and money at the problem to allow Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and his divided party to march rather than crawl back to Stormont in second place. But after 20 months of stalemate and repetition of impossible DUP demands on Westminster, the prospect of Labour in the driving seat is perhaps the best chance of a partial retreat.
While none of this seems to have much of a bearing on the border question – as Chris Heaton-Harris has said, he sees "no basis" for a referendum – it is still the central long term issue. No one imagines that Sinn Féin, in a restored Stormont operating the Irish sea border, would fail to build closer relations with Dublin, or that the DUP would not resent every hint of estrangement from London.
This pull of the British rather than the Irish dimension is something that nationalists tend to play down, but it has a long history. My liberal-minded family in Belfast always identified as British, though there were indirect links with Donegal and Dublin. South of the border was a small, rural, cleric-dominated country whose constitution made it an existential enemy and whose neutrality in the Second World War isolated it from most of the civilised world.
As for our education in the history of Ireland, it was almost non-existent. It started, in our British history books, with the wholly admirable Act of Union, quickly passed over the Famine and the evictions, and there was little sympathy for Home Rule (on account of its likely effect on Belfast manufacturing) or the treacherous Easter Rising. Partition, we learned, was the natural and correct solution to the rival cultures on the island, and de Valera was a continual bogey man for our parents, uncles and aunts, many of whom had lived through the London blitz.
That was then, but what changes there have been. Membership of the European Union, exploited by Ireland's best civil servants, has transformed the southern neighbour while it has never appealed to the exceptionalism of the British. They elected politicians who freed them, regardless of the effects on Scotland and Wales, let alone this blighted corner of Ireland.
We've been learning hard lessons since that fateful referendum vote in 2016, and it's no surprise that a divided electorate should look for radical solutions now that conventional devolution has seemingly failed. To unionists, fearful of constitutional change, that looks like direct rule and to nationalists a united Ireland.
Against the background I've described, with 30 years of armed struggle to harden opinions on both sides, a united Ireland could remain a vision rather than an inevitable reality. Neither the loyalist nor republican-supporting populations are going away quietly and even Keir Starmer is currently a born-again unionist who would campaign for no change.
The rest of us, clutching our Irish passports and desiring long term peace and political stability, can only watch and wait to see what is on offer. I'd love to reconnect with Europe, but would the extra cost of living and my several prescriptions be worth it? For future generations, yes, but mine? I could even abstain, as I did in 1975.
In the end, unity will come down to practicality, and demographic change in its favour. It has always been accepted that a contented nationalist middle class, in good jobs, could be decisive, but no one is sure that still applies, after the DUP's stalling tactics. Yet getting a clear majority, as the north aligns as much with EU regulations as British, will not be easy.
It is difficult to improve on the aspirations of the 1984 New Ireland Forum, which committed nationalists to recognising the validity of both identities and called for them to be protected in "durable political, administrative and symbolic" form, leaving the door open to a federal Ireland. Time, and the traditional lack of attention by Westminster governments, will tell.
