McDevitt: A united Ireland must be debated and agreed by all

Saturday 20 February 2010

SDLP South Belfast MLA Conall McDevitt has recommended the reconvening of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation to discuss uniting all the people of Ireland.

Speaking at an Irish unity event in London, Mr McDevitt said: "The Good Friday Agreement changes the debate about unity in a fundamental way.

"The question goes from being whether there will be a united Ireland to when and how Ireland will be united.

"I believe Irish Nationalism, including provisional republicanism, has not even begun to debate the type of Ireland we wish to build.

"Will this new country be built on the very thing that has made it possible - the Good Friday Agreement - or will it be cast in the image of the 1937 constitution?

"In other words do we want to build a Catholic and Gaelic Ireland or somewhere more representative of the true diversity on our island?

"The question today is surely not whether we wish to simply reintegrate the national territory in the image of the Irish state but whether Irish men and women, catholic, protestant and dissenter wish a New Ireland to emerge. An Ireland that reflects our diversity, good government and that places equality, prosperity and justice at the heart of everything it does.

"My generation has been handed the keys to that Ireland.

"We are the inheritors of peace not the perpetuators of conflict.

"We can open the door in front of us and with courage recast all about us or we can look back and repeat the mistakes of the past.

"The truth is the people of our region are not as divided as our politics suggests.

"Irish nationalism can take the old road of a one size fits all future or it can walk a new one in which unity is neither a unionist nightmare nor a nationalist pipedream.

"But to do that it must change and change radically.

"First the very issue of unity needs to be elevated above politics. That's why the SDLP has recommended the reconvening of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation to discuss unity.

"We owe it to ourselves as a nation to debate and agree a model of a united Ireland and to do so before 2016. We cannot be complete as a nation without a shared vision of our future.

"North needs south but south will need the North if a new Ireland is to emerge and the absolute potential of our island is to be fulfilled.

"Secondly we need to make the North work. Ignoring the opportunity of regional government is to ignore the common ground on which a new Ireland will be built.

"That means maximum devolution but also imaginative regional solutions to local problems. Its means real power sharing that is capable of building the best education system in Ireland, defending the NHS - a British institution made Irish in Northern Ireland.

"It also means getting serious about the economy because we will never build a strong all Ireland economy if we have a weak northern one.

"We need to make the North a place where sectarianism is the real enemy and government leads the fight against it.

"A strong North means a strong Ireland. A weak, underperforming and politically dysfunctional one means a weaker Ireland.

"Our home is a region of Ireland. Our dream is for it to flourish under the flag of our nation. Others hope it will remain a region of the UK. But we all surely agree that it is our region and needs governed for the benefit of all our people."