Some form of Irish unity is not unthinkable in principle and should be a process with a modest beginning and no predetermined end, a former head of the Northern Ireland civil service has told the Merriman Summer School.
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, who was secretary to the first but failed 1974 Sunningdale powersharing government, said that "far-sighted politicians, economists and academics will have to think long and hard about the true nature, cost, ethos and dynamics of a new orientation of affairs" in Northern Ireland.
While Sir Kenneth's comments on Irish unity are carefully qualified, his speech is likely to meet with hostility from unionist quarters, particularly considering his own unionist background and his long-standing eminent position.
Irish unity should be thought of as a process with "a modest beginning and no predetermined end", and "not a single dramatic step", he told his audience.
"Let us rather think of it as a possible or potential contract between distinct groups of people, with all the cards on the table," he said.
"So it is that I do not find the idea of some form of Irish unity or closer association - almost certainly after my time - in any way unthinkable in principle. But what is conceivably acceptable in principle would have to be mutually acceptable in practice," said Sir Kenneth.
"Please do not suppose that if, in some future poll, 50.1 per cent of the electorate were to vote for Irish unity, the outvoted 49.9 per cent would tramp into the new jurisdiction like a defeated army," he said.
While successive Stormont governments were far too slow to acknowledge the sense of Irishness felt by an "extensive minority" in Northern Ireland, any triumphalism "when the boot could be on the other foot" would not work.
Offering a "very personal perspective", he said, "As I grow older, I care less and less which flag is flown and which anthem played where I live." He was comfortable with a situation where in an "indefinitely prolonged situation" local politicians continued to run Northern Ireland with a British government financial subsidy.
What he would find difficult to bear "with any sense of self-respect was a further relapse into that parody of democratic government described as direct rule", he added.
Sir Kenneth, whom the IRA attempted to murder with a bomb attack on his Co Down family home in 1988, said he accepted Sinn Féin's presence in government notwithstanding the attack on his life.
