A thoughtful article and I don’t think anyone (south of the border anyway) would disagree with Ciarán’s view Geoff. He’s probably right that British media doesn’t really understand the subtlety of what’s happening in the North, and certainly Johnson doesn’t, nor does he care.
I liked the phrase “fracturing the binaries between Catholic and Protestant and nationalist and unionist”. For the last forty years I’ve hoped that joint membership of EEC/EU would blur and defuse the nationalist/unionist issue and that the Catholic/Protestant, which in fact has always been a civil rights issue, would be blurred and defused by increasing prosperity across all communities in the six counties. My first hope was clobbered by Brexit but I think the second is still on track, albeit with a £4/5B PA Westminster handout.
Just through gut feel I think that rabid nationalists have declined far more quickly than rabid unionists (my favourite is Sammy Wilson, who always looks as if he’s about to explode). That is undoubtably true south of the border. There’s no rebel songs in pubs anymore or cries of “up the RA” as there was in the seventies. Southern nationalism is now a matter of quiet pride in being Irish and the many achievements of the minnow nation over the last forty years. NI unionism is stuck in the sixties and really offers nothing to the electorate except nostalgia and stagnation, so there’s a leak to the middle ground. SF have done a better job of broadening their field of operations from nationalism to real day to day issues, so they’ve done a better job in retention.
Ciarán also makes the point that “These binaries had been built into the region’s power-sharing structures, and have in turn patterned the narratives brought to bear on the post-conflict polity…”.
I diverge with him a little here, IMO the power-sharing structures were built around the binaries, because that was fundamentally all that existed. The big question now is as these binaries dissolve how can the power-sharing structures be adapted to accommodate the new reality? As long as Johnson kisses the DUP’s bottom, there’s no chance.