Persuading unionists that a united Ireland would benefit them should be the focus of a new campaign for nationalism, SDLP leader Mr Mark Durkan said tonight.
In an address to the Oxford University Union, Mr Durkan indicated the IRA's campaign to achieve unity through violence was now consigned to the past.
He said: "I see a genuine persuasion exercise of the merits of an integrated, agreed Ireland as an essential defining part for new nationalism.
"I do so with some hope."
With the 1998 Belfast Agreement now bedded in and working, Mr Durkan, who is also Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland's power-sharing government, stressed the need to look to the future.
"It (the Agreement) provides the template not only for the present in Northern Ireland but also for a future moving towards an agreed Ireland," he said.
Since the IRA's terror campaign was halted unionists appreciate that nationalists can be motivated by vision rather than vendetta, he told the union.
Pointing to the SDLP's role in the new Policing Board set up under the Patten reforms, he added: "Irish unity is not about the entrapment of a new minority.
"Working the Agreement in full, including on policing, we can show that nationalists are not congenially subversive."
Mr Durkan hailed the Belfast Agreement's strength as providing unionists with the same guarantees where Ireland is the sovereign government to those for nationalists under British rule.
"We now know Irish unity will be legislated for once there is a majority in both parts of Ireland," the Foyle MLA continued.
"We are honest to unionists about unity. We have been consistent in our commitment to unity by consent.
"It is as set out in the Good Friday Agreement. There can be no higher threshold for a united Ireland than there is for a United Kingdom."