A word or two on unity

Sir, – Diarmaid Ferriter quotes from WB Yeats’s Seanad speech in 1924 on unity – that it would be won in the end not because we fight but because we govern this country well (“McDonald’s comments on unity are wildly exaggerated”, Opinion & Analysis, February 2nd).

I came across a similar thought recently in the report of a Dáil debate which took place less than a decade later on March 1st, 1933:

“The only policy for abolishing partition that I can see is for us, in this part of Ireland, to use such freedom as we can secure to get for the people in this part of Ireland such conditions as will make the people in the other part of Ireland wish to belong to this part.”

Some of your readers may be as surprised as I was to learn that the speaker was none other than president of the Executive Council, Éamon de Valera. His formulation may have been a little tortuous, perhaps because of his difficulty in finding labels acceptable to him for this part and the other part of Ireland. But his underlying thought, echoing that of WB Yeats, is, I think, as valid today as it was 90 years ago. – Yours, etc,