Sir, - In the pamphlet New Ire- land: Sell Out or Opportunity (1972), the Northern Protestant/ unionist people were urged to seize the initiative by establishing themselves as co-founding fathers of a truly New Ireland. It was argued that this would have vested them with enduring purpose and earned them the respect of their fellow Irish men and women. Much has happened in the intervening years to weaken the position from which they could have operated all those years ago. It is sad to conclude that a woeful lack of vision, combined with a lamentable lack of imaginative leadership, has kept the unionist people on the defensive.
Rather than waiting to be slowly spurned by the people of a changing Britain, rather than waiting to be out-voted into an Ireland for which they had little empathy, rather than waiting to decline without significant purpose for remaining in the land of their birth and their ancestors, it was suggested that they should instead pursue a vision of Ireland in which sectarianism would no longer dominate and undermine the social state.
It was acknowledged that, in the minds of many, "United Ireland" implied absorption of the Northern six counties as merely an extension of the Southern 26, so it was necessary to emphasise that, on the contrary, New Ireland implied sitting down with fellow Irish women and men to draft a completely new constitution to reflect the consensus required to underpin any claim to unity.
In re-stating the obvious - that six into 26 would not go, that a New Ireland could not be the old Ireland in disguise, that implicit in the ending of partition is the dissolution of the present Irish Constitution and 26-county state - a challenge was also being put to political leaders in the Republic.
We know that thus far most Northern Protestants have looked elsewhere for their salvation and we still wait for a convincing statement from the Republic concerning the fundamental constitutional changes needed if there is to be successful negotiation leading to the end of partition.
The world today is changed out of all recognition since 1972; the power and influence of Britain has waned while the self-confidence and self-esteem of the Irish people has grown to a degree unimaginable not so many years ago. The focus on Europe has replaced that once reserved for the British Empire and Commonwealth. The unionist world, in which many of us were reared, has gone for ever. We are also far removed from the world of those who stood on the steps of the GPO in Dublin in 1916.
Census trends and the falling unionist proportion of the vote suggests that unionist people are in danger of being overtaken by events in a manner which could, with demoralising finality, leave them high and dry - a diminished people lacking a real purpose for remaining here. Paradoxically, therefore, the challenge of New Ireland is of greatest relevance to that section of the population which remains most unconvinced by it and most opposed to it.
At a time when others have become ambivalent to it, the Protestant unionist community have most to gain by putting their stamp of commitment on it and by giving leadership for it. This would, more than anything else, restore to them lost dignity before the world at large and, in the process, pass to their children a destiny that would endure in the annals of Ulster and Ireland in the generations to come.
Here then is the challenge: the building of a new, all-inclusive Irish State. Will the northern Protestant/unionist people continue to remain in the laager of Irish history or will they now come out to give and share in leadership as the founding fathers of something exciting, fresh and new?
The greatest tribute we could pay to those who have fallen and to those others who have been so miserably disabled would be the building of a truly new social order in a truly New Ireland based on tolerance, conservation, sharing and accountability. If we were able to hand on to future generations the legacy of an island community at peace with itself then those who have suffered most might be able to feel that they had not suffered in vain. - Yours, etc.,
New Ireland Group, Adelaide Park, Belfast 9.