Sir, – Michael O'Loughlin is right to suspect the unanimity of Irish voices demanding no hard border in Ireland ("What is the problem with a hard border?", Opinion & Analysis, January 22nd).
Even if one wishes no hard border, it has been depressing to listen to the Dublin commentariat lip-synching the political parties.
He is also right to state an inconvenient truth: the Republic’s relationship with England has from partition been far more meaningful than that with Northern Ireland. (Or with Europe, I should add.)
A minor symptom of this is their relative ignorance of, and distaste for, Northern Ireland betrayed by the South’s public intellectuals, whether they live in Dublin or London.
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But O’Loughlin is wrong in thinking that even a hard Brexit could finally break the connection with England.
He himself identifies the Republic’s relationship with England as historically both vital and dependent.
No kind of Brexit could break the intimate ties of residence, kinship, economics and, most importantly, Anglophone culture.
Instead, Brexit should, and probably will, paradoxically compel a fully explored and healthy acknowledgement of Ireland’s English connection. O’Loughlin has opened the innings.
There would be a bonus. If he is right, as he surely is, that the Irish border runs through minds, then the acknowledgement of the English connection is, because of northern unionists’ irreversible cleavage to the UK, the likeliest way to soften that border. – Yours, etc,
JOHN WILSON
FOSTER,
Belfast.