Unionists and Sinn Féin have “the common goal for the first time” of making Northern Ireland work as a society, Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt, now the Stormont Minister for Health, has declared.
Sinn Féin must do so because they need to show voters in the Republic that they can govern successfully, but they also need to do so if they are going to make the idea of Irish unity “look attractive to people in Dublin and Limerick and Galway”, he said.
“The first rule of marketing, whatever you’re selling, is to make it attractive to buy. It’s not going to be attractive if the proposition is, ‘Please vote in a Border poll to buy a failed ungovernable statelet’,” he told a Dublin audience.
Mr Nesbitt’s comments come, however, after one of the worst weeks of relations between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party, who have clashed sharply over a decision by a Sinn Féin Minister to erect Irish language signs at Belfast’s new Grand Central railway station.
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Nobody had ever wanted to create the Stormont parliament and its government a century ago when the island was partitioned after the Free State was created in the wake of the War of Independence, he told the Institute of International and European Affairs.
Unionists had wanted the island to continue to be governed by Westminster, while nationalists had never wanted partition. With an inbuilt majority, unionists always won elections so they “built a cold house for nationalists”, because they feared being outnumbered.
Today, however, the “only way forward is constitutional government or powersharing”, so unionists realise they cannot govern Northern Ireland without the consent and the co-operation of nationalists and republicans.
Stormont must now push “a prosperity agenda”, where people can wake up “feeling good about life and get out of bed with a sense of purpose”, he said, financially secure, with well-educated children and decent public services.
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The best measurement for a society’s success is healthy life expectancy, but by that yardstick Northern Ireland is failing badly, said Mr Nesbitt, who was offered the Stormont Health Ministry a year ago, much to his own surprise.
However, a baby girl born at a Belfast maternity hospital into a family living in an affluent district in the city will have 14.2 more healthy years of life than a girl born in the same hospital into a family living a mile away in one of the city’s deprived neighbourhoods.
“In a first-world country a quarter of the way into the 21st century, I don’t even understand why that is tolerable. We haven’t moved the dial on healthy life expectancy since devolution started in 1998/99,” he declared.
