John Wilson Foster: Dublin’s cash injection plan for Northern Ireland is the equivalent to a Belt and Road Initiative

Meanwhile, Belfast and Cork city councils will share £77,000 initial funding for dockland development. Belfast council will apply for further money to build a new bridge across the River Lagan from Sailortown to the Titanic Quarter. It has already received £30,000 of initial funding to work jointly with Cork council on a rooftop solar heating project, the aim of which is as unimpeachable as that of the writers' retreat - through renewable energy technology to help decarbonise the cities by reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

Dwarfing these investments is the £38m that will be provided to Ulster University to expand their Magee campus in Londonderry. New buildings, an increase in enrolment of students from both sides of the border, a link-up between UU and the Atlantic Technical University in Letterkenny over the border, are what this investment intends to accomplish.

£451m of SII funding is ringfenced for joint north-south projects between 2020 and 2025. According to an August 21 article in the Belfast Telegraph by Paul Gosling, author of A New Ireland: A Ten Year Plan (2020) and ex-SDLP advisor, there are proposals to improve the Belfast-Dublin rail connection, reopen the Londonderry-Portadown line with an onward connection to Dublin, and improve the A5 Londonderry to Dublin road, though these are not listed on the SII website.

Although the UK's £10bn annual subvention to Northern Ireland will remain the guarantee of Northern Ireland's financial viability, the SII will allocate a billion euro (£865m) until 2030 for cross-border projects in health, education, the environment, transport, tourism, sport, culture and civic society to interconnect Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Should everyone in Northern Ireland, unionists and nationalists alike, welcome these injections of Irish euro into Northern Ireland? If they are strictly economic benefactions, yes. If they are solely to advance reconciliation between north and south, yes. And if the initiative's ostensible aim of strengthening the Ulster economy is solely to help Northern Ireland be a going concern (something I and others have called upon nationalists to get behind and that Sinn Féin has never sincerely done), again yes.

There is one essential litmus test. Is the initiative a way of advancing the cause of a united Ireland?

To begin with, the overreach of the ten-year initiative announced by then Taoiseach Michéal Martin in October 2020 turns a green light to deep amber.

Some sectors of northern society are to be joined up with their southern counterparts to their mutual benefit. But some are assumed to have intrinsic deficiencies that need taken care of. Gosling tells us that the Irish government is very concerned that too many NI students are leaving for university in Great Britain, that NHS waiting lists are too long, there aren't enough childcare places in NI, transport infrastructure is weak, and that the Republic aims to fix all this.

If this is true, this is hackle-raising to a unionist. These are internal matters for the UK alone. NI students when they go to a mainland university are going to another part of their own country and it is no business of the Republic's. The NHS is very nearly synonymous with post-war UK. No UK government is invited into the Republic to help remedy any of the multiple problems that beset Irish society.

We are told that the Good Friday Agreement (1998) mandates these projects. What an agreement for all seasons it is! No wonder Martin in his announcement hails its "genius". But under "Economic, Social and Cultural Issues" in the GFA, it is the British government alone that pledges to promote economic growth and strengthen "the physical infrastructure of the region". To imagine that the "broad policies for sustained economic growth" can be broad enough to directly involve the Republic is to give the unionist imprimatur to the agreement a whole new interpretation.

Martin calls the initiative "game-changing". So what's the game? Well, Martin recently chastised the NI secretary Chris Heaton-Harris for finding unhelpful Leo Varadkar's prediction that he will see a united Ireland in his lifetime. Varadkar was echoing what his Fine Gael colleague Simon Coveney said a few years ago.

Says Martin: "Since the New Ireland Forum, we in the Republic have always articulated our aspiration to a united Ireland.” Agreed, but these predictions are no mere "aspirations" but rather attempts at self-fulfilling prophecies. The initiative and the simultaneous predictions are soulmates.

The Republic's business minister Neale Richmond champions the initiative's plan to interconnect economically the island because, he says, he "aspires" to a united Ireland. It's a safe bet that every member of every major party in the Republic thinks alike: Yes to interconnection and to its chief end, Irish unification.

The SII is Ireland's Belt & Road Initiative (B&RI). Via investment and trade, China's B&RI aims to interconnect countries and regions in pursuit of a Chinese-led globalism. The SII appears to be its island-sized scale-model.

The SII will invest while all-island trade will develop in the wake of the Windsor Framework which impairs the Union and will subtract a growing portion of NI-GB trade from the NI economy and transfer it to the EU. The ulterior motive of the B&RI is, of course, Chinese political influence around the globe to counter that of the United States. Just as (in miniature) the Republic surely hopes with its initiative to counter GB influence in NI.

I'm quite sure members of the Dáil regard the island at present as one country, two systems. When China succeeded the UK in Hong Kong governance, it quickly set about fashioning one country, one system to which it had always aspired. Just as it schemes to get Taiwan back, in the teeth of 74 years of separate development. Or in the cases of Northern Ireland and the Republic, 101 years.

If the initiative were to proceed and expand in tandem with the outworking of the Windsor Framework, might a border poll not even be necessary to achieve unification? This would be the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael way, not the Sinn Féin way, which might even come to seem too divisive and unpredictable. The question is what the response should be to the initiative of those who wish to remain British and free of an Irish republic.

l Professor John Wilson Foster is editor of The Idea of the Union (2021) along with Dr William Beattie Smith