Letter: No union - with the UK or Europe - lasts forever so we need consensual co-operation across these islands to help us forge a better future

However, a democratically acceptable result of such a poll – in either direction – would not be 100% consensual.

There would be many disaffected people.

The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was not 100% consensual and, 25 years on, its provisions have not yet been fully implemented.

How long would it take to implement, and/or deal with, the outcome of a border poll, whatever the result?

There will in any circumstance, with or without a poll, be a “newer” Ireland (there is presently a “new” post-Brexit Ireland), but there will not in the near future be a “united” Ireland unless circumstances leave no other option.

Meanwhile, unionists and nationalists, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English, must come to realise that the UK as a unitary parliamentary concept came to an end in 1921 with devolution from Westminster to what effectively became autonomous parliaments in Dublin and Belfast.

Devolution in 1999 to parliaments in Scotland and Wales, and provision in the GFA for further devolution, implicitly to an English parliament, signalled the final demise of the UK.

Like other provisions in the GFA, it has not yet happened, but self-inflicted, protracted suicide-by-Brexit may now have put the UK in a terminal phase.

The debate on Northern Ireland’s future and/or Irish unity cannot be confined to this island.

We need to look before and beyond that to prepare a new pan-islands set of mutually beneficial and mutually supportive relationships that are not dominated by the larger population or historic dominance of one constituent; relationships that, among other things, accommodate membership and non-membership of the EU without divisive borders between constituents.

Like the UK union, the European union and any other formal union will not last forever.

Union with some means disunity and potential conflict with others.

We need consensual mutual co-operation and support across Europe and these islands (and ideally worldwide) while accommodating independence.

Prior to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 there had been talk of a “Council of the Isles”, a concept perhaps taken from the 1998 GFA concept of the “British-Irish Council” (BIC) which had not then been, and still has not been, implemented to its full potential as the co-ordinating forum for these islands.

Had the BIC been fully functional would Brexit have taken its present form, if at all?

We have the tools to forge a better future.

Why don’t we use them properly?

Dennis Golden, Strabane