Seamus Mallon famously referred to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.

Sunningdale (in Berkshire) was a missed opportunity in the tragic history of Northern Ireland (December 1973).

Edward Heath, the British prime minister was characteristically more interested in defeating the English miners than peace in Northern Ireland.

But the real slow learners must be the Ulster unionists themselves. As if the experience of Carson was not enough, they have now been betrayed by Margaret Thatcher in 1985 and Boris Johnson in 2019.

As an Englishman I despair of those unable to learn the lessons of the past. What does it take for the unionists of Ulster to learn these vital lessons?

Do they think money wasted on HS2 rail line is any more use to Northern Ireland than it is to England? Do they think the English taxpayer has an inexhaustible supply of money to bribe the DUP and voters in the north of England successively at the behest of the British Tory party?

Do they really prefer a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland to the recovery of NI’s railway system destroyed by the Tories under Harold Macmillan and Dr Beeching in the 1950s?

Will they support England against Ireland at Twickenham on February 22? I can’t believe it.

I urge Arlene Foster and Mary Lou McDonald the one from Fermanagh and the other from Rathgar, Dublin, to settle their differences if only for a day and go to Twickenham to back a 32-county Irish team.

Naturally as an Englishman from the Forest of Dean I shall be supporting England, although in 1993 I distributed 50,000 Song Sheets at Lansdowne Road to support an Irish team at a low ebb. Look up the result in 1993.

We all have to make sacrifices in the interests of peace and friendship. Are unionists going to continue to be bought off with useless peerages in the unelected House of Lords? If so, they haven’t even learnt the lessons of 1886 and 1893.

Gerald Morgan, Fellow Trinity College Dublin (Leader: English Parliamentary Party, 2001)