Trevor Ringland: Rather than be fearful, unionists should respond to challenges ahead by working to sell Northern Ireland

It’s understandable that people are angry and fearful, but loyalists who threaten social disruption must understand that those actions would destroy the United Kingdom far more surely than any Withdrawal Agreement.

I remember asking my father, who was an RUC officer, whether the police could have maintained law and order at the start of the Troubles in the absence of the army.

He felt that they may have been able to do so had loyalists, such as those inspired by Ian Paisley, not reacted to republican violence.

They made it impossible for the police as, in effect, they were fighting on two fronts to maintain order.

Fifty years later some of the wilder voices in loyalism should remember that secret history.

The late Maurice Hayes told me “there was nothing achieved through (republican) violence that could not otherwise have been achieved through peaceful means”.

The same was very much true with the loyalist response to that violence. It hindered the security forces.

The worst forms of republicanism flourish when unionism flirts with violence and hatred.

The ugly face of unionism always undermines Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom.

The sheer ineptitude that some unionist politicians have shown when they were supposed to be promoting the benefits of our constitutional position is only outdone by the way Irish nationalism has sometimes promoted the case for an all-Ireland state.

It is a moment in our history when unionism can change the conversation and grasp the future constructively.

Rather than acting fearfully, our response to the challenges ahead should be to sell the benefits of Northern Ireland’s place in the UK with renewed energy, by making it a place that works well for all of us and enjoys great relations across this island and beyond.

l Trevor Ringland is a former Ireland rugby international, lawyer, unionist, and reconciliation and political activist