Choices are more complicated than Yes or No

In maths and computing this is very useful. In many other situations it is a curse – where a crude yes/no decision is enforced when reality is much more blurred, much more shaded, indeed downright ambiguous.

Yet we seem to be endlessly forced into binary choices – yes/no; us/them; black/white: in/out; orange/green and on and on.

The EU referendum gives us the Binary Curse in starkest form. Can we not pull back from this madness and recognise that the vast majority of people want to get on with their lives somewhere in the middle ground?

The same applies to our orange/green confrontations in this part of the world. What we need is a middle ground of constructive compromise.

Let us demand that we now cast off the Binary Curse in all its shapes and sizes. As a start let us press the restart button and revisit, indeed reformulate the EU question before it is too late.

Fred Boal, Ballyclare