Who wants to pay for a united Ireland?

It’s a given wisdom – though our unionist fellow-Irishmen and women would not easily agree – that there is much the present residents of our divided and disunited Emerald Isle – North and South – hold in common. The recent findings of yet another survey on Irish unification has surfaced yet another shared understanding, North and South.

Pat Leahy, in The Irish Times, used the term "strikingly similar" to describe the response in both North and South when voters were asked about whether the impact of a potential blow to their financial circumstances might influence their response to unification.

Almost half of all voters in Northern Ireland who expressed a preference – 43% of the total – said they would be less likely to vote for a united Ireland if it meant they would be €3,500 a year worse off. In the Republic, 44% (almost the same figure) said it would make them less likely to vote in favour of a united Ireland if they would be €4,000 worse off as a result. Another 'shared understanding’ that supporters of unity will not welcome.

It is, like most things in our shared history, unsurprising. When any of the sacred cows of unionists and nationalists are threatened, both scurry back in defensive mode into their respective burrows. When either of orange or green totems are held up to the light the prospect of a united Ireland seems less and less likely.

The difficult truth is that the two most effective agents in ensuring that the prospect of a united Ireland is regularly undermined are the extremists on both sides. Both provoke carbon-copy responses in the middle ground of voters.

Sinn Féin in flights of fancy continually floats the prospect of uniting the four green fields and flaunts in interminable commemorations their rights to laud what by common consent is often unlaudable; the DUP tries to recapture their imagined ascendency of the past golden age when their abuse of power and their subversion of democracy was inflicted on those who happened to find themselves on the wrong side of the Reformation; and most people who form the sensible middle-ground find themselves asking yet again – who in their right minds would ever want to have anything to do with either extremity?

Indeed why would anyone in their right mind give more than a second’s thought to reconciling the Sammy Wilsons with the Gerry Adamses of Ireland? Or even think of attempting to ‘reconcile' one with the other? After all, it’s a self-evident truth that if most people believe something is not just undoable but impossible continuing to even imagine doing it is in danger of skirting the edges of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: attempting the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. Even more deranged is the expectation that the sensible people who inhabit the middle-ground of Irish politics would voluntarily relinquish €3,500 or €4,000 a year in attempting to satisfy a diminishing, even impossible, dream.

Here’s a thought. What’s the point of these endless series of surveys on Irish unity when they more or less confirm what the cat knows? Is there anyone out there who was even mildly surprised by the finding that "the economic effects of a united Ireland on voters’ personal finances would have a crucial impact on their choice in any future referendum on Irish unity"?

The only ones favoured by this suspect exercise are the media (who endlessly hype up the merest indicator of some completely unexpected implication in the figures into what presents as a workable thesis) or a conspiracy of research departments in universities (which sources and expends vast sums of money on worthy investigations) but which amounts in the end (as in the case of this survey) to little more than a hill of beans.

Hands up all those who thought (before this and multiple other surveys pointed out what John Cleese once described as "the bloody obvious") that the sensible denizens of middle Ireland – North and South – would ever have imagined even the possibility of a meeting of minds between the diametrically opposed worlds of Sammy Wilson and Gerry Adams. Especially when it was so recently irrigated with the blood of so many republican and unionist martyrs and so many innocent lives so often cursorily dismissed as collateral damage in the long war for Irish freedom?

Hands up those who, to compound the unimaginable and the preposterous, are prepared to invest €3,500 to €4,000 a year – or around €75,000 for 20 years – in the ambitious project of reconciling Sammy and Gerry, even if that were possible to do.

A bit of context might help to get a clearer perspective. The Middle East is Northern Ireland on a larger scale. With Hamas and Israel, anything that serves to further the mutual intention to eradicate the enemy is acceptable: the killing of the innocent, the bombing of children, the kidnapping of the elderly, the absence of any sense of a shared humanity or even any respect for the rules of war. With Hamas and Israel, the only uniting factor is an underlying mutual intention to eradicate the other side.

What is fundamental to understanding both the Middle East and Northern Ireland is that the underlying division seems to be beyond resolution. The most that can be achieved in either conflict is to make it difficult for opposing factions to stop killing each other and/or to observe a delicate truce forever teetering on the edge of a precipice.

What percentage of what faction may be slightly changing their perspective will be measured by surveys and provide welcome copy for the media but the problems remain intractable as there is really no shared foundation on which to build lasting peace.

Other than getting Sammy and Gerry into a room. And the best of luck with that.

* Brendan Hoban’s new book, Holding Out for a Hero/The Long Wait for Pope Francis, is now available at €18 in the usual outlets and from www.mayobooks.ie.