Tag Archives: Karl Popper
A United Ireland: why unification is inevitable…. Likely not.
Kevin Meagher, A United Ireland: why unification is inevitable and how it will come about (Biteback, London, 2016)
Book Review
The only thing ‘inevitable’ about this book is its failure to persuade.
That said, Kevin Meagher has produced a thought provoking, well written, but ultimately flawed book.
The failure of A United Ireland to persuade stems from a selective use of evidence and an overreliance on implicit assumptions and counterfactuals (which often don’t hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny).
Opportunity knocks
We don’t yet know how Brexit will affect Northern Ireland exactly, but the referendum result certainly revived the nationalist trope that Irish unity is ‘inevitable’.
The Republic’s national parliament recently published plans for a forum “to achieve the peaceful reunification of Ireland”, Sinn Fein blithely assure unionists that the “British identity” will be protected in a thirty-two county state and newspaper columnists rush to tell readers that the fourth green field will soon “bloom again”. One particularly excitable author, Kevin Meagher, a former special adviser to Shaun Woodward, (remind me again why unionists didn’t trust that former secretary of state), even called his book “A United Ireland: Why unification is inevitable”.
In response, unionists have challenged nationalism’s “self-regarding, single certainty” in a series of astute articles.