McDowell looks to reconciled island

Northern Ireland and the Republic can become “political” partners on a reconciled island very soon, Justice Minister Michael McDowell said today.

Mr McDowell also predicted that sectarian tensions between Catholics and Protestants would dissipate and people north and south would become valuable citizens of the enlarged European Union.

Speaking at the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Co Donegal, the minister said he believed the narrow image of Irish identity needed to be broadened to reflect increasing diversity of the island’s cross-border population.

“In concrete terms, I see Ireland rapidly becoming a successful, self-confident member of a partnership-based EU,” he said during a debate in Glenties on ’Managing The Future.’

“I believe that the great project of reconciling Orange and Green will succeed, and that both parts of Ireland will become partners in a common political enterprise.

“I believe that a much more diverse, heterogeneous sense of Irishness will replace the narrow official self-image of monochrome Catholic, nationalist Ireland which characterised the Republic in the 20th century.

“I envisage Ireland as an island with seven or eight million inhabitants,” he added.

Several politicians, academics and church leaders have addressed the week-long lecture series which celebrates the life of Donegal writer Patrick MacGill, who died in 1963.

Social values that celebrate success and help us learn from failure will build a better society, Mr McDowell also said.

“I believe that a society that simultaneously values both religious conviction and philosophical freedom is not only possible but attractive,” he told his audience.

“I believe that it is possible to strike a happy balance between social diversity and social cohesion, a happy reconciliation between the rights of freedom and the duties of solidarity, and to effect a reconciliation between the ethics of altruism and individual responsibility.”

In a wide-ranging speech, Mr McDowell also referred to the “suffocating dishonesty and self-loathing of much of what passes for contemporary social commentary in Ireland".