Overriding duty is to make the peace last

IRELAND’S Rugby Football Union has just appointed a team of advisers it believes can orchestrate a successful all-island bid to host the Rugby World Cup in 2023.

The Irish team will include advisers involved in the last three Olympic games, as well as this year’s Rugby World Cup. This is just one of many projects, each a declaration of ambition and national confidence we can all be proud of, that would probably come to nothing if the North’s political impasse creates a vacuum where the old hatreds and mistrust can slip back to centre stage. Political instability exacts a very high cost.

A return to anything approaching the divisions of the past would be a return to the isolation of the relatively recent past, an isolation that kept this island, particularly the North, as a kind of suspended-in-time backwater that everyone had heard of but could not begin to understand. Internecine warfare between two strands of Christianity each dedicated to different national flags was increasingly incomprehensible in an ever more secular 21st century world. Such a scenario would be even more incomprehensible today.