Let me begin by wishing you a happy new year.

Part of my Christmas reading included Ben Collins’s The Irish Unity Dividend and Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride’s For And Against A United Ireland (both particularly good books, by the way).

My primary conclusion, underpinned by a number of other books and articles I’ve read on the subject this year, is that the vast majority of people, north and south of the border, are nowhere close to being prepared for a serious, thought-through debate or campaign on the issue.

This conclusion doesn’t, of course, mean that the British and Irish governments won’t just wake up one day and announce that the conditions for the calling of a border poll have been met.

Sarah Creighton: Liberal unionism is dead. It never even got a chance

Newton Emerson: Stormont and the rise of the ‘stakeholder state’

That’s because no-one at this point knows what those terms and conditions are.

I was reminded of a comment made by Upper Bann MP Harold McCusker in a debate on the........

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