Young people want Northern Ireland to work, not to indulge in endless conversations about constitutional change, say Alliance Party members born after the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
Now in her early 20s, Amy Mairs was “taught to be open-minded” as she grew up in Limavady in Co Derry in a mixed family that talked politics, with a grandmother who worked for the late SDLP leader John Hume.
A child of Catholic and Protestant parents, Mairs is now an Alliance Party councillor for her hometown, with a clear idea on what she believes her constituents want her to focus on in her day-to-day politics – and it is not a united Ireland.
“My constituents are not saying, ‘Oh, what way are you going to vote in a referendum?’
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“People are saying, ‘Why can’t I get my kids into the school of their choosing? Why are my groceries so expensive? Why is my landlord ripping me off?‘
“They’re not coming to me telling me that they’re worried about a referendum that’s going to happen in God knows how many years’ time,” says Mairs, one of five young Alliance members, some holding elected office, some not, who sit down on the margins of the party’s annual conference on Saturday.
The heads of the others nod in agreement as she speaks, set against a backdrop of a slew of opinion polls led by The Irish Times/Arins survey showing that the numbers in Northern Ireland favouring unification are growing, if not a majority.
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Alliance has enjoyed some of its most successful years of late. In 2022, it won 17 seats in the 2022 Stormont Assembly elections. In 2019, it took the third largest number of first preferences in the European Parliament elections, after Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party.
Irish unity poses difficulties for the party leader, Naomi Long. Three years ago, she said Alliance would “undoubtedly” take a position if faced with a Border poll, but this year she said the party’s membership may not do so.
Few in the group of young people claim much knowledge of the Republic, bar holiday visits to Donegal and Cavan, or regular trips to Dublin for some of them, prompted by concert dates or by visits to Croke Park for GAA matches.
“I admit a certain amount of ignorance,” says Catherine Bell, from Magherafelt, Co Derry, but now studying in Queen’s, “Both sides of my family were Protestant. There was never any hostility around saying that we’re Irish, but we were far enough from the Border that we were not travelling down a huge amount.”
Jamie Harpur’s hometown of Castlederg, Co Tyrone is still divided along nationalist/unionist lines though he says it is changing. “Alliance always made sense to me, it was just common-sense politics,” he tells The Irish Times.
“If unity does come up, it is going to be driven by the evidence. People should be informed to make that decision, and Alliance has always championed that,” says Harpur, who was co-opted on to Lisburn and Castlereagh Council last year.
So how he would stand on the question? “I am pretty much in the middle. If it makes more economic sense, more social sense to stay in the UK, then I’ll vote for the UK, and if it makes more to join a united Ireland then I will do that.
“Brexit has changed a lot. The Republic is doing great right now, but who knows in five years’ time? Things can change a lot, you still have to put food on the table, and all of the rest of that,” he says.,.
For Sean Marshall, from Lisburn, Co Antrim – who joined Alliance a year ago – the unity debate, if it comes, will be decided by the impact it will make on “the people in my immediate vicinity, that is what I care about, most of all”.
The strong support for unity among the party’s membership, especially its younger cohort, has much to do with the state of Northern Ireland’s finances, he says.
“Northern Ireland has been underfunded for years. Austerity has hit everywhere in the UK very hard, but bear in mind, Northern Ireland was pretty much at a standstill for 40 years. There was no investment, no development,” he says.
“That might have influenced younger people who are looking around them thinking this isn’t working for them. Because, to be brutally honest, it hasn’t worked for them, it certainly hasn’t.”
