Born into a unionist family, Belfast-born Ben Collins favours Irish unity and has lost friends over his beliefs.
Collins remembers March 19th, 1988, when he was aged 12. This is the day two British soldiers, Derek Wood and David Howes, were dragged from their car on the Andersonstown Road to their deaths.
The two had mistakenly driven into the west Belfast funeral cortege of one of the mourners killed while attending the funerals of three IRA members shot dead by Britain’s SAS in Gibraltar in 1988.
Collins watched the terrible scenes unfold on TV from just 11km away at his family’s home on the King’s Road in east Belfast. His home was quietly unionist in sympathy.
RM Block
Today Collins knows how much his parents protected him and his two brothers, Jackson, now in New York, and Justin, now living in Britain. “We saw the violence on TV, but it did not come closer,” he tells The Irish Times.
A one-time member of the Conservative Party and, later, the Alliance Party, Collins worked as an official in the UK’s Northern Ireland Office for a number of years, acting as one of its press officers during the negotiations leading to the 2006 St Andrews Agreement on the devolution of power in the region.
He was later chief executive of Northern Ireland’s Federation of Housing Associations before he set up a Belfast-based political communications firm.
In his book, The Irish Unity Dividend, published last September, Collinsargues Northern Ireland would be better off in a united Ireland.
[ Unionists must ask themselves: ‘Is this as good as it gets?’ ]
However, planning is needed to avoid a repeat of “the chaos of Brexit”, he says. People must sit down to create the plan that will offer the best quality of life for everyone.
Unionist politicians choose not to engage, he says, “but civic unionism is already speaking with the rest of Ireland in offices, bars, restaurants and people’s homes”.
Growing up not far from Stormont, Collins from age seven helped out on his father’s pig farm in Castlereagh. “Every job after working on a pig farm is easier,” he says with a smile.
His father David was a vet employed by Belfast City Council in the city’s meat factories, but the pig farm helped him and his wife Rosemary send their three sons to Campbell College.
“There were Catholics there then. Not many, but there were some. Some said later they had had difficulties, and I was surprised. I hadn’t been aware of that,” he says.
His father was in the Orange Order, but “lost interest”, his son says. “He favoured Northern Ireland being a full part of the UK and was a member of the Campaign for Equal Citizenship.”
Led by Clifford Smyth and then by Robert McCartney, who would go on to become an MP, the campaign wanted the Conservatives, Labour and other British political parties to take part fully in Northern politics.
Unusually for someone in Northern Ireland, Collins’s father joined the Social Democratic Party set up with high hopes in 1981 by Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams.
Today, the pro-Irish unity Collins and his father occasionally spar about the constitutional future of Northern Ireland, with the latter holding to his integrationist views, the son says.
Growing up, Collins says, he “always felt Irish” and British, enthusiastically supporting the Irish rugby team with his family, along with reaching under-age All-Ireland athletics finals.
The rugby interest was, no doubt, fuelled by living next door to the Irish centre, Mike Gibson, famed for his role in the Lions’ first series win against the All-Blacks in 1971.
There was no contradiction being from a unionist family in east Belfast and taking part in All-Ireland sports, he remembers. “Nobody thought anything of it. It predated the Troubles.”
[ Island of Ireland ‘not ready’ for unification referendum, says former tánaiste ]
Collins’s belief in unity developed slowly, partly fuelled by the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998. By then, he was a student at Dundee University.
There, he remembers the hope the agreement created. But he also recalls the sectarianism of Dundee United supporters. The club was formed in 1910 by Irish immigrants to Scotland as Dundee Hibernian.
Often they would sing pro-IRA songs in the city’s pubs, once asking Collins and his friends if they supported “the Provos”. Told they did not, they were puzzled.
“One of my friends told them that we were from there we knew what the IRA had done. And we did not support violence, any violence,” he says, remembering the encounter.
Mary McAleese’s frequent reaching out to unionists during her time as president offered “inspiration”, he says, though Michael D Higgins showed few of the same impulses.
Given his background, Collins’s pro-unity sentiments have not come without cost, personally or professionally. “Some people who were friends in the past would not be friends now,” he says.
Unionists should and must engage with the unity debate, he argues. “Many unionists think that Nigel Farage and Reform would be good for the union; they won’t.”
Farage admits Brexit has been a failure yet refuses closer links with the European Union and he has admitted there will be a united Ireland, Collins says, adding: “Brexit is ultimately an English nationalist project.”
“The hostility towards both parts of Ireland will increase, and they will continue Brexiteers’ previous attempts to undermine Ireland’s membership of the European Union,” he says.
Some unionists see Reform UK as offering a “supposed golden past”, but Collins believes a Reform/Conservative alliance would have little interest in Northern Ireland.
