Ben Lowry: Far too much weight is being given to Wallace Thompson's view that Northern Ireland will leave the UK

​Yes, Wallace Thompson’s predictions are again getting scrutiny.

(Click here to read Ben Lowry on his dawn drive across Northern Ireland)

Mr Thompson was interviewed for 15 minutes on BBC One’s The View on Thursday night. It was the third time in 18 months that there has been publicity for Mr Thompson’s belief that unionists need to prepare for a ‘new Ireland’. That phrase was among his very first words on Thursday, as if he is still seemingly unaware that he is adopting a gentle term that republicans devised to make their long goal sound palatable.

When Mr Thompson’s views first emerged last year, I talked to unionists who were annoyed that someone who admits he got the last half century wrong was generating such headlines. But everyone was too polite to say that, so I penned a friendly article rebutting his logic (Click here to read it: ‘Northern Ireland faces big challenges but is not on its way out of the UK’, September 9 2023). But since Mr Thompson is again peddling a dubious claim, and causing NI people to feel concern that a big change is coming, I now think his claims need a firmer response.

Mr Thompson might want to ponder whether he is best placed to tell unionists where they are going wrong when, by his own logic, he has made colossal misjudgements. That is not so much my assessment of Mr Thompson as his own assessment of himself. He says that he was wrong to dismiss the moderate unionists Terence O’Neill, Brian Faulkner, and David Trimble. But why should those of us who listened to those men with respect follow Mr Thompson now, when he persisted in his wrongness for decades?

When Mark Carruthers said that some people listening to the interview would label him a ‘lundy’, Mr Thompson laughed in agreement. He has previously referred to the search for lundies. I believe this to be nonsense, and here is a link to an essay I wrote challenging the idea that unionists are searching for lundies (‘Unionists are not looking for lundies yet even unionists are claiming that we are!,’ January 28).

Some of us unionist commentators, including Owen Polley who writes for this paper each Monday (click here for his latest column), have chronicled with dismay unionists making perpetual concessions to republicans, some of which we think are unnecessary such as on the Irish language (which Mr Thompson naively has no problem with, as if it is not being used in a sectarian way).

We might think such unionists foolish or weak or hungry for power, but we do not think them traitors. Yet Mr Thompson, who was a stalwart backer of a Rev Ian Paisley who really did look for lundies now chortles in benign agreement at the idea that he might be called a lundy. But he won’t – it mis-characterises the criticism of his view that the UK’s end is near.

Mr Thompson cited demographic change, as if unaware of the fact that a sizable, stubborn minority of the Catholic community has supported staying in the UK since the matter was first tested in polls. And what does he say about the rise in young people who adopt a Northern Irish identity? That is hardly a trend that has given heart to those who have droned on for 60 years about NI being a ‘statelet’.

He says Brexit has hastened the defeat of unionism. Why then did he vote for it? Did it not occur to him that this was possible? Or if, like other evangelicals, his opposition to the EU was partly a religious concern at the influence of Rome on Europe, then you would expect him to stick with those principles, regardless of the consequences.

When I wrote an article in this newspaper the Saturday before the EU referendum saying that I was sympathetic to Brexit but would vote against due to my fear it would blow the UK apart (click here to read that June 18 2016 essay), I recall no engagement with such risks from people such as Mr Thompson. But, to my relief, as the years passed I was struck by how little movement in public opinion there was towards an all-Ireland.

My estimate, based on an array of polls and surveys and studies and applying them to election results, is of an overall increase of about 4% in people who want to leave the UK. That takes us from 60%+ support for staying in the UK to perhaps below that level. It is a loss unionism cannot afford, yet you can be sure that such a modest change has been a bitter disappointment to those who tried to bomb and murder their way towards a united Ireland. So why is Mr Thompson giving them succour?

Mr Thompson said on Thursday that he had to recognise that the Protestant country his forefathers fought for no longer existed. But he seems not to have known his own community. In 1968, weekly church attendance among Anglicans and Presbyterians was already below 50%, while Catholic attendance was almost 95%. In 1990, when I was 18, there was a clear sign that the wider Protestant community had no interest in religious dogma when the overwhelmingly unionist Castlereagh voted 85% for Sunday leisure opening in a referendum. NI was not ‘Protestant’ in the way he thinks it was prior to the Troubles, or in 1990, let alone now.

The Free Presbyterian Church at its height was a tiny 1% of Protestants. Many irreligious, working class Prods voted DUP as an understandable response to IRA terror.

Mr Thompson might want to consider why his comments are seized upon, just as were the also misguided comments in 2021 by the former PUP leader John Kyle that unionists should look again at the Northern Ireland Protocol, as if they had missed some great opportunity. In fact, as I said on the BBC after Mr Kyle said that, the opposite was the case – unionists rushed into seeing advantages to the Irish Sea border before realising its disastrous essence.

A lot of broadcast time is given to a ‘new Ireland’, often implicitly critical of unionists. It is long overdue that programmes like the View interview thinkers and critics of Irish nationalism like the transatlantic literary academic Prof John Wilson Foster (here is an article about his latest book calling for a suspension of the Irish unity campaign).

• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor