Summary: <br> <a href="https://twitter.com/Keyes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">Seán Keyes</a> is the finance correspondent for the Currency, a subscription news website.<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://blog.hereshow.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Sean-Keyes-scaled.jpg" data-wpel-link="internal"></a><br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> I spoke to a Sinn Féin supporter in the years after the Good Friday Belfast agreement, I think it was during one of the interminable negotiations trying to get DUP to participate and have the institutions up and running, and she said one thing about the peace deal that I thought was perceptive, if not very diplomatic.<br> <br> <br> <br> She said “The Unionists are too thick to realise that they’ve won, and the Shinners are too cute to admit that they lost.”<br> <br> <br> <br> Mindsets may not have changed for some at least, but I think that calculation may have changed in the years since. First off, there’s peace. In that sense alone, everybody won; that can’t be underestimated. But secondly, the Unionists may have won the war, if you want to call it that, but the nationalists may yet win the peace.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Personally, I don’t think that we will have a border poll in the next couple of years, politics just isn’t aligned for that, even if you have Sinn Féin in power on both sides of the border, which is an open question in itself. But I think it’s certain we’ll have a border poll in the next couple of decades, the pattern of political and demographic movement in the north just makes that inevitable.<br> <br> <br> <br> The one outside factor, underestimated in my view, that could impact this in an unpredictable way is Scottish independence. The SNP have announced their intention to have a referendum in October next year, along with a sophisticated legal strategy to defeat the London Conservative government’s determination to prevent it. That’s almost a no-lose strategy. If the Tories don’t fold immediately, they just demonstrate every more clearly the case for independence.<br> <br> <br> <br> If you are against independence, you might point to the opinion polls that show support for independence marginally behind, 49 to 51, much less than the margin for error, but still behind. If you were for independence, you might point out that during the last referendum campaign, in 2014, that’s when support for independence really took off, going from 25 per cent to 45 per cent, making the current 49 per cent a good starting position. If you’re against, you could say that well might be dry now, with opinion polarised. And if you’re for, you could say… Boris Johnson.<br> <br> <br> <br> If Scottish independence comes off, and that’s a very big if, that would effectively leave northern Unionists with nothing to be united with; Scottish independence would most likely have a bigger impact on the lives of people in Derry and Dublin that it would on the lives of people in Dover and Derby.<br> <br> <br> <br> But that is a very big if, and we should be aware of it, but we can’t sit around waiting for it to happen. Possibly a more important thing to pay attention to is the mess over Roe v Wade being overturned in the US. If you haven’t kept up, Roe v Wade was a constitutional ruling from the US Supreme Court 50 years ago. Prior to that, abortion was legal in only a few states; the Roe v Wade decision set aside all those laws at the stroke of a pen and said that abortion was protected by the constitutional right to privacy, making it entirely legal in all 50 states, regardless of state law.<br> <br> <br> <br> Last month, the now conservative-dominated court said no it isn’t protected, so all those old laws that haven’t been repealed, and a bunch of new ones kick in, making abortion entirely illegal, or so restricted as to be impossible, in huge swathes of the US.
