Paul Howard: “I think we’ll have a united Ireland within my lifetime. I’m not sure we’ll have a rail link to the airport within my lifetime.”
The author of a new novel, A Nation Once Again, has some questions about the prospect of Irish unity. “What can we live with? We don’t like it, but what are we prepared to live with to live in peace?” Howard says Ireland's Call would make for a perfect new national anthem "because nobody likes it, but nobody vehemently hates it. And anyone who tells you they hate it, they’re exaggerating. It’s a song written to inspire absolute indifference.”
He says he grew up in an era when events in Northern Ireland were "the first three items on the news", but the reality for people under 35, “especially in this part of the island", is entirely different. "They don’t really have any connection to the Troubles or any memory of the Troubles. It’s so remote from their experience, you might as well be talking to them about the Boer War as talking to them about the Troubles."
