Irish Unity Is Inevitable. We Should Get on Board.

In July 1996, I climbed onto my muddy pony in our small farm in County Armagh and headed down the road. It was a rare sunny and warm day in Northern Ireland. I didn’t get far before I was blocked by a large tree that had been felled over my path. A farmer living nearby had taken his chainsaw and cut it down, closing the rural road in protest.

That summer, men fiercely attached to unity with Britain undertook similar action across Northern Ireland, cutting down trees and forming barricades on highways. These men, belonging to the Orange Order—a society that commemorates the battlefield victories of the Protestant Dutch nobleman William of Orange over the Catholic King James II 300 years prior—had been prevented by the police and local residents for the second year running from marching with banners and bands through a predominantly Catholic neighborhood of a nearby town.

My family lived near the last ardently Protestant village before the green hills rolled south, becoming wilder and more heathered, eventually leading