IAR-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, speaking last Monday night in Dungannon at a conference organised by Mid-Ulster council, said that when people talk about reconciliation it’s generally taken to mean between the two communities in the north.

However, he went on to say there’s a “need to talk about the totality of reconciliation”, by which he meant the relations between the south and northern nationalists.

The south “went off and built our state and largely forgot about what happened up here for a very long time, certainly for decades. There’s a reconciliation process needed, where we, to a certain extent, say sorry for the fact that that happened”.

What first brought that necessity home to him, he said, was a speech he made during “the Brexit years”, as he called the period, in which he told “the nationalist people of Northern Ireland that they wouldn’t be left behind again”.

David Adams: Drumcree shows we’ve been kidding ourselves that we really had a ‘peace process’

Cormac Moore: Why does political unionism keep showing such strategic ineptitude?

“It was only after I said that and people contacted me that I really understood how deeply that’s felt by hundreds of thousands of people north of the border, that they were pretty much left behind.”

Indeed, in response to his speech, 1,000 people across civic society north and south, from business,........

© The Irish News