According to the historian DG Boyce, the British Labour Party a century ago had “no Irish past to live down or to live up to”. Despite the new British prime minister Andy Burnham’s references to his great-grandfather Edmund Burke, who lived in Drogheda before emigrating to Liverpool in the late 19th century, Boyce’s declaration could just as easily be applied to Burnham, who has little space for Ireland on his list of political priorities.

Burnham is probably unaware of the advice given to another British Labour Party prime minister, James Callaghan, who was once warned to avoid “getting sucked into the Irish bog”. Burnham is on a learning curve when it comes to Ireland and, thankfully, is not dealing with the intensity of the Troubles that O’Callaghan faced in the 1970s. But after his comments last week dismissing the desirability or possibility of a Border poll on Irish reunification, Burnham will now be aware of the enduring relevance of the advice to O’Callaghan.

In the 1970s, the British government planned to oversee regular Border polls in Northern Ireland. In the words of the prime minister Ted Heath in 1972, what was envisaged was “a system of regular plebiscites in NI about the Border, the first to be held as soon as practicable in the near future and others at intervals of a substantial period of years........

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