There was a British government-sponsored TV ad in the 1990s which people my age often remember, with amusement but also nostalgia. Two boys get to know each other, playing football and generally messing about. It emerges – as if it wasn’t obvious already – that they are from different sides of the North’s divide when, respectively, a GAA medal and an Orange Order badge fall out of their pockets. A Van Morrison song plays amiably in the background and the whole thing concludes with him saying, in his unmistakable drawl: “Wouldn’t it be great if it was like all the time?”

It speaks to a yearning for the sense – widespread in the 1990s – of hope for an emerging peace and potential reconciliation to follow. Both hopes were fulfilled; sadly the latter much less so than the former. Nostalgia is a fact of life, but it has become too much a fact of politics. And not just in Trump’s America or Brexit Britain. In parts of establishment Ireland, there is a marked tendency to hark back to the 1990s when the question of this island’s constitutional future is raised.

Put more directly, there is a tendency by Irish ministers to deflect any and all questions about planning for constitutional change with a general, sometimes impatient entreaty to get more out of the Belfast Agreement institutions as created in 1998. This desire is noble and right: every day as leader of the official opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly, my party and I are trying to force improvements in the North’s challenged political institutions.

The fact that it is hard to predict how Farage would act in office is its own argument for proper planning for........

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