Eilis O'Hanlon: Brexit is blamed for raising the unionist bogey of Irish unity. But what if leaving the EU is not that bad? Or... whisper it... what if it's actually a success?

If there was a border poll tomorrow, the chances are that I'd vote in favour of Irish unity. My children and I have also informed their English-born father that, despite insisting he wouldn't vote in any united Ireland referendum, because he doesn't think it's any of his business, we'll be locking him in a cupboard under the stairs like Harry Potter for the day, just in case he's tempted to sneak out when we're not looking and vote the "wrong" way.

But there isn't going to be a border poll tomorrow - and that's fine. And if there was a border poll tomorrow, or next year, or whenever, and it came back in favour of Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom, that would be fine, too.

Isn't that the problem for diehard Irish nationalists? A united Ireland is a legitimate and romantic aspiration, but it's also low on the priorities of any except the most tunnel-visioned zealots.

Ordinary life goes on regardless. The big constitutional questions loom in the background, ominous as Mount Everest in one way, but easy enough to ignore on a day-to-day basis.

As peace continues and the Troubles fade further into history, it may even be that the desire for unity among nationalists in Northern Ireland takes on the flavour that it has for most people in the Republic, becoming what the Dublin-based author of a new book on the subject calls a "low-intensity" objective; one that's for the long-term, rather than immediately urgent.

You wouldn't think so to read some recent headlines, which have made it appear as if the question of a united Ireland is one that's about to, and must, be settled once and for all.

The reason for the giddiness is easy enough to pinpoint. Brexit has shaken things up to an extent that it suddenly feels to many commentators as if the political tectonic plates have shifted decisively in favour of Irish unity.

And maybe they have. Who knows? Around the world, politics is in flux. We're in "anything can happen" territory. It's still curious how a belief that anything might happen has settled down in some sections of nationalist opinion to the certainty that only one thing can happen: Irish unity.

As economics guru Dr Graham Gudgin pointed out in yesterday's Belfast Telegraph, things are not that simple. They rarely are. However much green-minded commentators, north and south, crunch the numbers to their hearts' content and come up with figures showing that a pro-unity majority is tantalisingly close, the deeper statistical reality seems to be that the population of those who identify as Irish has stabilised in recent years and, with no real difference anymore in the birth rate between Catholics and Protestants, overtaking unionists might not be so straightforward as once supposed.

The automatic identification of all Catholics as nationalists and all Protestants as unionists is also far too simplistic. Gudgin probably overstates the number of the former who'd be reluctant to swap free school education and the NHS for the higher taxes and house prices in the south; but demographics is not destiny by a long shot.

His was a timely reminder that excitable predictions of an imminent nationalist majority should be taken with a pinch of salt, especially when similar forecasts have been knocking around for decades in different forms and have yet to materialise.

That's before any border poll campaign itself begins, when numerous other factors are bound to come into play, which conspire to push down the pro-unity vote.

Fear and uncertainty played a crucial role in the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums. There's no reason to say the same thing wouldn't happen here. Not least, the prospect of a resurgence of violence, however mercifully limited, after a narrow vote to leave the UK would play on many people's minds.

Campaigns are not foregone conclusions. Worth considering, too, is that, even at its soonest, a trip to the polling stations for a border poll remains some way off. Who knows what might happen between now and then to change the dynamic?

What if - bear with me - Brexit simply isn't that bad as being predicted by naysayers? What if there's a bit of chaos at the start and then everything settles down to the new normal? Human beings are adaptable creatures.

What if - an even more heretical thought - Brexit is a success? What if the UK economy booms outside the European Union? What, for that matter, if there's another eurozone crisis?

That's even before other cultural factors come into play. Identity is a more complex phenomenon than can be explained by mere economics. No matter how much the UK booms, most Irish nationalists aren't going to warm to the notion of belonging to it. However much it goes into decline, most unionists aren't going to choose to leave it.

Despite knowing full-well that, when push comes to shove, even unionists alarmed by Brexit will hesitate before voting in favour of becoming a minority in a united Ireland, republicans still keep pushing this superficial "next year in Jerusalem" narrative to fob off impatient supporters with a comforting fairy tale of unstoppable momentum. Otherwise, what was all the misery and mayhem for?

There's something regressive about that approach, because, if you're always hoping that some future electoral show of hands will magically fix things, less attention inevitably gets paid to making them a bit better in the present.

A united Ireland, much like a reunited Germany almost 30 years ago, probably is an inevitability - eventually. But eventually isn't a date. And it's definitely not a working policy for devolved government.

Unionists, unhappy with the current state of politics, are invariably urged to keep faith in the Good Friday Agreement as the best way forward; but, then, why don't nationalists listen to what the 1998 accord likewise says about border polls, which is that it's wisest to park epoch-making constitutional issues until the desire for such change is unambiguous?

Having a rolling campaign for an Irish unity poll while the Brexit dice are still up in the air seems guaranteed only to create uncertainty.

And, of course, the DUP has created enough instability on its own by going gung-ho for a hard Brexit, despite the opposition of a majority of nationalists and significant minority of unionists in Northern Ireland, who value their European identity and who are fearful of the economic and political impacts of leaving the EU.

If nationalists are reckless for agitating for a border poll during a time of political insecurity, then Brexit-cheerleading unionists are the last people with any right to chide them for it, when they're merrily stoking those fires in the first place.

Belfast Telegraph