Repeating myths in the North about Brexit

The IT had a good piece interviewing four representatives of loyalism about Brexit and the current political chaos.
All articulate spokespeople for their community, though sadly not entirely representative of it given the dominance of the DUP, they were both flexible and oddly retrospective. For example, they confused the position of the ROI government entirely arguing that:

“There’s a feeling that 20 years of goodwill is being lost by aggressive statements by the Irish Government. That is a danger,” said Williamson. He points out the Belfast Agreement covers a million Protestants but feels the Government does not recognise the whole population the agreement protects by “making all these green statements”.
For these four men, it does not follow that because a majority (56 per cent) of people in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU that a majority would want to stay in the EU by being in a united Ireland.

And:

“Moving the constitutional tectonic plates is very dangerous and very irresponsible,” Irvine warned. He said that “most right-thinking people” in their communities would not want a return to “the dark days of the past” but he is worried about how younger loyalists who have no memory of the Troubles might react to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland within the UK being eroded in a post-Brexit world.

But the ROI government has been studious in saying it does not think a Border Poll is appropriate in the near future or that a united Ireland should or is an option at this point. Indeed it has been exemplary in arguing only for the GFA/BA and the current status quo.

Worse again they suggest the following:

These loyalists see the repeated warnings from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tánaiste Simon Coveney about the threat of a return to violence, the importance of the backstop provision in the Brexit deal and the risk of a hard border – all raised as part of the Government’s objections to the pro-Brexit British positions – as undermining good neighbourly relations with the Republic.

But this is to ignore who else has been making precisely that argument, that being the security forces on both sides of the Border including current and former PSNI members. And also the NI civil service, as recently as this week.

I find it depressing that we are hearing from loyalism the same incorrect tropes as put around by pro-Brexit commentators and proponents and it does offer an insight into how rapidly those tropes have been adopted and amplified.

It’s odd too some of the contradictions expressed. For example…

…he recognises there is a “sea change” among moderate nationalists and that post-Brexit they would vote in a referendum “for some sort of agreed Ireland”. While he believes there will never be a united Ireland, he is concerned about what Brexit might throw up. “The representatives of UDA, UVF and the Red Hand [paramilitary group] all signed up to decommissioning because the union was safe. You go into the whole Brexit situation, nobody knows what is going to happen.”

But… also:

He thinks it “very likely” that English and Scottish nationalism could break up the United Kingdom and is concerned about what the coming years and wider political disruption across the UK might bring.

So that would suggest that some sort of united Ireland might well be a plausible (if not inevitable) outcome, no?

Interestingly though there is this:

Williamson said Sinn Féin and others who want a Border poll in Northern Ireland on Irish unification “haven’t told people what a united Ireland even entails”. He said that, post-Brexit, other options should be considered: a Northern Ireland-Scotland confederation, Northern Ireland and Scotland going “semi-independent” or the Republic “coming within the British Isles” or rejoining the Commonwealth.

That’s a lot of options, and some are clearly non-starters. But… there may be space in there which would provide a path forward.