Letter: There will be costs to a united Ireland but also enormous benefits for both North and South and for the island as a whole

Any attempt to calculate the cost of a united Ireland must involve a much wider analysis of costs and benefits than the recent paper by John FitzGerald and Edgar Morgenroth for the Institute of International and European Affairs, Dublin, would suggest (‘Separation from the UK would involve 'major costs' for Northern Ireland - and the Republic could pay up to €20 billion - report,’ April 5).

There will be costs - nation building does not come cheap - but also enormous benefits for both North and South and for Ireland as a whole. It was bad luck for the authors of the paper that they published it in the same week that the Ministers for Finance and Public Expenditure published new proposals for sovereign wealth funds. The funds will accumulate very serious money in a fairly short period of time (10 to 15 years).

The Republic is now seriously wealthy although it doesn’t feel like it because it is a fairly ramshackle place. And of course, the climate change challenges ahead are enormous and are going to cost billions to deal with. All that being said, the Republic could almost absorb Northern Ireland today. Within 10 years (leaving aside the many external threats to all of us) we should be able to do so without difficulty.

There are two aspects of the final run in to re-unification that are relevant at this point, viz., (a) support for re-unification among Northern nationalists will be virtually unanimous when the referendum takes place. The event will be momentous and will sweep all before it on the nationalist side and (b) the Republic’s Establishment will oppose re-unification albeit in a disguised way because of a reluctance to share establishment privileges with Ireland’s second largest province but the people of the Republic will back it in comfortable numbers.

Michael Clarke, Dublin