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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Each week we choose three pieces from the magazine

and ask their writers to read them aloud. I'm Oscar

Gregminton and on the podcast this week. Jenny McCartney says don't expect to United

Ireland any time soon. Chloe Ashby reads her review of con slash artist, the memoir of notorious

art forger Tony Tetro, and a sender Maxstone Graham read her notes on Canapes. Up first, Jenny McCartney.

A hundred years since the founding of the Irish state on 6th December 1922, how likely or desirable

is the prospect of Irish unity? The recent electoral success of Sinn Féin suggested to many, particularly in the US, that the idea's momentum is now unstoppable.

Of course, it's being egged on by Sinn Féin itself, whose New York Times advertisements in March

proclaimed that Irish unity would be in the best interests of citizens abroad and the wider diaspora.

Extensive polling for the Irish Times this week, however, paints a much more complex,

contradictory picture of opinion at home. Before stocking up on celebratory green beer,

the Irish-American diaspora might well be advised to read it. Among those polled in the Republic of Ireland,

two-thirds said they would vote for a United Ireland in a border referendum.

Yet this number declined when respondents were asked to consider a new Irish flag

or national anthem to accommodate unionist citizens.

Almost half declared themselves less likely to

vote for a united Ireland in the first place. The idea that unionists could veto a new law,

if they thought it violated their vital interests, triggered the same effect. The Irish times

characterised the South's desire for unity as wide but not deep.

Sinn Féin's current status as Ireland's most popular party may owe more to its stance on housing and healthcare than the border.

In Northern Ireland, half of all respondents said they would vote against a United Ireland, with only 27% in favour.

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