Unionism will not survive.

The people in Great Britain are no longer interested in Northern Ireland,

and at the same time society in Northern Ireland is changing

because the majority are going to be in favour of a United Ireland.

Not the view of anyone connected to Irish nationalism,

north or south of the border, nor of anyone sitting on the fence,

but the carefully weighed words of a man who's been at the heart of Ulster Unionism

for over six decades.

Lord Kilclooney, John Taylor, someone whose roots go right back to the old Storm and government

in which he served as a

minister who was elected as a councillor, an MLA, an MP and an MEP, has gone on the record to say

unionism needs to prepare for what is inevitably coming down the tracks.

I'm Mark Carruthers. That's what we're discussing on this edition of Red Lines and I'm pleased to say the man John Taylor chose to unburden himself too is with me now.

That's Alex Kane, of course, who wrote up the piece for last Saturday's Irish News.

We'll also hear later from Wallace Thompson and Lindsay McLaren,

two unionists who've similarly been on a journey away from their roots and been lambasted for it by the faithful.

So welcome to all of you.

Interesting conversation to be having at this time, Alex.

And I want to start with you and the interview you secured with John Taylor.

He's now 88.

He's not in the best of health, but he wanted to talk. He did want to talk. And I've known John for years. I mean, family connections. And then when I was up in the assembly, he was there. And I just mentioned to him one that we were tweeting about something entirely different or DM in each other and something entirely different. I said, sometimes, John, I really need to sit down with you and have a chat because, you know, you haven't really done a long sit down interview for a very long time. And if you do one, I would like it to be me. And thinking he would take a week or two weeks to think, and you go back immediately and say, yeah, let's sort something out. So we got that done just fairly quickly. But I was going to say, Mark, I know you're not going to go on to this. But the interview was primarily about John and his life. I'd done one with David Trimble a few years ago. It was just to talk to them about how they're going from one place to another place, the challenges they'd faced. So it wasn't meant to be an interview about John, a long interview about John and future of unionism. It was about John and the various challenges he had faced.

And it was himself who brought it up in an answer I wasn't expecting when I asked him a very

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