BEN Collins grew up in a strongly pro-Unionist and pro-British background in East Belfast.
“It was the Troubles, before the Good Friday Agreement, so I was very much aware of the conflict,” he told The National.
“At that time, I was determined that I wasn't going to be bombed into a united Ireland, to be blunt.”
Then, when he lived in Scotland in the early 2000s, he was an active Scottish Tory member. He has also campaigned for the Alliance Party and worked for the UK Government in its Northern Ireland office.
Not exactly the early CV you’d expect from the author of two books about a unified Ireland.
The first was “Irish Unity: Time to Prepare”, the second is The Irish Unity Dividend – which bills itself as an analysis of the advantages of Irish unity and will be released next month.
I asked Collins how that transition from a devoted Unionist happened, and he told me that it was a gradual change.
“I'd always felt Irish in addition to being British, but over time, my sense of Britishness dissipated, while my sense of Irishness really grew,” he said.
Collins credits it partly to his time in Scotland. He went to the University of Dundee in 1994 at the age of 18 and then lived in Edinburgh between 2001 and 2003 – where he spent some time canvassing for the Scottish Conservatives.
“I felt increasingly uncomfortable in the party because, even back then, I could see they were becoming ever more eurosceptic and I just didn't feel comfortable with that so I left,” he said.
“At the same time, it was the 2003 Scottish Parliament elections when the SNP were under John Swinney, the first time round.
“They started to talk about fiscal autonomy. I had come from very much a Unionist background in Northern Ireland, and just being in a different context in Scotland – I started thinking, yeah, this makes a lot of sense.
"You want to have control over your finances. If you're going to have a parliament, you want to have control of your finances, and so that sort of opened the door for me in many ways.”
When he returned to Northern Ireland and worked for the UK Government, that sentiment grew.
Collins recalled a business meeting with Richard Needham, a former Tory minister who was previously in the Northern Ireland Office, in which he said the sentence: “If you create a parliament that doesn't have proper tax varying powers, you're creating a eunuch”.
Collins said of that interaction: “It's quite stark language, but I think in many ways it's right – that if you want to have proper grown-up politics, you need to have the financial wherewithal, as well as the political structures.”
He came up with the idea of his first book during the 2012 London Olympics.
“I could tell things were changing. As I said, I felt more Irish and less British. The idealist in me felt that a lot of the division within the island of Ireland and within Northern Ireland is caused by the fact that we have a border which was put there by a British government,” Collins said.
“There's a lot of talk about how you can't have a united Ireland until you have reconciliation within Northern Ireland. But for me, reunification is reconciliation – because that's how you bring people together.”
His second book, The Irish Unity Dividend, will be published next month and offers a deep dive into the “benefits which everyone across the island will receive from reunification”.
Collins said the overall message of the book is that “you don't need to be an economist to know that two of something is less efficient and less effective than one of something”.
“For me, the key thing is that it’s about taking an integrated approach to Irish unity. I think that there absolutely will need to be a Northern Ireland assembly for a transitional period after a vote in favour of Irish unity, but I do not believe that there should be a Northern Ireland assembly in perpetuity,” he said.
“As I said in the very front cover of my book, there's no such thing as a kinder, gentler form of partition, and for me it's about how Northern Ireland has been semi-detached from British politics for the last 100 years, and I would say that Westminster has been a cold house for Unionists, and I think it's about bringing Unionists and those from a British background into the centre of of Irish society and helping to run an Irish government and having the benefit of being part of one of the richest countries in the European Union, if not the world, and being in being in the centre of of making those decisions, and for me that's the key thing.”
He added: “With the increasing likelihood of Nigel Farage and Reform UK forming the next UK Government, that just accelerates for me the need to prepare for Irish unity and also Scottish independence, because I don't think either Scotland or Northern Ireland will want to be part of the UK which is run by Nigel Farage, who is in essence, an English nationalist rather than a, you know, a UK unionist.”
Ben’s new book The Irish Unity Dividend is now available to pre-order. It will be published on 30 September 2025.
