evidence: Fifty years ago, not long before Northern Ireland’s first power-sharing executive took office, Conservative prime minister Edward Heath apparently told Ulster Unionist leader Brian Faulkner that power-sharing with Irish nationalists was the price that his party must pay for maintaining the union. Faced with an IRA insurgency and an Irish Government incapable of advancing any significant political, cultural or societal change to facilitate peaceful coexistence north of the border, very few of Faulkner’s senior colleagues invested political capital in the venture. The public were more sanguine about the coalition government’s prospects however, and Faulkner’s loyalist opponents were forced to resort to unconstitutional action to bring it down. Twenty-five years later, another unionist leader succeeded where Faulkner had failed. David Trimble convinced enough of his senior colleagues that power-sharing with nationalists was the only way that his community could secure its long-term future within the UK. [...] If Irish nationalists win a referendum on Northern Ireland’s constitutional future due to the failure of these institutions, it will provide the weakest basis imaginable for a shared future between the peoples of this island, for power-sharing is the price that they must pay for reunification—its failure in the north will ultimately lead to its failure on an all-island basis.