Unionists have to stop fighting over the Good Friday Agreement and start formulating a new non-Orange unionism – according to a pamphlet published by the Cadogan Group yesterday (Friday).
This would help make it possible for Catholics and nationalists to live with a settlement within the UK, the group said.
"Unionists should make it clear that while they cannot share government with those still associated with political violence, they are fully committed to a cross-community executive and to significant and probably expanding cross-border cooperation, with all-island institutions," the group said.
The Cadogan Group said northern nationalists must face the reality that the consent principle and the census results together mean that Northern Ireland will remain inside the UK.
The group asked: "Does the SDLP, by making Irish unity the primary focus of its politics, want to remain a minority party pursuing an unachieveable goal? Can it survive in competition with Sinn Féin if it offers only a slightly different version of anti-partitionist nationalism?
"Sinn Féin will eventually have to face up to the contradiction between its rhetorical commitment to a sovereign Irish Republic and indefinite participation in the administration of a UK region.
"Republicans have still to prove that they really are in transition from violence to exclusively democratic means; their continued justification and glorification of the terrorism of the Provisional IRA makes that transition more difficult for themselves and less believable by others."
The Cadogan group believes that a fundamental review of the Good Friday Agreement is needed if a peaceful settlement based on cross-community support is to survive.
Its pamphlet entitled 'Picking up the Pieces: Northern Ireland after the Belfast agreement' suggests that now is time to move to the specific provision in the agreement for a review leading to amendment.
"In some ways it had worked, and reduced violence, but for many it had proved too ambitious.
"If all parties had moved swiftly to honour their commitments, it might just have worked, but those linked to paramilitaries had not done so, and the agreement had buckled under this weight. All concerned now needed to consider how to retain its best and most workable features, and how constructively to amend or replace the rest," the pamphlet said.
Current members of the Cadogan Group are Steven King, Dennis Kennedy, Graham Gudgin, Arthur Green, Paul Bew, Arthur Aughey and Colin Armstrong.
