Colin Harvey: ‘Unionists should be central to making a New Ireland a success’
The Queen’s University professor and prominent member of Ireland’s Future speaks to Denzil McDaniel about how his Derry upbringing, the campaign of vilification he has faced, and what a ‘New Ireland’ means to him
First published in Irish News 7 June 2026
COLIN Harvey still speaks with a distinctive Derry accent more than 35 years after leaving to go to university in England.
Neither has he lost his affinity for the people of the city and what they went through when he was growing up in the 1970s and 80s; indeed it imbued in him a lifelong passion for working in the fields of equality and rights.
“Growing up in Derry gave me a very acute sense of poverty, of exclusion, of what discrimination meant,” he says.
“My background gave me my instincts to always try to do something about people who have been marginalised.
“Although I work in a university environment, the conflict wasn’t an abstract academic argument,” he says.
From Derry to Belfast, where he’s a professor at Queen’s, and from the north west to Dublin, where he’s now on the President’s Council of State, are now relatively short road trips across the island.
But outside of this triangle of cities, Harvey’s journey has involved over three decades of a distinguished academic career, including writing 10 books and publishing numerous articles.
He has also written extensively in the media about his hopes for a “New Ireland”.
He was invited earlier this year by President Catherine Connolly to sit on her advisory council, alongside fellow northerner Linda Ervine, the Belfast Irish language activist.
Harvey admits to being overwhelmed by the appointment, saying: “For a Derry person like myself, there is really no higher honour. It was the symbolism of it and an acknowledgement of the work I’ve been doing for many years in the area of constitutional law and human rights law.”
The Council of State has a membership comprising former presidents, ex-taoisigh and tánaistí, and senior figures from the top courts in the land.
“So, I’m immensely proud and privileged,” says the former St Columb’s pupil, the latest from that college to make his mark on public life in Ireland and further afield.
In recent years, Harvey’s long career has been almost overlooked by critics who unfairly pigeonhole him as a campaigner for a united Ireland.
He’s suffered personal abuse, which he tries to understand but admits was “challenging”, and he believes there’s been an “orchestrated” campaign against him.
He’s a prominent figure in the Ireland’s Future organisation and in this interview talks about his hopes for an all-embracing conversation involving civic unionism and the southern establishment in preparation for a choice to be made.
He wants the debate to conducted in a “safe space”.
Much of what drives Harvey can be traced back to his Derry background.
His mother was a McCafferty from Derry city and his father a Harvey from Eglinton, just outside. Young Colin was brought up in the city’s Carnhill area.
Born in 1970, the conflict was a backdrop to his formative years, when “all the names of the civil rights movement were really front and centre of conversations around the city”.
He recalls his father losing his job in the 1980s and says “I’ve always tried to stand with and be with marginalised and vulnerable groups”, and he remembers “the way Derry people were treated, the second-class citizenship layered on to socio-economic exclusion”.
“What I saw in Derry was really an attempt to humiliate people, right in the city that I grew up in. I was determined in my adult life that I wanted to something about that.
“That really gave me a powerful sense that something needed to be done.
“It explains a lot of why I’ve ended up spending so much of my life working on equality and rights, both academically and beyond academic life.”
When he left St Columb’s in 1989, he headed to university in Lancaster in the north of England to do a law degree.
It’s where he met his future wife, Lisa, from Devon, and after spending time working as an intern for Anti-Slavery International, Harvey got a scholarship for the University of Nottingham where he did a PhD in refugee rights.
“When I went to England in the 90s, the people who were the target were refugees and asylum seekers. So, I could see what was happening there, there were similar issues.
“The same lack of respect for human dignity, lack of respect for rights, an attempt to humiliate people.”
His first full-time lecturing job was at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth in 1994.
“Actually spending time in Wales in the mid-1990s and the ease and comfort there was with Welsh language and English language, given what’s been happening here, I just thought it was an interesting context.”
Colin and Lisa Harvey have two teenage daughters, 18-year-old Áine and Cara, who is 16, and with a busy family life focused on their exam time, he is in reflective mood going back to his own teenage years.
He recalls that for his generation, “what was happening on our streets was our normal”.
“I think how far this society has travelled from then until now,” he says.
“Things that seem normal in 2026 often seem remarkable to me. There’s an awful lot of work to be done, particularly in the area of socio-economic injustice, but sometimes acknowledging that we have a relatively successful peace process, in a world where many societies can’t actually say that, is really significant.”
It’s the idea that we still have some distance to go which feeds into Harvey’s belief in a “New Ireland”.
“If you believe in what I’ve outlined, then there is a responsibility to do something about it,” he says.
Referring to a “post-Brexit environment” and the debate over the future, he says: “It leads back to Derry and what it instilled. My background really instilled a sense of civic, political and educational responsibility. If you think we’re heading towards a border poll, and I do, then there a serious responsibility to get ready.”
He’s a firm believer in constitutional change but approaches the conversation with the analytical and logical mindset of a university professor of 30 years’ experience across the world.
In addition to being party to academic research on the subject, particularly 2019 to 2022 reports on EU constitutional change, he’s well-placed as a teacher of constitutional law to enter the public arena to promote the issue.
“People have a choice. The union with Britain or a united Ireland is hardwired into our constitutional legal framework. In a post-Brexit context, people were taken out of the European Union here against their wishes.
“The European Council in April 2017 said there’s an automatic way to return to the EU through the Good Friday mechanism.
“It would be bizarre, it would be odd if people weren’t having the discussion, and that’s how the research done has tried to frame the conversation because it’s about choice.”
Harvey’s perspective on that choice is that “Ireland is a thriving, prosperous, successful EU member state”.
He adds: “It’s hardly surprising, given the toxicity of what’s been happening in Britain in recent times, that people are thinking ‘Is that the better option for my children and grandchildren?’
“What worries me in 2026, so long after the (Good Friday) Agreement, what is supposed to be an absolutely foundational commitment, the promises that were made to people that we talk out loud about these things and prepare for them sensibly, that there would be anybody worried about doing that.”
The debate is about much more than emotion, and he cites research carried out by the ARINS Project and a recent book by Sam McBride and Fintan O’Toole among contributions.
“ARINS, which is a collaboration between the Royal Irish Academy and the University of Notre Dame in the US, is producing month-in, month-out, rigorous, peer-reviewed academic research on this,” says Harvey, who also points up work being done by the Shared Island Initiative.
Ireland’s Future has sat in on a range of meetings with political parties and civic society who “see the very good sense of preparing”.
However, he’s critical of the Irish Government and says they need to do more.
“The history of this place is that the governments will come on the pitch at some point. But often a lot of the hard work gets done by civic society groups and other people in advance of that.
“The Irish Government needs to do more because ultimately they will have to deliver all of this in practice when a prospectus is eventually written.
“My sense is that both governments will eventually come on to the pitch,” he says, pointing out that in 2024, an all-party Oireachtas Good Friday Agreement Committee report called for the government to commence immediate preparations.
Harvey says he has always tried to de-escalate any toxic elements of the conversation and he encourages people to get involved in shaping the future.
That includes unionism, and he says: “It’s entirely understandable that political unionism does not want to contemplate this outcome. The clue is in the title – unionism – and, quite understandably, their primary focus will be on maintaining the union.
“I think the importance of unionist engagement is central in figuring out what it is that will make unionism and loyalism comfortable in terms of what happens next,” says Harvey, who adds, “People who are writing the prospectus for a New Ireland genuinely and in good faith want to know what will make people feel comfortable at the end.
“My hope and the hope of many is that the unionist and loyalist communities will be central to making constitutional change and a New Ireland a success.”
Just a part of Harvey’s extensive CV includes achievements in academia from Aberystwyth to the University of Michigan, at Fordham, chair at the University of Leeds, and teaching in the London School of Economics and Oxford.
He first came to Queen’s as a lecturer in 1997, returning in 2005 as chair in human rights law, has been head of law, and served on the University’s Senate.
In addition, he’s served on the Human Rights Commission on both sides of the border, the NI Higher Education Council, and is currently involved the EU Fundamental Rights Agency.
Despite his successful career, I put it to Harvey that sometimes his detractors condense it into a narrow role as a united Ireland campaigner.
He says: “One of the striking things about recent years is the way in which our rather volatile and febrile discourse almost creates a caricature of somebody, a stereotype. When you look at my career working around these islands, what’s been really striking is the reduction of that to Colin Harvey from Ireland’s Future.”
He looks at the dynamics of it and tries not to personalise it, but agrees it had a personal impact.
It’s a dignified response – Harvey has been subjected to a campaign of vilification and intimidation, some of which was vitriolic and must have been personally distressing.
He was labelled dangerous, pro-IRA, a republican activist and there were calls for him to be removed from Queen’s and blocked from bodies by Stormont.
“I’ve been trying to collate a lot of this material and thinking what does this tell us about where we are on the island of Ireland, in Northern Ireland in 2026, about the debate?” he says.
“It’s been challenging and difficult at times, particularly between 2019 and 2022. There’s evidence for this, in my view, that there was a fairly concerted, I would say orchestrated, campaign focusing on my position at Queen’s.”
He believes “a message was being sent to him”.
“What worries me about this society is the attempt to create a chill factor to try to send a message to other people.”
Although he feels this works at times, he insists: “The conversation is now centre stage and more and more people are talking about constitutional change.”
It’s clear that Harvey will continue to be part of that conversation. His approach has been reasoned and reasonable; he’s a polite, well-spoken and articulate individual, but underneath his principled stance clearly won’t be silenced.