Fintan O'Toole, member of the Royal Irish Academy, is a columnist with The Irish Times and advising editor of the New York Review of Books. His many books on Irish history, politics, society and culture include We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. He has been awarded the European Press Prize, the Orwell Prize for Journalism, and the Robert Silvers Prize for Journalism.

Sam McBride is the Northern Ireland Editor of the Belfast Telegraph and the Sunday Independent newspapers. He also writes on Northern Ireland for The Economist. He is a former Political Editor of the Belfast News Letter and has made a BBC film about the Northern Bank robbery. He is author of The Sunday Times bestseller Burned: The Inside Story of the 'Cash-for-Ash' Scandal and Northern Ireland's Secretive New Elite and is a regular broadcaster.

"Sam McBride and Fintan O'Toole are among some of the best-known journalists on the island of Ireland." --BelTel Podcast

"Most of the arguments made for and against a united Ireland are advanced publicly by individuals or organisations with skin in the game. We are well used to hearing people attempting to make the facts fit with their own particular preferred outcome. Not so Fintan O'Toole and Sam McBride in their new book For and Against a United Ireland, in which they argue for and against constitutional change leaving aside as best as they can any personal baggage they might carry with them on the subject." --BBC Red Lines

"Mr. O'Toole writes that "to adapt T.S. Eliot, Irish idealism cannot bear too much reality." On the other hand Mr. McBride, a child of the Troubles, writes that "much of what our forefathers were fighting for and against has gone," meaning that the ancient divisions of faith and culture have given way to an island that is, largely courteous of American multinationals, not only peaceful but affluent. Is that dream worth risking for one of unity?" --New York Sun

"For and Against a United Ireland is a direct challenge to any assertion that to debate is to polarise and thus to put peace at risk. . . . O'Toole and McBride have ably demonstrated the democratic necessity of debate. It is up to us to realise what it is that we urgently need to be able to argue in defence of, together." --The Irish Times

"Remarkably and fittingly, unionists and nationalists, northerners and southerners, will find themselves united in recommending this book." --Slugger O'Toole

"Hundreds of years of historical hope and pain will weigh on a border poll campaign, and manifest themselves in the joy and the anguish, the thrill and the fear that will follow its result. We owe it to each other, and to all those who have suffered because of the tensions and passions aroused by these issues, to consider them thoughtfully and respectfully. Not everyone who went before us had this chance." --from the Introduction

"They've produced a book which is really really interesting." --The Last Word Podcast

"Very interesting, rational arguments on both sides." --The Irish Times: Election Daily

"[T]he book they have jointly written does not take refuge in easy categories or simple arguments. They each write two chapters in which they argue for and then against a united Ireland. It is a sign of their skill that the arguments they make for unity seem oddly solid and unassailable, and then their arguments against a united Ireland do as well." --New York Review of Books

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press

Pub date: 2026-02-15

Length: 192 pages