‘People in the Republic don’t understand unionists. But they don’t understand northern nationalists either’

Mary C Murphy is the new head of the prestigious Irish Institute at Boston College .

She studied politics at Queen's University Belfast in the mid-1990s .

Murphy was among the first to publish a book on its implications for the North .

She has been a lecturer at University College Cork since 2003 and from 2023 the head of its Department of Government and Politics and Brexit .

Two-thirds of people in the South said they had no friends in the North .

More than 80 per cent had no relations there, and more than half had not travelled across the Border in the past five years .

Murphy says there are very different lived experiences on both sides of the Border.

The debate around constitutional change has ebbed and flowed a little bit in the last year .

Murphy ’s goal is for the Institute to “continue to be a hub for conversations between various different people from a variety of different backgrounds and from both sides of the Atlantic ” “I think the ambition will be to have a sort of two -way dialogue between Boston and Ireland and the UK and the EU , recognising that Ireland , the Republic of Ireland , sits within the European framework, and that Northern Ireland has a very particular relationship with the EU post.