Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride will debate the case for and against Irish unity during a public lecture at Princeton University on Friday, March 20.
The discussion will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the James Stewart Film Theater, 185 Nassau St., as part of the university’s annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture presented by the Fund for Irish Studies.
The event will feature the co-authors examining the arguments presented in their book, For and Against a United Ireland, which explores one of the most contentious questions in modern Irish politics.
The lecture is part of the 2025–26 Fund for Irish Studies series. Admission is free, but tickets are required and must be reserved through Princeton University Ticketing.
In the book, the authors examine the political and social implications of possible Irish unification, an issue that O’Toole has said is now more plausible than at any point since the partition of Ireland in 1921.
Voters on both sides of the Irish border may one day face a referendum on unity, raising questions about the consequences for individuals, communities and the broader society.
In For and Against a United Ireland, O’Toole and McBride present and debate the strongest arguments on both sides of the issue.
“Most of the arguments made for and against a united Ireland are advanced publicly by individuals or organizations with skin in the game,” journalist Mark Carruthers wrote for BBC Red Lines. “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.”
O’Toole is a columnist for The Irish Times and an advising editor of The New York Review of Books. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian and The Observer.
From 2012 to 2024, he served as the Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University.
His books include We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, named by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2022, as well as Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain and Ship of Fools. O’Toole has received numerous journalism awards, including the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize, and was recently appointed official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.
McBride is Northern Ireland editor of the Belfast Telegraph and the Dublin-based Sunday Independent. He also writes on Northern Ireland for The Economist.
A former political editor of the Belfast News Letter, McBride has produced a BBC documentary on the Northern Bank robbery and regularly provides analysis on Northern Irish politics for international audiences.
His first book, Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, became a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.
For and Against a United Ireland, his second book, was shortlisted for Best Irish-Published Book in the 2025 An Post Irish Book of the Year Awards.
The 2025–26 Fund for Irish Studies series is co-chaired by Jane Cox, director of Princeton’s Program in Theater & Music Theater, and Robert Spoo, the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters.
The Fund for Irish Studies supports programming designed to broaden understanding of Ireland’s languages, literature, drama, visual arts, history and economics, as well as the role of Ireland in the wider world. The lecture series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Additional events scheduled in the series include a talk by biographer Merlin Holland on April 10 titled “After Oscar: Wilde between the li(n)es,” and an April 23 keynote by writer John Banville titled “Fiction and the Dream,” presented as part of the (De)Stabilizing Nabakov conference organized by Princeton’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
The James Stewart Film Theater is an accessible venue. Guests needing accommodations are asked to contact the Lewis Center for the Arts at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.
More information about the lecture series is available through the Fund for Irish Studies website.
Fintan O’Toole (photo by Nick Bradshaw) and Sam McBride (photo by Conor Mulhern.),
