The two had mistakenly driven into the west Belfast funeral cortege of one of the mourners killed while attending the funerals of three IRA members shot dead by Britain\u2019s SAS in Gibraltar in 1988.<\/p>\n
Collins watched the terrible scenes unfold on TV from just 11km away at his family\u2019s home on the King\u2019s Road in east Belfast. His home was quietly unionist in sympathy.<\/p>\n
Today Collins knows how much his parents protected him and his two brothers, Jackson, now in New York, and Justin, now living in Britain. \u201cWe saw the violence on TV, but it did not come closer,\u201d he tells The Irish Times.<\/p>\n
A one-time member of the Conservative Party and, later, the Alliance Party, Collins worked as an official in the UK\u2019s Northern Ireland Office for a number of years, acting as one of its press officers during the negotiations leading to the 2006 St Andrews Agreement on the devolution of power in the region. <\/p>\n
He was later chief executive of Northern Ireland\u2019s Federation of Housing Associations before he set up a Belfast-based political communications firm.<\/p>\n
In his book, The Irish Unity Dividend, published last September, Collinsargues Northern Ireland would be better off in a united Ireland.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0Unionists must ask themselves: \u2018Is this as good as it gets?\u2019<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n However, planning is needed to avoid a repeat of \u201cthe chaos of Brexit\u201d, he says. People must sit down to create the plan that will offer the best quality of life for everyone.<\/p>\n Unionist politicians choose not to engage, he says, \u201cbut civic unionism is already speaking with the rest of Ireland in offices, bars, restaurants and people\u2019s homes\u201d.<\/p>\n Growing up not far from Stormont, Collins from age seven helped out on his father\u2019s pig farm in Castlereagh. \u201cEvery job after working on a pig farm is easier,\u201d he says with a smile.<\/p>\n His father David was a vet employed by Belfast City Council in the city\u2019s meat factories, but the pig farm helped him and his wife Rosemary send their three sons to Campbell College.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were Catholics there then. Not many, but there were some. Some said later they had had difficulties, and I was surprised. I hadn\u2019t been aware of that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n His father was in the Orange Order<\/a>, but \u201clost interest\u201d, his son says. \u201cHe favoured Northern Ireland<\/a> being a full part of the UK and was a member of the Campaign for Equal Citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n Led by Clifford Smyth and then by Robert McCartney, who would go on to become an MP, the campaign wanted the Conservatives, Labour and other British political parties to take part fully in Northern politics.<\/p>\n Unusually for someone in Northern Ireland, Collins\u2019s father joined the Social Democratic Party set up with high hopes in 1981 by Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams.<\/p>\n Today, the pro-Irish unity Collins and his father occasionally spar about the constitutional future of Northern Ireland, with the latter holding to his integrationist views, the son says.<\/p>\n Growing up, Collins says, he \u201calways felt Irish\u201d and British, enthusiastically supporting the Irish rugby team with his family, along with reaching under-age All-Ireland athletics finals.<\/p>\n The rugby interest was, no doubt, fuelled by living next door to the Irish centre, Mike Gibson, famed for his role in the Lions\u2019 first series win against the All-Blacks in 1971.<\/p>\n There was no contradiction being from a unionist family in east Belfast and taking part in All-Ireland sports, he remembers. \u201cNobody thought anything of it. It predated the Troubles.\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0Island of Ireland \u2018not ready\u2019 for unification referendum, says former t\u00e1naiste<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Collins\u2019s belief in unity developed slowly, partly fuelled by the Belfast Agreement<\/a> on Good Friday 1998. By then, he was a student at Dundee University.<\/p>\n There, he remembers the hope the agreement created. But he also recalls the sectarianism of Dundee United supporters. The club was formed in 1910 by Irish immigrants to Scotland as Dundee Hibernian.<\/p>\n Often they would sing pro-IRA songs in the city\u2019s pubs, once asking Collins and his friends if they supported \u201cthe Provos\u201d. Told they did not, they were puzzled.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of my friends told them that we were from there we knew what the IRA had done. And we did not support violence, any violence,\u201d he says, remembering the encounter.<\/p>\n Mary McAleese<\/a>\u2019s frequent reaching out to unionists during her time as president offered \u201cinspiration\u201d, he says, though Michael D Higgins<\/a> showed few of the same impulses.<\/p>\n Given his background, Collins\u2019s pro-unity sentiments have not come without cost, personally or professionally. \u201cSome people who were friends in the past would not be friends now,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Unionists should and must engage with the unity debate, he argues. \u201cMany unionists think that Nigel Farage<\/a> and Reform<\/a> would be good for the union; they won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n Farage admits Brexit has been a failure yet refuses closer links with the European Union and he has admitted there will be a united Ireland, Collins says, adding: \u201cBrexit is ultimately an English nationalist project.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe hostility towards both parts of Ireland will increase, and they will continue Brexiteers\u2019 previous attempts to undermine Ireland\u2019s membership of the European Union,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Some unionists see Reform UK as offering a \u201csupposed golden past\u201d, but Collins believes a Reform\/Conservative alliance would have little interest in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Born into a unionist family, Belfast-born Ben Collins favours Irish unity and has lost friends over his beliefs.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[179851,802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-565234","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-ben-collins","9":"tag-brexit","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-eu","12":"tag-europe","13":"tag-european","14":"tag-european-union","15":"tag-great-britain","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115535481334949377","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"British](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Q6ZURI4DJ3266ZM2MZ3M4GRQ6A.jpg\")
British army corporal Derek Wood emerges from his car with a gun in his hand in Belfast in March 1988. Photograph: Pacemaker <\/p>\n