About the Book

The Green Thread is an advocacy-oriented policy book that outlines a vision for a democratic, inclusive, and socially just reunited Ireland. It argues that reunification should go beyond ending partition or extending the Republic of Ireland’s existing institutions northward. Instead, the book advocates a new constitutional settlement: a federal parliamentary republic designed to distribute political authority, protect diverse traditions, and provide meaningful regional representation. It therefore presents unity not simply as a territorial objective but as an opportunity to build institutions founded on equality, pluralism, shared sovereignty, and civic participation.

The proposed federation would have three autonomous regions: Ulster, encompassing all nine counties of the historic province; Leinster, comprising its 12 counties; and Connacht–Munster, comprising the five counties of Connacht and the six counties of Munster. The book presents the union of Connacht and Munster as a way to promote economic fairness and political balance. It argues that each region should control substantial areas of regional policy while participating in a shared national government. In the book’s account, this arrangement would preserve national cohesion without concentrating authority in a single political center, while giving unionist, nationalist, urban, rural, and other communities a practical stake in the new state.

A new written constitution would divide powers between the national and regional governments, while regional authorities would devolve specified regulatory and administrative responsibilities to county governments and community councils. The book emphasizes constitutional supremacy, human rights, equal opportunity, democratic accountability, and safeguards against excessive central authority. Its proposals also address the presidency, a representative Council of State, electoral systems, political parties, courts, policing, regulatory bodies, the civil service, and other institutions required for a decentralized federation. Citizens’ assemblies, a charter of rights, and balanced representation at the national and regional levels are presented as mechanisms for making reunification a jointly designed process rather than an imposed outcome.

The book also examines possible locations for national and regional governments, including the symbolic case for placing a national capital outside Dublin and Belfast. Beyond constitutional design, it discusses wealth inequality, housing, uneven regional development, public services, language and culture, environmental responsibility, and stronger local democracy. Together, these topics illustrate the book’s broader argument that reunification should improve everyday governance and material conditions rather than merely change flags, borders, or constitutional labels.

The historical chapters connect the proposals to British rule, partition, the Troubles, the Good Friday Agreement, Brexit, and earlier federalist thinking such as Éire Nua. The book credits the Good Friday Agreement with establishing a framework for peace while criticizing its referendum mechanism and the recurring instability of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing institutions. It portrays Brexit as a major disruption that has intensified the constitutional question and exposed tensions involving trade, sovereignty, identity, and democratic consent. For implementation, the book envisages approval through referendums, followed by elections and a managed transition in which existing laws and public institutions would be reviewed and adapted to the federal constitution.

Overall, The Green Thread is an openly persuasive work that frequently criticizes centralized government and existing constitutional arrangements. It portrays reunification as a civic transformation rather than a victory for one identity over another. Its central contention is that a durable united Ireland must be planned in advance, balanced across regions, responsive to local communities, jointly shaped by people from every tradition on the island, and informed by the diaspora.

About the Book

About the Author

Tomás Ó Coisdealba

What does it mean to carry a nation’s memory across an ocean, then use that memory to imagine its future?

That question runs through the life and work of Tomás Ó Coisdealbha, linking his roots in the Irish-speaking west of Ireland with a global engineering career and a lifelong commitment to political writing, historical memory, identity, and national renewal.

Ó Coisdealbha was born in Spiddal, County Galway, and raised in a bilingual household shaped by transatlantic experience. He emigrated to the United States in 1965 after several years in England. His father, also a Gaelic speaker, had spent more than 15 years in the United States, served in its armed forces during World War I, and returned to Ireland in the 1930s. His mother, a Roscommon native, had also lived in the United States, where she met and married his father.

That transatlantic background later broadened into a global professional life. An engineer by profession, Tomás worked for major engineering and pharmaceutical companies, managing projects across North America, Europe, West Asia, and the Caribbean. The experiences, observations, and knowledge he gained during those years gave him a broad international perspective and shaped his lifelong interest in political organization and national identity, as well as a distinctive approach to problem-solving and to working with people who hold different worldviews and ideas.

Alongside that professional life, he devoted significant time to political writing, historical research, and the preservation of Irish republican memory. In The Green Thread, he advances a detailed vision of Irish reunification grounded in democratic pluralism, regional equality, and a Federal Parliamentary Republic. He argues that a reunited Ireland must move beyond inherited divisions by establishing regional structures that protect local identity, balance political power, and give all traditions on the island a meaningful place in a shared constitutional future. His writings reflect a sustained engagement with questions of sovereignty, federalism, economic fairness, political representation, and the practical institutions needed to ensure a peaceful, inclusive, and durable reunification.

The Long Irish Wake, his companion project to be published later this year, reveals the historical dimension of that same commitment. This work honors the men and women whose lives were bound to Ireland’s struggle for national freedom and to America’s enduring struggles for liberty, equality, humanity, and civil rights. It compiles biographies and burial-site information for Irish revolutionaries, Irish-American military figures, and prominent and ordinary exiles whose lives sustained Irish national consciousness and contributed to the growth and strength of the United States. By preserving these stories and memorial sites, Ó Coisdealbha links the memory of past struggle to the civic questions facing Ireland today. Taken together, The Green Thread and The Long Irish Wake present him as both a political thinker and a custodian of historical memory: a member of the Irish diaspora whose work seeks to honor those who came before while imagining a more democratic and reunited Ireland.