As a young teenager growing up in Enniskillen I did something none of my friends or classmates experimented with or showed any interest in. I joined the Alliance Party.

I did so because I couldn’t ever get my head around identifying either as a Unionist or as a Nationalist.

I was a Catholic (practising at that time), attending Portora Royal.

The 1994 ceasefires had been announced and I had friends with hugely different political outlooks. I loved the intense discussions and debates and totally understood how conflict, loss and division led to different perspectives on how to resolve issues of concern.

How to move forward in a dark and bloody society that barely functioned and without vital interventions from people like Gordon Wilson would have been even worse.

Like many Fermanagh folk, I resented the reference by Winston Churchill to “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”.

Community relations were challenging, very strained at times, but the overall sense of things growing up was that we are a people who have much more in common with each other than we think or even realise.

This came into sharp focus when I went to Dublin to study after finishing school.

I very quickly realised how little understanding or knowledge there was of “the North”.

How few had ever really spent any time North of the Border, apart from the odd trip to the shops.

How the absolute rejection of violence there meant many had never given a second’s thought to wanting a United Ireland or to push for it.

This was also the view mirrored in other parts of the UK when my friends who went to study there brought back similar observations to our Christmas and summertime pints in Blakes.

And yet, for those of us who didn’t obsess about the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, or about flags, emblems or commemorating ancient events, we didn’t have a political vehicle or a sizeable tribe of our own.

Even people who thought like Alliance didn’t vote Alliance. Until now.

In May, Enniskillen elected an Alliance councillor for the very first time.

Eddie Roofe’s stunning success cannot be underestimated in its import.

It’s a big local political moment, and a massive opportunity to move beyond the two traditional blocks.

The growth of centre ground voting, and changing demographics, tell us that any political change will effectively be determined by that centre ground voter.

The people who vote for Eddie Roofe.

We will have to be persuaded by the merits of the various arguments being put forward. There are no longer political majorities. We are all minorities now.

And that’s great, because that’s the third way.

The third way of doing things is to build coalitions of support for your political position. To reach out beyond those you have already persuaded. To make ‘the other’ feel safe and secure and welcome.

So, whether we remain in the Union with Britain, or opt for some form of union with the Republic, it will be a merits-based rather than a factional-based test.

The so-called sectarian headcounts will no longer count for anything in the final analysis.

For those who think like and/or vote Alliance here, I have no doubt there will be differing perspectives on a Border poll.

And that’s great, because that too is the third way. Making our own minds up, rather than it being imposed upon us.

And which is why I suspect Alliance party leader Naomi Long, or Councillor Roofe, if the time comes, would sensibly point out that Alliance voters should vote for whichever future they want for themselves, their families and communities.

There has always been a fascination in some quarters in seeking to label Alliance voters as being either Unionist or anti-Unionist.

It’s a tiresome debate, and misses the point that if people who vote Alliance saw themselves as Unionist, they would vote for one of the Unionist parties, and the same if they considered themselves Nationalist.

They vote Alliance because they believe in alternatives.

Personally, I really don’t know how I would vote in a Border poll. It would depend on so many different things at that point in time.

Sometimes the heart and the head tells us different things. But I have a couple of observations at this point.

The DUP boycott of the institutions is doing immeasurable damage to the Union with Britain.

Brexit continues to be disastrous for the Union.

For a county like Fermanagh, with our background in tourism and agriculture, I can’t think of one single benefit Brexit has brought, or will bring.

Political Unionism is on the backfoot, is shockingly poorly led and, frankly, my Unionist friends and old school mates deserve better.

The significant political advances made by David Trimble and others for Unionists in the Good Friday Agreement have never been celebrated, recognised or built upon in the years since.

It also means that in almost whispered tones and quiet conversations, people from a Unionist background are wondering what a United Ireland would look like for them, for their Britishness, and how the architecture of governance would be built or modified to reflect the Unionist population here.

And yet, in Dublin, very few are thinking that way at all.

It’s simply not a significant discussion point, and voters’ priorities in the run up to next year’s general election continue to focus on housing and health.

Sinn Féin too will be focusing on those issues, and not on Irish unity. It will win more votes that way.

So, our political impasse and its resolution is solely dependent on political leaders re-entering Stormont and working out mechanisms to resolve policy differences without one party or another collapsing the entire government and leaving us all outside in the political cold.

Sharing power for the benefit of all our people isn’t the third way – it’s the only way.

Gareth Noble is a Fermanagh native and now a leading children’s law solicitor in Dublin, writing for The Impartial Newspaper in a personal capacity.