I'VE thought hard about Thursday's referendum to the point it has kept me awake at night.
I've always liked the idea of being European, it sounds so much more exotic than being a west Belfastian. Although realistically we don't particularly fit in with the rest of the Europeans, not only an island apart but you can spot an Irish person abroad in a crowd of thousands, burnt shoulders, dressed like they won a trolley dash through JD Sports.
But in thinking about the future I've considered many factors including the European human rights act, a complex piece of legislation that while sometimes misquoted by amateur legal experts provides iron clad cover from abuses of people's rights from increasingly oppressive governments.
The Leave and Remain campaign have fostered some strange bedfellows, the far right and far left, united in their desire to ditch Brussels but for very different reasons.
One wants to regain all the power for themselves while the other wants to remind those of us living in the north that we are still a partitioned country. A hard border with checkpoints will have a massive psychological impact, especially on the younger generation for whom border checkpoints are a page in a history book.
I've also seen how much Ireland as a whole has benefited from European investment in infrastructure and communities.
And on the flip side how millions of that money was frittered away on paramilitary controlled organisations that have more interest in pounds than peace with community funded projects only ever intended to be a stop gap to normalisation, not jobs for life for the boys.
However, that aside and the vast majority of European peace money was invested in trying to bring two communities together and regardless of how fed up we get around the summer marching season or occasional times of contention, we're undoubtedly in a better place than we were 10 years ago.
Security statistics show a slow but gradual move away from violence and while the reasons for that are complicated and varied the commitment of the EU to the north's development should not be disregarded.
After much internal debate I've reached the decision that to remain is the right thing to do not just in the here and now but for my children's future.
Being able to live and work in the EU is not a one way street for dole scroungers and on the run criminals as project fear Brexiters would have you believe but a two way exchange.
Our young people have always travelled and with little industry to speak of other than call centres always will travel.
Those who point to free movement as a reason to pull out of Europe and pull up the drawbridge refer to 'swarms' of people heading this way.
In the main, though, when trying to scare they speak of refugees who are not from within the European Union but people fleeing war and poverty in North Africa and the Middle East.
A Brexit won't stop those people coming and not only has the rest of Europe a moral obligation not to let people starve to death at locked borders they've a legal obligation to care for people fleeing wars the west helped facilitate.
A Brexit will stop the thousands of care workers that the NHS relies on to function.
But if you're really undecided as to what to do today, before you cast your vote listen to the words of Jo Cox's husband Brendan. The MP was savagely murdered by a man whose motive appears to have been rage at her liberal political stance.
The mother of two was a voice for the vulnerable, her husband said she genuinely feared for our future given the heightened danger of the world we live in and the politicians internationally who have sought to exploit that.
Brendan Cox said the MP for Batley and Spen was concerned at the "whipping up of fears and whipping up of hatred" not just at home but on a scale not seen since the 1930s.
We know what the result of hate speech from that time was and we know the EU was set up to stop it ever happening again.
David Cameron is unlikely to survive an out vote, the favourite to succeed him is Boris Johnson.
With the joke of a Donald Trump president now no longer a laughing matter, extremism is flourishing across the world.
Jo Cox was right to be afraid, and we all should be. Those who say they want to take back power from Brussels really mean they want all the power for themselves.
You have to ask what is it they're going to do with all that power if they get it, and is that really the world you want your children to live in?
