Irish unification would be a silver lining to this awfulness.

As someone from Ireland I'm really not sure I could be bothered dealing with all the shit that could entail. Would prefer if they just went independent and joined the EU as a separate country.

It would be rather ironic if after all the troubles the North said they wanted to reunify and the South said fuck off.

Something similar happened in Belgium a while ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Belgium

It's still pretty much an unresolved situation at the present, in the longer term it could go either way.

Unfortunately Northern Ireland doesn't have the economy or infrastructure to realistically function as an independent state at this point. You never know about the future, but it's likely not on the table any time soon.

Why does it need to be large to function independently? There are a bunch of far smaller nations in the EU/Europe: Luxembourg, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, etc. If Northern Ireland became independent, it could just join the EU (regular Ireland is also an EU member), so they wouldn't have to maintain their own currency at least, and would benefit from the free trade. If Luxembourg can function as it is, I don't see why Northern Ireland can't do the same.

Which is ironic given how long foreign rule has had to sort the place out.

Not really. Northern Ireland is quite small.

It would also represent an economic hit for the Republic of Ireland.

This may be offset by the fact that Ireland will be the English speaking country in the EU in which multinational corporations can maintain a base of operations.

A lot of people from both sides of the border don't want unification.

> With emerging talk of Irish unification and Scottish independence after the referendum, some legacy he is going to leave behind.

As much as Sinn Fein might like to think they could exploit the pro-EU majority to push Irish unification, it seems to me that NI still has a unionist majority, and that those who are in the pro-EU/unionist overlap are predominantly going to favor staying with the UK instead of Ireland at the cost of the EU over joining the EU at the cost of unification with Ireland.

Never going to happen. The Britain transfers about GBP £11 Billion a year into Northern Ireland, to keep it afloat. The Republic could never afford that and the people in the Republic would never vote for it. Never mind the Unionist community up North.