Why are you trying to force 2 million people to live in a country that most of them explicitly don't want to?

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Irish_Unification_of_20...

This isn't happening.

Technically most of the residents of NI were British citizens at the time this was happening.

Additionally, it wasn't just the British engaging in violence, there were at least three sides (nationalist/loyalist/government).

> The north is still under British occupation

I'm pretty sure that I could find a lot of people (almost certainly a majority) of NI residents who'd disagree with this statement.

> When that ends and the island is re-unified,

I hope (as someone from the Republic) that this happens, but we'll need a bunch of planning and time to make sure this doesn't turn out like Brexit (a close result leading to lots of problems over the following few years).

> residents of NI were British citizens at the time

That's how it works for every independence movement - a smaller entity asserts it's right to exist outside the boundary of a larger one. Fighting smaller entity is self-harm by the larger entity.

Look at the Chechen war in Russia, it was the same.

For a start, the Ulster Protestants were the majority in NI until this year (100 years after partition).

And while I (as an Irish person) would love to see a united Ireland, I completely condemn the violence that was used to attempt it.

Again, I understand why it happened, but 3.5k deaths over 30 years was not an acceptable price to get to the negotiation table (essentially repeating a deal that was shot down by the Unionists in 1972).

I objected to your use of the word 'colony' as it does not describe Northern Ireland. The social injustices you are referencing, and there have been many, do not make that word any more appropriate.

There is already a framework affirmed by the voters of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland that the a plebiscite on unification can be held. There is no occupation, and your language does nothing constructive.

It is also incorrect to say 're-unified' as there never was an all island Irish state.

Personally I'm all about self-determination. If the people of NI want to return the land to Eire, then nobody should stand in their way. But that doesn't seem to be the case right now, even though support for reunification has been increasing in recent years.

We can split hairs about what is and is not democratic until the end of time, but the debate takes place in a historical vacuum: the creation of Northern Ireland was a response to a very specific set of circumstances, and I don't think yak-shaving about democratic niceties casts any light.

It is moot anyway, because there is no prospect of changing Northern Ireland's status without democratic sanction. Which vote of course takes place at the pleasure of His Majesty's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

Can you point to a vote by the Irish people in favour of independence?

I'm pretty sure you can't given that no such vote has ever taken place.

The IRA derived their 'legitimacy' from it.

And to be quite frank, you are probably thinking of the Provisional IRA when you put legitimacy in quotes, where as this was the original IRA, who basically have nothing in common with the Provos (as they were called when I were a lad) except the name.

The Brits left split polities in quite a few places as they decolonized. Almost as if it was policy.

I'm not even Irish and certainly have no skin in this game but what the UK did to Ireland over the centuries is disgraceful, and it clearly is struggling to come to terms with it.

I wonder if NI wouldn't be better off part of the Republic, now with Brexit and everything.

Unification will happen when the advantage of receiving such money will be clearly be offset by the disadvantage of having a broken political system (NI regional government is boycotted by unionists, while the national government is boycotted by republicans). As money reduces further and further while annoyances get bigger and bigger (because of an entrenched "England-first" government pursuing policies like Brexit), that threshold gets closer and closer.

Those subsidies don't seem to be enough to save it when the infrastructure is crumbling and everyone is moving abroad for jobs.

>money they likely wouldn't get from Dublin

They would get it from the EU then, and probably a lot more, as the UK gov is now struggling financially to stay solvent. The EU can very generous if you can play the game right. Just look at Poland 20 years ago and Poland today, the difference EU funds and the EU open market made, is night and day. It has also benefiter the Republic of Ireland. I doubt they would have been in the same state today without EU membership. For all its faults, the EU has been a force for good many times. Another English speaking region joining the EU could be a mutual benefit.

It used to be the case that the roads would get noticeably worse as you crossed the border into the republic, now the situation is reversed.

NI receives a disproportionately large amount of money from the UK gov compared to other UK nations.

The place needs to be actively developed, not repeatedly patched up and sent on its way to hobble along.

NI is a little better-off than much of England in that regard, outside of Tory towns and villages. My home town never recovered after Thatcher.

The UK government didn't have a lot of choice, the Ulster Protestants would almost certainly have fought a civil war if the full island was granted domininion status.

The boundary commission was problematic, but the real issue post partition was the removal of PR by the NI government. I think that if the ballot box hadn't essentially been stacked against Catholics we might not have seen the Troubles.

India, Pakistan, I am seeing a pattern.

Even if you get independace from england, you won't leave in one piece.

So which one was that then? Was this before the Representation of the people act or were women and working class men still banned?

> It was a landslide victory for a one-Ireland state and the UK created this never-seen-before entity as a response.

In the 1918 election in Ulster 66% voted for unionist parties.