People calling it the Irish Republic usually have an agenda in doing so, yeah.
ED: > Not to politicise this discussion
I mean, this is on a thread about the Nazis; I think you don't need to worry too much about further politicising it :)
How does one unambiguously refer to the country rather than the island without saying “republic”?
Traditionally, you mostly see weird names for Ireland in British media with an anti-Irish viewpoint (you saw a lot of this from the right-wing tabloids during Brexit, in particular). In particular ‘Eire’ and ‘the Irish Republic’ are red flags; ‘Eire’ has never been correct to use in English, and ‘the Irish Republic’ was never _really_ the name of the country at all. At best it comes across as ignorant (a bit like Americans calling the UK ‘England’) but in practice it tends to only be used by a certain type of publication.
(In particularly extreme cases you sometimes see ‘the Irish Free State’, presumably from journalists who are over a century old.)
> How does one unambiguously refer to the country rather than the island without saying “republic”?
Ah, well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? In cases where it could be ambiguous, Irish media tends to say ‘the state’, but that doesn’t really work elsewhere. In practice where disambiguation is required “the Republic of Ireland” is a reasonable neutral term.
https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/cons/en/html
ARTICLE 4
The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland.
And that framing is where the trick is hidden. People are perfectly capable of accepting and having multiple identities. They can be a mom of their kids, a receptionist of company X, a neighbour of street Y, a citizen of city Z, a member of the flower gardening society, a supporter of football club Q, citizens of the UK and Europeans too.
In fact you don't have to choose between these identities. But when you frame the question like that it make sense that people would choose what is closer to them.
This is a very common conflict for many communities around the world and rarely is “just be both” a satisfactory solution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separatism
Basically that's because "American" isn't a breed, like Scots or French. It's a political choice and an identity which is (should be) open to anyone who lives here and adopts the Constitution as the set of laws they want to live by.
Ironically, this is why Yarvin and Musk and Thiel will fail in their attempts at overthrowing the US government to create "network states". The US is the original state founded on a set of ideas rather than identities. (Since, at least, the Roman Republic). That is its strength, and something difficult for Europeans to really understand.
For that matter, the UK, despite being a country, has some aspects of this; while Northern Ireland in particular is complicated for historical reasons, plenty of English and Scottish and Welsh people would think of themselves as English or Scottish or Welsh AND British.
Expertise has also been politicised. Experts are picked who give the prior decided opinions, and those who have the wrong opinion are got rid of (e.g. Professor David Nutt).
Finally Gove was speaking in the context of Brexit, and arguing that it ultimately a question of national identity. DO people identify as British or European? I agree - it is more like whether people in Northern Ireland want to be part of the UK or the Irish Republic, or maybe Scottish independence, than anything else in British politics. lots of parallels around the rest of the world.
Covid policy had multiple examples of this, and of not consulting experts on a sufficiently wide range of subjects.
A lot of evidence based policy is like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U