Six Into Twenty-Six Won't Go

Proving that no one is all bad, Nick Cohen has it right: no one in the Irish Republic has really wanted Northern Ireland for as long as almost anyone alive can now remember, and that state could not begin to assimilate a cultural minority one million strong. No wonder that the Republic's voters so massively renounced any claim to the Six Counties.

What Cohen doesn't add is that, if anything, the Republic would find it even harder to assimilate Northern Nationalists, who would be rather like hopelessly unrealistic third, fourth or fifth generation colonial returnees to Britain from Africa or India, only far more numerous, and far more concentrated geographically. Who on earth would want that? No one in the Irish Republic, that's for sure.