Simply British

If you meet people from, especially, working-class Protestant backgrounds in Northern Ireland, then they really are as I described yesterday: they think that their version of Britishness is universal, or at least the norm, or at the very least the historical norm.

Thus, it is, for example, truly beyond them that city halls in Great Britain do not fly the Red, White and Blue every day, and that in fact people would regard such behaviour as French or American in a civilian context. It is still going to be flown in Belfast on every day that it is over here, and that has already begun on the Duchess of Cambridge's Birthday. Making them what they have always insisted that they were: exactly as British as the rest of us. The question, then, is whether they really want to be any such thing. Or whether they even understand what it means.

Nothing has been made illegal. A public body has merely resolved to behave in a normal rather than in what might very politely be termed an eccentric way; in a way characteristic of a civil context rather that of a military one, including a military occupation; and in a way characteristic of the Home Country rather than of the Colonies. When, in the near future, there is a Nationalist majority in Belfast, then the reaction to what was in fact integration with the Mainland, as ostensibly demanded by the Ulster People's Forum, will not be forgotten. Willie Frazer and his supporters obviously have no more idea what Britain is like than have any idea what the Irish Republic is like.

For all its ongoing history of breaking up multinational states, I cannot imagine that the EU gives two hoots. No one on the Continent understands why the United Kingdom has four international football teams, and this is very much in that same vein when viewed from the outside, I'm sure. They don't quite understand Irish independence, either. Scots, take note. No one bemoans the passing of Yugoslavia more than I do. And no one was more opposed than I to the regional assembly.

But while the former was bound up with the EU, and therefore also with the US and NATO that the Johnny-come-lately pseudo-opponents of the EU on the New Right believed could do no wrong until Obama came along, the latter had absolutely nothing to do with the EU outside the imaginations of faintly unhinged pub bores. Mercifully, hardly anyone in the North East pays any attention to them, so we still got a massive No vote. (The New Right is also very Johnny-come-lately about its support for the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.)

A United Ireland would in fact be the creation of a new, and a thoroughly unstable, multinational, or at the very least binational, state. The Ulster Protestants are more manageable within the United Kingdom because they are such a small proportion of the population and because they inhabit such a tiny, out of the way corner of the territory. At least arguably, the same is true of their neighbours, who are still professing allegiance to the Republic of 1916.