Simple Solution?

To Micheál Martin as to any of its notable politicians, the legal name of the 26 County State is Ireland because Ireland is what it is. The Irish come from Ireland, meaning that. Over 100 years old, it is economically, socially, culturally and politically distinct. To be Irish is to have been formed by that. To that way of thinking, people the world over may be a bit Irish ancestrally, but whether in Boston, Brisbane, Birmingham, Buenos Aires or Belfast, they are not really. One in five adults in the 26 Counties is a first generation immigrant, and one in five births there is to a non-national. What do the Six Counties mean to them? So much for the cry from Boston, Brisbane, Birmingham, Buenos Aires or Belfast that "Ireland belongs to the Irish" rather than to people whose ancestors had arrived a mere 400 years ago.

That Ireland has perhaps the most impregnable cordon sanitaire in the democratic world. Wake up and hear The Hum when even Michael Healy-Rae may be a Minister, but never, under any circumstance, may any member of Sinn Féin, the party of the First Minister of Northern Ireland. Up there in the Six Counties are almost all the members of the Provisional Army Council that Sinn Féin believes to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland as the legitimate successor of the Second Dáil, although that Parliament's only surviving member in 1986, Tom Maguire, conferred legitimacy on the Continuity Army Council, so that it was the Continuity IRA that provided a firing squad at his funeral in, almost unbelievably, 1993, and so that it has been Republican Sinn Féin that has held commemorations at his graveside. Anyway, that is what Sinn Féin believes. That the Army Council is the sovereign body throughout Ireland as the legitimate successor of the Second Dáil.

With Michelle O'Neill as First Minister and with Mary Lou McDonald (a Planter surname, like Conor McGregor's) as Taoiseach, then who would need a border poll? Why would the IRA want one? No referendum would ever endorse rule by the Army Council. Once that were established across the whole of Ireland, then the beneficiaries would never wish to give it up, and everyone else would find it practically impossible to make them. That is what Martin is determined to stop. That is what everyone who matters in Dublin is determined to stop. So the whole idea of a 32 County Republic has to be delegitimised.