Is Ireland Headed for a Merger?Is Ireland Headed for a Merger?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/opinion/united-ireland.html

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Before she died in 2013, Dolours Price, a Provisional Irish Republican Army guerrilla, started granting interviews. She described planting I.R.A. bombs and driving people to their executions, smuggling explosives and going on hunger strike in a British prison.

But it was Ms. Price’s memories of girlhood in 1950s Northern Ireland that kept running through my mind during a recent trip to this city. Ms. Price was born into an era of Catholic disenfranchisement under British rule — job discrimination, vote suppression and barriers to housing and education. Most of all, Ms. Price told the journalist Ed Moloney, her family resented having been left inside the United Kingdom — abandoned to live under a government they considered foreign — when six northern counties were partitioned from the rest of the island after Irish independence.

“We were very angry people, actually, the rump of republicans that were left behind in Belfast,” Ms. Price said. “We always regarded the fact that when they signed away the six counties, they actually signed us away.”

Talking now with people in Northern Ireland, I hear eerily similar complaints. Minority angst. Fears of abandonment. Indignation over laws regarded as foreign.

The mind-bending distinction is that, this time, it’s the unionists — the largely Protestant faction clinging fiercely to British citizenship and Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom — who question the terms of the peace they live under and struggle to articulate their future.

And it’s the Irish nationalists — those, largely Catholic, who regard the partition of Ireland as an untenable injustice — who are brimming with confidence. Demographics and voter enthusiasm have been moving in their favor, and the once-distant republican dream of a united Irish island, free from British rule, seems more possible every day — thanks, paradoxically, to the British initiative of Brexit.