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Comment by crispyporkbites | Hacker News Reader

The Northern Irish who identify as British would not be very happy there. Pretty sure they would not accept this.

So are they ready to trash the Good Friday agreement and go back to The Troubles? Because that's the alternative.

Why should they have to trash the good friday agreement in the first place? NI voted to remain.

Because neither Northern Ireland nor Scotland have the power to decide unilaterally to stay in the EU as independent countries even if that were the desire of 100% of their respective populations (which of course it is not).

They have to trash the Good Friday agreement because it requires a customs-free border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. This isn't possible with Brexit: having a customs-free border means anyone can just import anything into or out of the UK through NI.

Maybe one solution would be to have a county-by-county referendum, where each county in NI gets to decide whether it wants to stay in NI or instead join Ireland. This would make NI smaller, but would concentrate the UK loyalists in it, and the number of Republicans (the ones who want to rejoin Ireland) would decrease a lot (many would be in the counties that would leave, which are probably mostly right on the border, and some might even move), so maybe re-establishing a hard border would be more palatable then.

That amounts to repartioning Ireland. The original partition in 22 was traumatic, and we're still living with the consequences today. The partitioning of India in 47, and the British Mandate of Palestine in 48 were also traumatic and bloody events. Partition generally causes forced population transfer, which tends to lead to bloodshed.

Well, they're going to have bloodshed anyway, so wouldn't it be better to minimize it? The IRA isn't going to stand for going back to the way things were before the GF agreement.

there's already increased IRA activity https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17891935.londonderry-bom...

Giving Northern Ireland to Ireland against the will of the people living there does trash the Good Friday Agreement. The press and the EU haven't been talking about that side of it because it doesn't fit their narrative, but it's rather important. One of the key reasons why the Troubles happened the way they did and why Britain hasn't given Northern Ireland away already is that a large faction of the population are violently opposed to that, with emphasis on the violence part, and are willing to use all of the same tactics as the other side to get their way. That's why peace in Northern Ireland was so hard to achieve.

but right now NI belongs to UK against the will of a lot of Northern Ireland. All the border counties e.g. have voted for Sinn Fein for UK parliament. Possibly those counties need to join the republic?

Is repatriation to mainland UK not a possibility?

Unionist Northern Irish people feel Northern Irish. Not mainland British. They don't feel English, Welsh, or Scottish. They're not in some sort of newly-established colony from whence they could be plucked and re-settled. This kind of comment screams of ignorance of the entire damn situation that's caused the Troubles and much more besides.

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