In their conclusions, the authors recommend Northern Ireland – which remains relatively poor and heavily reliant on public sector spending and employment – embark on major reforms to improve its residents’ standard of living.
“Even though Ireland has a much higher national income, funding the needs of the people of Northern Ireland in a united Ireland would put huge financial pressure on the people of Ireland, resulting in an immediate major reduction in their living standards,” the report says.
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It really isn’t, on top of the standard leftward shift experienced among the young folks of the west right now, Southern Ireland is also grappling with some very heinous ways the Catholic church abused them specifically, and have basically been rebelling against the more conservative traditional hard lines normally found in a Catholic society.
Same time, Northern Ireland has steadily been trending towards a population that really isn’t ideologically beholden to the old notions of protestentdom which animated the ulster volunteers. I think nowadays the argument against unification is mostly just a mix of “probably not ready yet” and “well I don’t want to anyways so fuck off.”
Currently NI doesn’t want to leave the UK, no. But religion isn’t really that strong a reason anymore.
I suspect the Republic of Ireland doesn’t want Northern Ireland either, for the reasons stated in the article.
So I’m not sure why we’re even talking about it.