I noted quite early on in our current crisis that the Irish border could be a problem. As it happens, I now think that the Irish side have made a bit too much of this. The 1998 Belfast Agreement did not have anything direct to say about the Irish border (I’ll come to the indirect implications in a moment).

What’s more, a British crash exit from the EU (now unlikely anyway) would not require the UK to put up border controls on roads and railways to the Republic. It would require Dublin to put up such barriers, as the UK would have become a Third Country under EU rules, and so could not lawfully be treated any differently from any other country outside the EU, without running foul of the World Trade Organisation. That would mean that great masses of EU bureaucracy, especially the non-tariff barriers of the Single Market, great wodges of regulation, would have to be imposed on traffic leaving Northern Ireland and trying to enter the Republic, or originating from Britain and heading for Irish ports or airports.

The root of this is Ireland’s quite legitimate desire to be separate from the UK, not any wish in the UK for a breach with Ireland.

It obviously makes sense to try to overcome this in a friendly and civilised fashion. But what really puzzles me is the affronted poses of so many Tories, and come to that Democratic Unionists, who say that it is quite impossible for Northern Ireland to be treated in any way differently from the rest of the UK.

This is a very thin argument. The British government made Northern Ireland a semi-detached part of the country form the start, by giving it the Stormont Parliament in 1921. I believe some sensible Unionists spotted this baited hook at the time, and did not want Stormont. They rightly wanted full permanent union with the rest of Britain (a policy I wish we had followed) , rather than an obviously temporary toy Parliament, whose very existence suggested that Northern Ireland was destined, in the long run, to be unified with the Dublin-ruled state to the South But others, seeing the chance of jobs and titles, accepted it.

But from the start, Northern Ireland was treated separately and differently from the rest of the UK. It is the only constituent part of the UK to be named separately on the Passport. Until the Blair era, for more than 70 years, no other part of the UK had its own assembly. Arrangements in Northern Ireland for education, health and welfare and railways (NI’s trains are still nationalised, and jolly good they are too, where they exist) are separate from those in the rest of the country.

Both in the days of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the days of its very different successor, the NI Police Service, the province has had a unified police force rather than the system of local city and county forces which still exists (though horribly diluted by Roy Jenkins in 1967) in England and Wales, and existed until very recently in Scotland.

Now it is more different still. Uniquely among UK police forces, the PSNI does not have a proper Royal Crown on its badges or coat of arms. On the mainland, such badges must bear the Crown of St Edward or the Crown of Scotland (symbols of royal authority deriving from the Coronation Oath and central to their lawful exercise of power and its nature). On the PSNI badge, there is a little cartoon crown, like a Monopoly token, along with various other squiggles (a cartoon harp, emphatically not the one used as a state symbol in the South, a torch, an olive branch, the scales of justice, a boot, an iron, no, I made the last two up). Nor is the cartoon crown on the top of the badge.

Northern Irish Driving Licences do not display the Union Flag, unlike those issued in the rest of the UK, though they do display the EU flag. Presumably this is because of a fear that Nationalist drivers would reject such licences. One has to wonder what happens to this arrangement when we leave the EU.

In NI, the flying of the Union Jack itself (no pedantic comments on how it is the Union Flag, please, the names are interchangeable) is far more restricted than in mainland Britain. There was a terrible row in Belfast when the City Council voted to restrict the flying of it to 18 designated days. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20651163

But NI is the only part of the UK where the flying of the national flag is regulated by law on government buildings, and restricted by that law to 18 days a year. The law ‘The Flags Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2000’, lists these days, and some other permissible occasions, and then adds : ‘ Except as provided by these Regulations, no flag shall be flown at any government building at any time.’

Let us leave aside the freedom of NI political parties to raise funds abroad, and various other peculiarities. Let ius rejoice at the freedom of those born in NI to obtain Irish Passports, once very popular among British journalist working in the Soviet bloc, because of the ease with which their neutral documents allowed them to obtain entry visas, which might take weeks if they used UK passports.

The most enormous difference between NI and the rest of the country is that NI’s membership of the UK is now, er, provisional, and has been since the Belfast Instrument of Surrender to the IRA, (known blasphemously to the soppy and naïve as ‘The Good Friday Agreement’) 1998. A single referendum can shift it to Dublin sovereignty.

I am repeatedly told this is impossibly distant and unlikely. But in last Saturday’s FT, fast supplanting the Guardian as the main newspaper of the British Left, the Irish economist David McWilliams produced some extraordinary facts and figures suggesting that NI cannot long sustain itself as it is.

https://www.ft.com/content/7d5244a0-f22d-11e8-ae55-df4bf40f9d0d

Unionists are now in a minority among young people in NI (though Protestants are still hugely in the majority among the old). The Catholic population could be a majority by 2030. As I often point out, many middle-class Protestants are using their good grammar school education to take their pick of mainland Universities – and not coming back afterwards. The mood is also shifting in the Republic, despite conventional wisdom that the South does not want unity

McWilliams says politicians in the Republic are ‘talking about unity in a way I have not heard before’. He says it is ‘still remote but not improbably so’.

He is also very good on the cultural and economic reasons why unification may begin to appeal very strongly not all that far off in the future.

Personally, I think he is over-cautious. I think the events of the last three years have greatly accelerated the process which will leave to the transfer of Northern Ireland to the Republic, which – when it happens – will be the first transfer of territory in Western Europe since 1945, which will have been made as a result of, and under pressure of, violence and the threat of further violence.

Mr McWilliams is so young and modern an Irishman that he doesn’t seem to know that the words ‘Fear God. Honour the King. Love the Brotherhood’ are what used to be a fairly widely-known passage from the Bible (The First Epistle of Peter, 2:17) and describes them as a sectarian slogan, because he sees them on a banner in an emphatically Unionist village. Well, maybe that is their intention, I’m not qualified to know the minds of those who displayed them (they’re often found in war memorial chapels in England). But the forgetting of the Bible is a perplexing and worrying thing. When all this is gone, what will come after? With what will our minds be furnished, to give shape and dignity to our thoughts?

But in general, Mr McWilliams is an acute and reasonably open-minded observer of events in the North, from the Southern point of view, , and tend to think his judgement is not far off the truth. In which case, it seems to me to be rather silly to make a huge great big deal about giving Northern Ireland different treatment from the rest of the UK, should that come about. We have done that for years, because we are weaker than we pretend to be.