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"...Nor is Ireland one nation based on the Good Friday Accords. Quite the opposite in fact - the Republic of Ireland has renounced its territorial claim to Northern Ireland...."

The RoI agreed in good faith to this controversial provision while negotiating for the joint governmental oversight of Ulster with the U.K., as you know. I think it is fair to say that both parties viewed this arrangement as a transitional step toward ultimate unification by democratic process, not as an acknowledgment of the permanent nature of the status quo ante.

"...The Dail, with a Sinn Fein majority, voted to ratify partition..."

The Dail ratified partition under duress. That is, the British government threatened to impose draconian oppression and economic privation upon the Irish if they did not accept this unholy bargain, as well as agreeing to forgo the notion of an Irish republic and accept the indefinite sovereignty of the crown over an "Irish Free State." If my math is correct, it took Dev another fourteen years to correct this mistake. Contracts agreed upon under duress and threat of violence are not valid in law, nor in historical circumstance, in my opinion.

"...And frankly, if there were an all-Ireland vote(which there never will be for reasons already gone over), the results might surprise you. The overwhelming number of people in NI want to remain part of the UK, including a sizable number of Catholics, and most people in the Republic feel little or no attachment to NI, view its inhabitants as a pack of nutters, and are happy to let British taxpayers foot the bill for policing NI. The people there who don't get along now aren't going to get along any better simply because the border disappears...."

You may be right. But, I sense that if this were the truth the government of the U.K. would have moved expeditiously to carry out a plebiscite on the issue in conjunction with the RoI and the multilateral organizations to settle the matter. They've had nearly forty years of civil rights demonstrations, guerrilla violence and civil unrest that could largely have been avoided by taking affirmative action in this regard, not to mention all the domestic and international opprobrium.

And, as I wrote earlier, the notion that it is advisable to simply let the wiggers up north fight it out among themselves is fashionable in the RoI, but it is less so here in the States. Perhaps we are sentimental and foolish. Or, perhaps we don't look the other way when we encounter injustice and bigotry. We are used to bearing burdens for just but unpopular causes and receiving nothing but scorn from the bien pensee crowd in return. So be it.

"..The people there who don't get along now aren't going to get along any better simply because the border disappears..."

But the institutional and cultural structures that permit systematic bias against minorities can be dismantled expeditiously. (See RSA). I believe tremendous progress could be made in ending the injustice (and thereby the strife) by expediting the reform of the RUC and ending de facto support of loyalist paramilitary groups by the NIR government. I don't see this happening under the existing circumstances, even eight years (has it been that long?) since the Good Friday Accords were signed.

By the way, I got involved in this imbroglio primarily in defense of Bertie Ahern. Perhaps the Taoiseach is not the free marketeer that we would wish him to be (there isn't much of a constituency for free market/capitalist economic policies in Ireland, is there?), and perhaps his personal life is not perfect (nor are any of ours); but he towers above any other successful politician in Western Europe, by my way of thinking, and you are fortunate to have him. It is my hope that the Irish do not cut off their noses to spite their faces by embracing the failed policies of statist socialism and the soul destroying anti-life, anti-family secularism of the EU. For better or worse, Bertie and FF are the last best defense.

A few points:

The Dail ratified partition under duress

Partition was a fait accompli long before Lloyd George threatened to resume the war if the treaty were not signed, and it was a fait accompli as a direct result of Sinn Fein's choosing to abstain from voting in Westminster and leaving the unionists as the biggest Irish voting bloc in parliament, which led to the passage of the 1920 Act that codified partition. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! Partition was a political compromise that the Irish government accepted in order to defuse the potential nightmare of dealing with the six counties that formed NI as much as for any other reason.

But the institutional and cultural structures that permit systematic bias against minorities can be dismantled expeditiously.

You're a bit behind the times and need to get off the 'oppression and injustice' line if you want to be taken seriously when discussing current affairs in NI. Basically, its already happened. Martin McGuinness is the Minister of Education after all! The RUC has been morphed into the PNSI and Catholic enlistment is way up, simply because Catholics don't need to worry about being nutted by the IRA(which is the main reason very few Catholics joined before). My point about the border not making any difference is that the small minority of nutters who mess things up for everyone else are going to keep fighting amongst themselves regardless of which flag is flying over Donegall Square, and that kind of tit-for-tat violence is not something that a change of government will eradicate. It is not caused by 'Injustice' but by the same type of tribal animus that causes problems in the rest of the world. Many working-class Catholics and Protestants grow up in insular communities, attend school with their own 'tribe' exclusively, and may not get to know anyone from the other tribe until they are adults and their attitudes are set. The best way to end this self-Balkanisation is to have the children from both traditions attend school together - but that will never happen, since that would require a complete overhaul of the educational system. Very few parents want their children to attend a religion-neutral school as is common in the US, so the problem will go on. Also, there is no 'de facto collusion' of the NI govt. with loyalist terrorists. The loyalist paramilitaries have been neutered and reduced to turf wars amongt themselves and running protection rackets in their own communities. They were far easier to deal with than the republican groups because they never got any outside funding or help from abroad.