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.
By way of response:
You have laid out a well reasoned "glass is half full" argument. I will, however, maintain my "glass half empty" position.
In either case it argues for further progress along the lines envisioned by Tone and Bertie in the Good Friday Accords. It seems to me that a shift to a Fine Gail/"Labour" coalition government is a move in the wrong direction: in respect to economic policies especially; but also as regards the preservation of a distinct Irish culture and the laudable aspects of it; and progress toward peace and unity. In any event, let's hope for the best.
BTW, I would not advise the use of the U.S. educational system as a model the Irish should emulate. Rather, it is more a hydra that afflicts us that we cannot be rid of. Cut off one head and another bites you in the tail. It is a state monopoly that responds to the demands of the unions and bureaucrats that control it; the needs of students and the desires of their parents are secondary if not tertiary concerns. It also is run with all the efficiency and fiscal control one expects from a government monopoly. Needless to say, the unions and bureaucrats are not only utterly securlar in their outlook as regards family and life issues, they are fundamentally leftist and unpatriotic in their world view: the very definition of a Fifth Column. You need not search hard in the domestic threads on this board to find ample examples of their perfidy.
Best wishes,
I_l