They made the mess, over, as you say, a period of 600 years; they should clean it up.

The province of Ulster is very much a part of Irish history and culture. Also, logically, the island should be united because it's a geographic unit. But politics doesn't yield to logic.

The idea that one must be a Catholic to be an Irishman is silly; some of the foremost spokesmen for Irish independence and unity have been Protestant. There's something else going on in Ulster, and it has to do with privilege.

If the British want to stand for law and order, they're going to have to stand for justice as well, and that means the end to privilege based on religion. Let's see them get on that bandwagon.

If Ulster still wants to be ruled from London rather than Dublin after that, well, at least there may be peace. There certainly would be a lot less to attract the average Ulster Catholic to the IRA if there were justice, though I wonder if it would have the opposite effect on some of the Protestants, but it would matter less because they would have nowhere to go.

Incidentally, I doubt you know this, but the WASPs, during the second wave of Irish immigration to America in the wake of the Famine, also made remarks about Irish (Catholic) breeding proclivity. Later, when the Italians came, at the turn of the 20th century, the same argument was used to encourage quotas for Italian (Catholic) immigrants. In the 1950s, similar remarks were made about Puerto Rican (Catholic) migrants, but since the US had conquered Puerto Rico, nobody could say much about limiting immigration, because it wasn't really immigration. It seems that the people what has are prone to characterize those what hasn't as inveterate reproducers. This makes them seem both ruled by animal instincts and somehow Machiavellian in their reproductive activity, all at the same time: a double threat.