How long before Irish reunification?

Berserker wrote: »

if NI is to reduce the handout it receives, it will need to experience economic growth in it's private sector.

That's a massive assumption. Maybe it will just not be able to get the handout from the English to raise the living standard, or the living standard over in Britain will decline?

Berserker wrote: »

That will mean that Brexit will be a success for NI. I was under the impression that Brexit is going to cripple the UK.

All economic predictions are that the NI economy will be the worst hit part of the UK in the event of a no-deal Brexit. It's already a basket case in every respect - and the handful of areas it was holding on to its older technical skillset have been kicked in the goolies with Bombardier's recent decision to leave.

All those mad Fenians in the... Confederation of British Industry are warning of the "devastating" impact of a no-deal Brexit: No-deal Brexit could cost Northern Ireland €5.7bn over 15 years

A BBC summary of other research into the effect of Brexit on the North: Brexit: What would no-deal mean for the NI economy?

Berserker wrote: »

People in the RoI and NI, who are not blinded by nationalism, will vote with their heads and put their own well being first.

You assume both are mutually exclusive, yet like others here you've failed to give evidence for this faux rational position.

The main issue with reunification will be the socio-political one of how to deal with the shockingly inordinate number of egregiously undereducated troglodytes which the British state has nurtured in welfare class loyalist areas of the Six Counties. Economically, an all-Ireland state of 6.7 million people will have greater economies of scale than the current state of 4.8 million people. And very many business classes south of the border would be quite happy to get rid of the existence of those cheaper prices up the road, while many in the welfare classes would be quite happy to get the higher welfare here. And so on with various toing and froing between discrete economic interests.

Deleted User wrote: »

The main issue with reunification will be the socio-political one of how to deal with the shockingly inordinate number of egregiously undereducated troglodytes which the British state has nurtured in welfare class loyalist areas of the Six Counties.

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

are the egregiously undereducated troglodytes exclusively in loyalist areas?

The inordinate number are, yes, ohnonotgmail. That word was put there for a reason. Explore it.

Finola Meredith in The Irish Times (2013):

It is only in the area of education where working-class Protestants are seen to be doing even worse than their Catholic counterparts: the 2010 deprivation measure found that 12 of the 20 most deprived wards assessed on education, skills and training are predominantly Protestant, as are 26 of the worst 30 wards for school pupil absenteeism. In 2011, a report aimed at improving educational standards among young working-class Protestants explored several community and cultural reasons for this, particularly deindustrialisation and the loss of traditional labour markets and skills. Plentiful trades and apprenticeships in the past meant there was less emphasis on the need for qualifications; when the jobs evaporated, the pattern of educational disengagement endured, and has now become augmented by a kind of listless fatalism. As east Belfast Progressive Unionist Party councillor John Kyle puts it: “There is a culture of worklessness, which perpetuates the expectation that there will be no work in the future.”

Poorer Protestant boys underachieving (BBC, 2014)

Catholics pupils perform better than Protestants (Irish News, 2017)

Poorer Protestant boys faring worst in Northern Ireland schools, says report (Belfast Telegraph, 2019)

For anybody who still has their head in the sand about the extent or significance of demographic change in the North, here are the latest (April 2019) official figures on the religious denomination of all students in education there: Number of Catholic children in schools at all-time high (Irish News, April 2019)

THE religious divide in schools is at its widest ever with the number of Catholic children at an all all-time high.

Official government figures also reveal the percentage of pupils who identify as Protestant is plummeting.

There are now more Catholic children at nursery, primary, secondary, grammar and special schools.

On school census day this year there were 175,617 Catholic pupils - 50.7 per cent of all enrolments. It is the first time this figure has topped 175,000.

There were 114,314 Protestant children - 33 per cent - while 56,408 identified as `other'.

The Irish Times (May 2019):

This trend away from a Protestant majority “is likely to continue”. The main drivers of change are differing birth and death rates between the two communities, the effect of migration, and loss of affiliation, which is more pronounced in urban areas and in the east of Northern Ireland.

Both Queen’s and Ulster University have a majority of students from a Catholic background; conversely, 63 per cent of students who study in Britain do not return to Northern Ireland, and the report cites other studies which have suggested their numbers are disproportionately Protestant.