How can we integrate Unionism into a possible United Ireland?

How can you "guarantee" that there would be EU funding earmarked for NI development.

The Irish public are far behind the thinking in Europe. There is significant goodwill towards Ireland which is seen as a country that had embraced the EU and benefitted from it. However, that significant goodwill is also accompanied by a very widespread sense that it is now time for Ireland to repay Europe and help the poorer countries emulate its success by subsidising their growth.

Putting out the begging bowl for NI not only runs counter to that latter sense but also risks destroying the goodwill which will be needed for political issues.

"Guarantee" is probably a bit strong. But if we found ourselves in a Unified Ireland, I suspect the EU would do everything in their power to ensure that it was a success following Brexit - they wouldn't want a population to become poorer because they had left the UK and indirectly re-joined the EU. And the moneys involved would not be huge in the grand scheme of things (things being EU budgeting).

See my post comparing with Romania.

Remember, we will need votes from countries like Romania to agree to this programme. As I said, €450m a year is extremely optimistic.

Why look at Romania in particular ?

5 yrs old now, but look at the net contributions from 2018 https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-budget/

There are some net recipient countries there who we think of as wealthy, eg Spain, Belgium. Others I assume are an anomaly due to size eg Luxembourg, Malta. Portugal gets more than Romania. There is no sliding scale of income to EU budget - if the EU wants to ensure a Unified Ireland is a success, then it will.

Yes, it is.

Geography is more than rocks.

The EU currently funds projects in Ireland even without needing NI attached. You can ask people in Romania how they feel about that now.

As I said, the EU works in projects and will fund some in NI if NI is part of the EU, in this case as part of Ireland. How much NI specifically would get and how much it would effectively give back is up for debate but it will receive funding and likely more than the rest of the country.

Per the GFA, the Secretary of State is to call a border poll if he thinks reunification is likely to win. I think it would be difficult to pretend that he thought reunification was likely to win in circumstances where it fairly obviously wasn't going to.

And they can't pull the "once in a generation" shite that people in England seem to take seriously for reasons that I cannot for the life of me understand. The GFA also deals with this; it provides that a border poll cannot be repeated within 10 years.

The fact that unionists / loyalists are so dead set against a border poll would suggest they secretly fear it would be lost, no matter how much they deny this in public. If they genuinely thought it was virtually impossible for NI to vote for unification, they'd nearly be begging for a border poll.

A poll will be "once in a lifetime" if the result discloses a large and settled national consensus on the issue at hand — like the UK's 1975 referendum on EU membership, which voted in favour of membership by more than two to one.

But a poll can equally disclose the opposite, that opinion is very finely balanced — like the UK's 2016 referendum on EU membership. In that case it's absurd to imagine that it will be a "once in a lifetime" event, since the poll result encourages those who just barely lost to keep campaigning by showing that, if they can win just a bit more support, they can shift the balance of national opinion.

The view often articulated in the UK that holding a referendum should, in and of itself, settle a question for a generation, regardless of what the poll results actually show, is just magical thinking.

Politicians who promise that a poll will settle a question for generation are, if we are being polite, clearly making a promise that it is not within their power to deliver. Voters would be fools to place any reliance on such a promise. If we're being less polite, those politicians are lying.

The poll was followed later on by a landslide victory by the Scottish National Party which indicates that it's still an open question.

It's neither NI nor the Republic that calls the poll — under the GFA a border poll is called by the Secretary of State for NI (i.e. it's called by Westminster) if it seems to the Secretary of State that reunification with the Republic is likely to win.

And the Sec of State can't trot out the "once in a lifetime" guff, since the GFA also stipulates that a further poll can be held after 10 years.

And you talk about "the other side not wanting to accept the result" as though it were some massive injustice. Of course the side that loses doesn't want to accept the result; if they didn't have strong views on the subject they wouldn't have been campaigning on the losing side, would they? It's precisely because the will be unhappy with the result and will seek to move on from it that politicians are dishonest if they assert that a referendum will inevitably settle the question, and the public are fools if they believe that.

To be clear: there is nothing remotely undemocratic about seeking to alter a decision made by referendum, provided you seek to alter it by democratic means. If anything, it's those who regard this as improper who are being undemocratic — it's kind of foundational to democracy that a decision, democratically taken, remains open to democratic review. A referendum is supposed to be a tool of democracy, not a device for terminating democracy. Those who think that a referendum means, or should mean, that a question cannot be considered again for decades are not just idiots, but anti-democratic idiots.

There's only one democratic way to arrive and an enduring settlement, and that's to build and maintain a strong and enduring consensus in favour of the settlement. That's not easy, particularly in the UK's rather polarised political culture, but it's the only thing that works, or should work.