Northern Ireland 2125?

I am interested in peoples thoughts about the future of Northern Ireland.   As things stand OWC ranks fifth in the world of areas under the same continuous authority.  I think we just have England, Wales, Japan and maybe a wee principality ahead of us. 

Much scope for arguments over trivia and terminology here! But lower down in the thread you explain this by saying:

Continuous authority means a region ruled by the same state or monarch without interruption — no conquests, no independence, and still under same authority today.

NI has only been ruled continuously by the same state since 1801, and has only been ruled in the name of the English/British/UK monarchy continuously since 1660. There are many places that can beat that — Denmark has been the same state, ruled by the same monarchy, for more than 1200 years, for example. Japan has been subject to the same monarchy since at least the 8th century.

Northern Ireland currently exists as a country of sorts, in the same way as Scotland, Wales, and England, within the United Kingdom. 

As is almost always the case where NI is concerned, the terminology is disputed. So far as the UK is concerned, officially England, Scotland and Wales are “countries” or “parts” of the UK but in official usage NI is variously a “country”, a “part” or a “region” of the UK. In non-official usage, all these terms are used, as are “province” and “nation” (as in the four nations, or the home nations, in a sporting context — whether one of these nations is NI or Ireland depends on which sport you’re talking about).

So if we had a united Ireland, surely it is entirely reasonable to expect Northern Ireland to remain as a country of sorts within a united Ireland.   I think there are many unionists and nationalists that will struggle terribly with this position, but I am very comfortable with it. 

It’s certainly a reasonable possibility, but there are other reasonable possibilities. By definition, the question will be answered in circumstances that are somewhat different from today's, and in the light of events that haven’t happened yet, so we can’t be too dogmatic. But my best guess is that, yes, NI would retain a distinct identity and distinct political institutions within a united Ireland, at least initially.

Currently, if you’re born in Northern Ireland, you’re born British, but you can apply for Irish nationality. I guess a change would be that you will be born Irish but can apply for British nationality.  That change is not worth losing sleep over.  

Currently anyone born in NI is entitled to Irish nationality. You don't have to apply for it; you just start exercising it.

Access to British citizenship after unification would be a matter for the UK, but at a guess they would give some commitment along the lines you suggest in order to facilitate unification. But rather than affording citizenship to everyone born in NI indefinitely into the future, they might affirm the continuing UK citizenship of UK citizens in NI at the date of Irish unification, plus the indefinite right of the descendants of those people to UK citizenship, if born in NI (or, possibly, if born in any part of Ireland). I think a guarantee of British citizenship to anyone born in NI at any point in the future would mean that the immigration policy and rules of Ireland would operate, in effect, to confer British citizenship in the future. That might not be acceptable to the British government.

Is there anyone out there who believes that there will ever be a fully united island, no devolution, no Northern Ireland football team, no ni flag, no soda bread, etc, etc?

You can have a “fully united country”, in the sense of having no tier of government between central government and local goverment, that still has separate sporting teams — e.g. the UK before 1922. Conversely you can have federal and even multinational states that don't have separate teams — Germany, Italy, the former Czechoslovakia, the former Yugoslavia. Whether NI continues to have its own soccer team indefinitely after Irish unification is really down to FIFA, isn’t it? But my guess is yes, unless at some point it becomes financially advantageous for the IFA and the FAI to merge. Professional sport is a business, and ultimately this will be driven by commercial factors more than political sentiment

Similarly you can have a fully united country in which different flags exist, associated with different places. In fact this is common; in countries like Belgium or Italy practically every town and village has its own flag. But I would note that, right now, NI doesn’t have a flag, because yiz can’t agree on one. Perhaps yiz’ll be able to after unification. On the other hand, perhaps not.

As for soda bread, it seems to be a myth cherished among Unionists that soda bread is a distinctively Ulster thing. Not at all; soda bread is common throughout Ireland. I do not think unification will change anything in that regard.

Actually, I think he's more stuck in the present. He can see that on current trends NI's place in the union can't be indefinitely guaranteed, so he's willing to contemplate that NI might be incorporated into an all-Ireland state. But he has difficulty envisaging that NI itself might change very much, and in particular that it might lose its current level of devolved government, or that it's identity, formed by century of partition, might change or weaken if partition, and NI's status as part of the UK, is ended. He sees unification as involving minimal change — NI continues as it is right now, except that all references to "Westminster" in describing NI's status get replaced with references to "Dublin", and vice versa.

Which, you know, is a framework for a viable model of unification, and not an unthinkable starting point for modelling a united Ireland. But I don't know that it's a stable end-point.