There is a refusal to accept the inescapable truth that this place is the last remnant of England’s first colony.

As such it ticks all the boxes of an ethno-political or politico-ethnic problem which any political scientist would instantly recognise.

That creates the same problems as similar divided societies across Europe: in Belgium, northern Italy (Alto Adige/Sud Tyrol depending whether you’re German or Italian-speaking) and of course the Balkans.

As my colleague Alex Kane correctly says, “it would be difficult for even the Pollyanna wing of optimists to make a convincing case that we are a happy, settled, reconciled society”.

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That’s because it’s never gonna happen, because it’s not and never will be ‘a normal society’.

What happens in such places, whether it’s Belgium or Switzerland or Bosnia-Herzegovina, is that appropriate political mechanisms are devised to enable ethno-national groups to share the place. The........

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