Hi, Namulanta combo here and I'm excited to tell you that my award-winning

podcast Dear Dota is back for his second season and it's available now. Find out

more at the end of this podcast. Welcome to the inquiry on the BBC World

Service with me Gary O'Donohue, one question for expert witnesses and an answer.

It's just over 100 years since the island of Ireland was partitioned. It created

two separate entities, a majority Catholic free state in the south, largely

independent from Britain and a majority Protestant one in the northeast called

Northern Ireland which remained part of the United Kingdom. For many Catholics

and nationalists, North and South, that division represented unfinished

business. For most Protestants and unionists it's been key to preserving their

British identity. But the political tectonic plates are shifting. I think it's

unlikely that there will be a referendum before 2030. I think the likelihood of

a referendum in the early 2030s is quite high. This week we're asking will there

be a united island? Part one, an island divided. Irish history is full of

rebellion, revolution and bloody repression and there's almost nothing that isn't

contested among historians. For centuries indigenous kings fought among

themselves, vied with Vikings and Anglo-Norman invaders and saw British

monarchs gradually tighten their hold, often by brutal and bloody means on what

many of them saw as a colony. That all culminated in 1800 when both British and

Irish parliaments passed an act of union creating the United Kingdom of

Great Britain and Ireland. For more than a century that endured but it wasn't a

happy union. I suppose I would say the heartened was never a settled part of

...