A federal UK? Home Rule all round? We have been here before.

There are fewer truly new things in politics than you think. The present constitutional uncertainty – which, it should be said, could scarcely have been avoided – is no exception. We have been here before, all of us, even if we choose to forget our previous gallops around this track. A century ago – on September 18th, to be precise – a bill for Irish Home Rule was finally passed. It had taken three attempts and nearly 30 years but it was passed at last. There would, once again, be an Irish parliament. Or there would have been had it not been for the Kaiser’s War. The guns of August delayed Home Rule; Easter 1916 (and, especially, the response to Padraig Pearse’s mad provocation) killed it. Nothing would recover; nothing would be quite the same again. Nevertheless, it is useful to recall just how similar many of the arguments over Irish Home Rule are to those we hear now about the future governance of these islands.