You've built your own definition of a country there, and it's such a dated definition of a country even Wikipedia straight up disagrees with you [0]. When talki

You've built your own definition of a country there, and it's such a dated definition of a country even Wikipedia straight up disagrees with you [0]. When talking about NI in particular, the rules are flexed but there is no doubt that it is not a requirement for a country to be an independent sovereign nation. > the “country” descriptor would appear to have been externally applied. You've made two generous leaps here - that the population don't consider it to be a country, and that the fact that an externally applied label on a state is invalid. It's incredibly dismissive of you to think that the people of NI don't think of it as country for a dtart, but your second point is just plain wrong. I can call Crimea a disputed territory with confidence, despite Russia claiming it's independent, for example. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country