I think we may be talking at cross purposes. I'm a Brit too, and I'm well aware of the history you describe. If anything, you've presented the truncated versio

I think we may be talking at cross purposes. I'm a Brit too, and I'm well aware of the history you describe. If anything, you've presented the truncated version: English/British interference in Ireland goes back more than 800 years, to the Anglo-Norman invasions of ~1170 and the award of the Lordship of Ireland to the King of England by Hadrian IV (the first, and so far the last, English pope). I was alluding to Article 2 of the Constitution of Ireland of 1937, which explicitly claimed the whole island of Ireland as the state's national territory; this was replaced by more wishy-washy language about the Irish nation in the wake of the Good Friday agreement of 1999. By the way, the Irish state created by the 1921 treaty explicitly wasn't a republic: it was a dominion of the British Empire, and the King of England was still technically King of Ireland (even under Irish law) until 1949.