It would appear that both Raggytash and Jim Carroll have major problems with time lines and chronology of events.

Carroll thinks that all parties involved used their clairvoyant powers to decide to delay the enactment of Home Rule until after the end of a war that hadn't even started.

Raggytash wonders:

Start of the war August 1914, the Act 1914, the Rising 1916 yes I can see how two years after the event the Rising prevented something two years prior. Makes sense doesn't it.

Yes it does make perfect sense as long as you take the trouble to realise that:

1: The 1914 Home Rule legislation was delayed by the start of the war and that it would be enacted once hostilities were concluded. Before the start of the war all parties had reached agreement and that involved temporary partition for Ulster for a period of six years.

2: The rising of 1916 hardened Unionist opposition and prevented enactment of the 1914 Home Rule Act, it did not however prevent enactment of the Government of Ireland Act 1920. Besides in August 1914 the "Rebels" hadn't had the opportunity to hold all the appropriate meetings to collude with the Germans and get more arms, in order to stage their rising while the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was at war with Germany. The "magnificent seven" hadn't even had the chance to form their highly secret clique within a highly secret organisation in order to hoodwink the Supreme Council of the IRB and the Executive Council of the Irish Volunteers who were actually supposed to be running things. All that underhand and traitorous planning and plotting takes a bit of time - two years would just about cover it - Makes sense doesn't it.

As for this:

No country or Empire should have the right to artificially divide another without the permission of its inhabitants.

Quite right and no country or Empire did in the case of Irish Independence. By the way what was the position of the inhabitants of Ulster? I think that they made their wishes known very clearly from 1912 onwards - they were to be ignored were they? OK to coerce them.

No country should have the right to section of vast tract of another and declare it a separate state, based on religion, colour of skin, taste in music..... whatever.

Quite right and no country did in the case of Irish Independence

No country should have the right to defend minority religion-driven fanatics who have armed themselves in order to impose their will on the country as a whole.

Who are you talking about here the UVF or the Pearse Faction of the IVF? Fact shows that of the two only the IVF actually used their arms, only the IVF engaged in the subsequent War of Independence in order to impose their will on the country as a whole. In the North how well supported was the "rebel" side in the war of independence, hardly any support at all correct. Neither the Rising or the subsequent war did anything to promote any confidence in any Dublin based independent government and de Valera's total disregard for the will of the majority and disrespect for democracy illustrated in the aftermath of the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty vindicated the Unionist's decision to have no further part in any Independent Ireland.