I remember when I was a kid growing up in Whitton there were some old prefab sheds standing by some allotments at the bottom of the road. They were put up after the war as emergency low-cost housing and were only expected to last a few years - yet there they were, 20 years later, still in use.

It strikes me that the Irish state is a bit like that - it was only designed to be a stop-gap measure pending a permanent settlement of the National question (at least, that was how it was sold). It was set up with a legislative system based on the Westminster model partly, in my view, in order to be able to accommodate the North when the Protestant majority 'saw sense' and decided they wanted to be part of a united Ireland after all.

Well, that never happened and in the 26 counties, republicanism became superseded within the political establishment (particularly Fianna Fail) by 26-county nationalism and a political machine that in fact had a vested interest in partition - unification would have threatened their own political dominance within the Catholic state.

Now the whole constitutional basis of the 26-county state has collapsed with the end of Irish sovereignty. Republicanism is potentially in crisis as well since there appears now to be no Republic to fight for.