The UK has voted to make itself irrelevant: it no longer matters to the rest of Europe whether it remains united

Now that the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union, the arguments for a divided Ireland in which the British government maintains its hold over Northern Ireland while ‘Ireland’ itself is a member state of the European Union are no longer tenable.

The British government was protected from pressure to let go of Northern Ireland largely because the entire island was in the European Union anyway – Northern Ireland through the UK and the Republic of Ireland independently.

Now it is pressingly obvious what will happen next. The British government no longer has a strong basis to argue that Northern Ireland should stay in the United Kingdom, which will put it outside the European Union, rather than leaving it and uniting with the rest of Ireland as a logical next step which will make it a member of the European Union in its own right.

There will be further pressure from Scotland, though in that particular case they are not strongly backed by geography too.

And the bottom line is that the rest of Europe will now not give a damn if the United Kingdom breaks up, and the British government will not receive any support from the EU in keeping the UK together. On the contrary, the EU will now be obliged in the opposite direction: to help those parts of the UK which want to stay in the EU. A united Ireland will henceforth be in the interest of the European Union in a way that it never mattered before. And Scotland, which was encouraged to vote against independence in its own referendum not long ago, by statements from the EU saying that it would be unable to stay within the Union if it seceded from the UK, but would have to apply for membership in its own right, will now be looking to restart that process.