Brexit mess could lead, unintentionally, to a united Ireland

Berlin Wall, you can sense the acceleration toward the inevitable. Bear with me while I walk through the Groundhog’s Day of this muddle. When Britain voted narrowly in 2016 to leave the union, it did so in a fit of nationalism and xenophobia and against the will of majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Voters were promised a migrant-free Britain, unfettered from evil globalists. Instead, they are getting a Balkanized Britain, its stagnant economy at the mercy of forces they no longer will be able to influence in Europe. The vote was a Trump-level temper tantrum that revealed the fraudulence of conservative populism.

What has bollixed the formal exit — and is the root cause of all of the rudderless rumblings in Parliament last week — is Northern Ireland.

The Brexit vote roused the ghosts from bloody eras past, those centuries when it was a crime to be Irish in Ireland. The Troubles, three decades of late-20thcentury sectarian terror that took at least 3,500 lives, was the latest iteration of that dead weight of memory.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 — an instance when ‘‘hope and history rhyme,’’ in the words of the poet Seamus Heaney — ended the Troubles. Remarkably, it has held the peace while essentially erasing the border between the Republic of Ireland and the swath of historic Ulster belonging to Britain.

No one wants to put up guard stations and customs checks along the invisible 310-mile line separating prosperous Ireland, a member of the EU, from the shakily peaceful six counties of the north, which would exit. And only the most hateful elements on both sides want a return of violence that is sure to come with a hard border.

The solution? It’s there in the not-so-fine print of the peace agreement. Should a majority of Northern Ireland residents desire to leave Britain, it is required to call for a vote of those people.

That majority is fast approaching. What Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain calls ‘‘our precious union’’ is held together by 10 members of Parliament representing the old hatreds of North Ireland — the Democratic Unionist Party. It was founded by Ian Paisley, a bigot with a Bible who opposed the peace agreement and referred to Catholics as scum who ‘‘multiply like vermin.’’

Paisley is no longer with us. Nor is most of the dark sentiment he stirred up. When the borders came down, so did many of the walls of religion and nationality. Catholics, long a persecuted minority, will soon be a majority in Northern Ireland if demographic trends continue.

The Republic of Ireland is proudly progressive, led by an openly gay Taoiseach (prime minister), Leo Varadkar, who is of Irish and Indian heritage. After a series of scandals, the influence of the Catholic Church has greatly diminished. Last year, Ireland had the fastestgrowing economy in Europe.

Given a choice, a majority in Northern Ireland could well be persuaded to ditch what is left of feckless and intemperate Britain and form a single Irish nation — if for no other reason than they like the benefits that come with being a small country in the EU. Of course, many things would still have to fall in place. But the stars are aligning.

Remember: This was all Britain’s doing, unintentional though it was. Hope and history don’t usually rhyme. More often, they bump into each other. That happy accident could result in a single Irish nation finally free of foreign rule.