Professor John FitzGerald:

However, if we got rid of the Northern Ireland Executive and had a unitary state, we would have to fire 10,000 civil servants in the North, which would not be popular. We would have to roll out the Republic's education system to the North and steamroll everything in the North. Two things we would steamroll from the North to the South would be that the PSNI would take over the Garda - we are already moving in that direction - and the Northern Ireland Housing Executive would take over social housing in the Republic, given that it does a better job.

I do not have the answer to it. It is a real conundrum. I will leave it to political scientists and politicians. We should leave the columnists out of this one.