THERE is great fun to be had by going around the map of Europe looking at how the EU's sacred rules have been fudged at the edges.
Some of these fudges are within states rather than between them, giving hope of special Brexit solutions for Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scandinavian precedents seem especially promising.
However, one of the first things to become clear since the referendum is that this is fanciful. Spain will block special treatment for Scotland and Brussels will not offer it regardless. Theresa May has pitched herself as a `one nation conservative' - a phrase that means little but which still rules out being a four-nation conservative.
There will be no grand constitutional reworking of the UK, on purpose at least. For its part, the Irish government has expressed no desire for a fundamental re-imagining of relationships.
So Brexit means Brexit, for the UK as a whole. The unique circumstances we find ourselves in on the island of Ireland are still amenable to the EU's surprisingly flexible solutions but these must be pursued in terms of two indivisible countries, the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
The history of this is encouraging, if rather ironic. The UK and Ireland should not have been able to join what was then the European Economic Community in 1973 because they had an unresolved territorial dispute, via Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution.
In theory, the UK and Ireland fudged this by joining on the same day. In practice, Brussels was happy to ignore it if London and Dublin were happy to ignore it.
The lesson for today is that both countries can deal ingeniously with Europe and with each other once they agree common objectives. A consensus is already emerging on maintaining the common travel area, preserving EU citizenship for Irish passport holders in Northern Ireland and avoiding a `hard border'.
Saving the common travel area looks relatively straightforward. The UK and Ireland have saved it together once before, in 1999, when they jointly opted out of the Schengen zone, the EU common travel area that would have superseded our own. If Ireland stays out of Schengen and the UK and Ireland keep coordinating immigration policy, as they do now, all that should be required to satisfy Brussels are passport checks across the Irish Sea, given that passport checks on the border are a practical and political impossibility.
Unionists will not like this but they will richly deserve it. In any case, is it not absurd to fetishise passport-free travel when you can rarely board a plane or pass through an airport without one, even on internal flights?
Preserving EU citizenship is slightly trickier. The EU usually dislikes the kind of multiple passport entitlement we have in Northern Ireland but that is usually because it is an act of troublemaking - Hungary offering everyone a passport in Transylvania, for example.
Here, it is an act of peace-making, which would be troublesome to undo.
Recognising the EU citizenship of Irish passport holders living outside the EU would be unorthodox but not unprecedented - Greenland has a similar arrangement.
Approaching Brussels together, the UK and Ireland could present Irish EU citizenship in Northern Ireland as a harmless fait accompli.
The problem that appears insurmountable is avoiding a hard border for trade. Fascinatingly, the UK and Ireland set up a free trade area in 1965 as a prelude to EU membership. But even that was a limited and lopsided affair and it cannot be resurrected half-in and half-out of Europe.
Britain's crown dependencies - the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man - are not in the EU but are in the EU customs union, permitting free trade in goods. This might be a model for some new form of devolution but we are straying back into the realm of Scandinavian fantasy. Plus, the customs union does not cover the agricultural products so important to inter-Ireland trade and for which EU tariffs are horrendous.
The best we can hope for is a UK deal to re-enter the single market, taking us along with it. But there is still huge scope here for Dublin and London to work together to smooth the transition. The threat of paramilitary-linked smuggling alone is a persuasive argument for interim arrangements.
If you see our salvation as a united Ireland all this may seem beside the point or even actively counterproductive. Unfortunately, our old problem will not be solved within the two-year deadline for solving all our new ones.
