When Taoiseach Micheál Martin said last week that English nationalism was the driving force behind the result of the UK's 2016 EU referendum, he was simply stating the obvious.
He might well have added that, while Irish and Scottish nationalists have been unsuccessfully trying to end the union for centuries, it is striking that their English counterparts have brought us to the brink of the same outcome through their first serious intervention.
It is worth pointing out that the factors which influenced the decisive vote across Northern Ireland by a margin of 56 to 44 pc in favour of remaining within the EU have not always been properly analysed.
Some unionists who always looked to London rather than Brussels, and felt that the EU undermined their sense of sovereignty, were initially attracted to the leave campaign.
Many nationalists also considered their options and could immediately see that Brexit offered a clear path towards their aspiration of a united Ireland achieved by purely constitutional means.
However both traditions ultimately concluded that Brexit represented an economic disaster for all sides and accepted that staying in the EU was the only sensible decision.
The people of Scotland reached the same verdict but Boris Johnson had identified a path to Downing Street through his endorsement of the dubious Vote Leave campaign and had little interest in the wider constitutional implications.
Mr Martin, in an Irish Independent interview published on Friday, quite reasonably asked; `What if England gets turned off Northern Ireland ? We have got to be thinking this through.'
The Fianna Fáil leader, who faced unionist criticism over his comments, also referred to his plans for a Shared Island Unit, which in the eyes of many people across Ireland, north and south, is among the mildest responses possible to the Brexit debacle.
It will be recalled that his Fine Gael predecessor Leo Varadkar was regularly denounced by unionists for his attempts to bring a rational approach to the EU negotiations, even before Sinn Féin emerged with the largest share of the vote in the last Irish general election.
With the three parties which dominate The Dail equally appalled by Brexit, and the reality that unionists are now a minority in the Stormont assembly, it can be seen that previous assumptions about future Irish political developments have been turned on their head.
