Plan Paisley has come much closer to a return to his old-style beloved "majority rule" them. Fianna Fail enjoyed generations of such power in the South - in close alliance with reformist nationalists of the North. All this did was copper-fasten the border and British rule, as shown by the brutal wave of repression that met the most reasonable demands for democratic reforms from 1968 onwards.
There is some possibility of a renewed political opposition to Sinn Fein's slide into partnership with unionism. But this is likely to be confined to a coalition of the rag bag of failed militarists who splintered from the republican movement over prior decades.
We are unfortunately a long way off he 32-county movement based on mass action -linking the national question to class-based demands - that can turn round this political ECLECAL Ireland - the hard facts Ireland was partitioned over eighty years ago in the wake of the overwhelming majority of the country voting for independence. The carve up was a imperialist solution to the ensuing war. The border was drawn on sectarian lines: designed to contain an in-built unionist majority.
Far from "democracy" this was a state based on permanent gerrymandering. Ever since then, the nationalist minority have been discriminated against, but more importantly all attempts to fight for Irish self-determination and unity have been met with the brutal opposition of a state who's raison d'etre is the maintenance of unionist privilege and British rule.
For most of those decades this was meted out by locallyrecruited state militias and armed police. For three decades from the late sixties, this could only be done with a permanent mobilisation of fully armed British soldiers on the streets.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland is only the latest in a line of such "bodies of armed men" who's function has been to underpin this status quo. At the frontline in truncheoning those who had the temerity to march for equality in housing and one person one vote in the 1960s their death squads - the "day jobs" of loyalist paramilitaries -were responsible for hundreds of deaths during the troubles.
The recently published report by police ombudsman Nuala O'Loan - limited to a small area of North Belfast over a small number of years -implicated the police special branch in over a dozen such state-sponsored assassinations, carried out with impunity by police agents acting with high level approval.
Few nationalists doubt that this report represents the tip of an iceberg that may never be revealed. There is still no inquiry into perhaps the most notorious of such murders, that of solicitor Pat Finucane. Many of the officers implicated in the O'Loan report are still serving, and the government has stated that there will be no prosecutions.
Sinn Fein's vote is, the most unequivocal endorsement possible of the apparatus of partition.