Could Brexit result in the reunification of Ireland? Could it trump — forgive us — all the wars and feuding over the division of the emerald isle between the centrally Catholic Irish Republic in the south and the predominantly Protestant part of the United Kingdom that is known as Northern Ireland? That it might is a suggestion being made in a piece in Sunday Review of the New York Times .

Nice to see the Times come in on this story. That’s because the first to raise this possibility was our columnist on 20th century history, Paul Atkinson, writing on March 11 in the Sun under the headline: “Could Brexit Manage to Unite Ireland?” He built his argument on the fact that the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland had emerged as a — or even the — major objection to a Brexit deal.

The Irish Republic, of course, is already in the European Union and shows no signs of wanting to leave (it’s abandoning many of its defining traditions so as, at least in part, to accomodate Europe). Plus, in the June 2016 referendum on Brexit, Northern Ireland voted to remain in Europe. So maybe Brexit could provide what Mr. Atkinson called the “ultimate answer to the ‘Irish Question.’”

In the Times piece, headlined “The Irish Border is a Scar,” Patrick Radden Keefe notes that Brexiteers “don’t realize that by forcing Northern Ireland to choose between the United Kingdom and Europe, they may have inadvertently hastened the reunification of Ireland.” Whatever problems the Brexit backers have, though, it’s hard to see naiveté as one of them.

The current parliamentary crisis stems from the May government’s failure to acknowledge that maintaining open borders between both North and South, and between the North and the rest of the Britain, is impossible. No delay via the “backstop” provision that has caused such disarray in Parliament can alter that reality. Brexit requires either a hard border or the risk of shedding Northern Ireland.

Since the partition of Ireland in 1921, United Kingdom governments have suggested that reunification is not theirs to decide and that the six northern counties could never be forced into the Republic without their consent. The South, while paying lip service to the pious platitudes of reunion, has always considered making it happen to be a British responsibility.

Yet most Brits would be happy to be rid of the headache Northern Ireland has been for so many decades. They’ve lacked the leader to to create a unification strategy that it can sell to Northern Protestants. The Republic, despite its gangbusters economy, has failed to make a pitch to the North as to how, as a member of the EU, all thirty-two counties of Ireland would have a brighter future.

Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, a gay man of Indian extraction, has been touted as the new face of — whatever one thinks if the merits — a secular, progressive Ireland. Yet Mr. Varadkar has failed to make an issue of the division of Ireland the way, say, Helmut Kohl made of the division of Germany or, say, Ho Chi Minh made of divided Vietnam. Unification was a defining issue of their political cause.

Not to be misunderstood, the Sun would not commend to any country membership in the European Union. We oppose the EU as a false, and illiberal (and anti-American), construct. Yet only Britain has even tried to make a run for freedom. Northern Ireland’s voters seem wont to being part of the EU. So December 2021, centenary of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that established partition, beckons in a fresh light.

It will beckon in a fresh light if Britain manages to escape Europe on April 12, the next deadline. Or if Britain flinches and delays Brexit yet again. It could beckon Mrs. May, or whoever emerges as premier, to sit with the leadership in Belfast and Dublin and set a timetable for reversing that treaty’s legacy. In the long sweep of history, Britain’s independence will be seen as priceless.