The Irish protocol.

Some of the things you might not be able to accept are fundamental (EU law in NI post Brexit, authority of ECJ etc.). NI can't remain in EU Single Market without this, so if Unionists reject it there is no answer.

I think the other stuff you've criticised (bound up with customs checks and standards etc.) gets increasingly problematic and unworkable for NI the more the UK adopts a Brexit fundamentalist stance "i.e. we're not having anything whatsoever to do with them in the EU now - we're going to make a load of totally contrasting laws on everything under the sun, start a race to the bottom on different standards etc to try & grow the economy".

So repeating myself, I think what happens is in the hands of UK govt. (Johnson & Frost). If Unionists wish the agreement to survive, it is probably their ears they really need to get into rather than complaining to EU Commission/Martin/Varadkar/Coveney etc. Unfortunately I kind of doubt it would make any difference to the outcome though.

Reduced to writing gung ho articles to those who think he is giving the EU what for.

It read like building a case. Brexit is supposed to be done. He may be trying to explain to the faithful (Conservative voting Daily Mail edit Mail on Sunday readership in GB) why some more battling must be done with the EU dragon, in case they might not be excited by the fight any more and think its all a bit stupid/self-harming at this stage.

And Unionist politicians backed it and are against the Protocol.

Not sure why downcow is trying to back Unionism away from a, so far, very defined position. I think though that a split is forming.

Yes, but "most brexiters are unionists" is a very different claim to "most unionists are brexiters". "Most Brexiters are unionist" actually tell us more about nationalists than it does about unionists.

UK political culture, between its bizarre first-past-the-post electoral system and its fairly childish attitude to referendums, often creates an impression of solid or overwhelming support for one party or one position which is, in reality, quite misleading.

As Ads by Google points out, if there was a block vote in the 2016 referendum, it wasn't by unionists or protestants. Catholics voted 85:15 in favour of Remain; that's as close to a crushing victory for one side, and a crushing defeat for the other, as you are ever likely to get in a functioning democracy. Protestants, by contrast, were much more evenly split: 60:40 for leave.

The result of this 60:40 vote is that a great swathe of Protestant-majority constituencies are coloured blue (or whatever colour you assign to "Leave") on a referendum results map, but in fact a large minority in that area supported remain. The highest "Leave" vote was in North Antrim: 62.2%. By contrast, six constituencies had a higher Remain vote, ranging from Newry and Armagh (62.9%) to Foyle (78.3%).

A similar picture emerges if you look at how people who identify as "nationalist" voted (88% Remain), or people who identify as "Irish" voted (87% remain).

One feature of the monolithic Catholic/nationalist/Irish support for Remain is its uniformity. In Britain, support for both Leave and Remain was correlated with gender, with educational attainment, and with a variety of other socioeconomic characteristics. Women were more likely to vote Remain than men; people with university degrees were more likely to vote Remain than those whose education stopped at secondary school; older people were more likely to vote Leave than younger people; etc. But in Northern Ireland, among Catholics, this was hardly true at all. There was little correlation between Remain support and age, gender, educational attainment, etc; pretty much every sub-group within the Catholic community supported Remain by pretty much the same amount; this is a solid, across-the-board, position.

Protestants, by contrast, were much more "British" in the composition of their vote. The 40% of Protestants who voted Remain were disproportionately female, disproportionately young, disproportionately middle-class, etc, in much the way that we observe in Great Britain.

So, the imposition of hard Brexit on NI isn't so much the imposition of something that Protestants/unionists/British en bloc want. There is no Protestant bloc position on this. There are many sub-groups within the Protestant community where a majority favour Remain. (E.g.. 55% of Protestants who went to grammar school voted "Remain".) But it is very much the imposition of something that Catholics/nationalists/Irish en bloc do not want; on the data we have there is no identifiable sub-group of Catholics that favours leaving, or even that contains a significant minority that favours leaving.

And, on the basis that people have stronger reactions to offences, slights and insults than they do to compliments and praise, the political problems that will result from imposing hard Brexit on NI do not result because hard Brexit might possibly enjoy the support of a narrow majority of the Protestant community, but because it is certainly opposed by the overwhelming bulk of the Catholic community. It's a truism of politics that the people you offend by your policy are always more offended by it than the people you gratify are gratified by it.

Tl; dr: It's not the supposed unionist mass support for Brexit that matters here; its the real Catholic mass support for Remain. Imposing hard Brexit on NI, given the Catholic bloc position, is obviously destabilising even if there isn't an opposing Protestant bloc position.

'truly new illuminated'? I think it just confirmed your bias.