The population of the twenty-six county Republic of Ireland is now over 4 million, according to census figures released last month.

This is an increase from 2.6 million in 1961, the lowest figure on record.

Add on the 1.7 million living in the partitioned six counties still under British rule, and the figure for Ireland as a whole stands at 5.7 million.

Before the Great Famine in the 1840s, the country had a population of 8 million. Starvation, death, and emigration halved the number, and it continued on a downward spiral until the 1960s.

According to papers recently released, in the early 1970s British Prime Minister Ted Heath asserted that the then twenty-six county Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, "made it clear that he could not afford to assume responsibility for Northern Ireland right now." The different levels of social welfare payments were cited as his reason.

Is it at all possible that the current Taoiseach would "made it clear that he could not afford to assume responsibility for Northern Ireland right now."?

Is there a monetary price on the heads of Irish men and women living under British rule in the Six Counties, a price that Irish men and women living in the Twenty-six Counties are not willing to pay?

Has Partition caused such a division between Irish people that money is the main criterion for locking hundreds of thousands out of the Republic, leaving their democratic representation to the whim of nay sayers who turn on and turn off the faucet of Stormont's "glorified county council" as the mood strikes them?

If Britain were to repeat its offer, thus shedding its last remnant of Empire in Ireland, freeing up much needed army personnel for deployment in Iraq and elsewhere, would the twenty-six county Republic still refuse to accept its obligation to the Irish people in the Six Counties, nationalist, unionist, protestant, papist, on the ground that it couldn't afford to do so?

Whether born in the Twenty-six Counties or the Six Counties, all are born in Ireland. Ireland has the resources to care for all. A nation of 5.7 million people rather than a "nation" of 4 million, or a "nation" of 1.7 million, given the native talents of all its people, can care for its own, and relieve the long-suffering peoples of England, Scotland, and Wales from the burden they have been paying for far too long in taxes, lives lost, and blackened reputations.

Some may still say, "We can't afford it." Nonsense. We can, we will, and we must. It is time to be a nation once again, not two pieces of the same land.

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