AHC: Most dystopian and most utopian Northern Ireland possible

OK, this sounds a bit ridiculous, but that's one of the points. You can only use non-ASB ways to achieve these scenarios.

Essentially, try to create :

1.) The most plausibly dystopian Troubles possible, with Northern Ireland essentially devolving into a complete war zone, with most people of either side acting like extremely paranoid gun-toting revanchists (on the level of Haiti or the DRC at its lowest historical moments).

2.) The most plausible "utopian" fate for Northern Ireland, where most of the biggest social and economic tensions are effectively fixed soon enough to prevent anything on the scale of OTL Troubles.

The POD for both scenarios can be no earlier than the 1910s.

Well for dystopian What if Gordon Banks played has to be the winner, while it appears to have disappeared from the internet it features PM Enoch Powell and mostly by accident rather than design Ulster getting ethnically cleansed and then becoming an independent state after the very dystopic Britain collapses.

hm, home rule in Northern Ireland in 1912, 1914 or 1918, the Ulster Volunteers had many members, many guns and the will to burn everything down to get their way, and the British army in the field was very unwilling to take action against them, so blood bath, ethnic cleansing of Ulster

Thanks.

As for WIGBHP :

http://web.archive.org/web/20080208084118/http://www.btinternet.com/~chief.gnome/

Tada ! Am I awesome or am I awesome ?

Thank you very much.

Implausible but possible best case

The British government has the balls to implement Home Rule regardless of the international situation, calling the on the Ulster Volunteers' patriotism not to rock the boat in time of war. And suppressing them with a couple of batallions of the regular army if they insist on doing so.

Lloyd George never imposes Stormont on the Unionists, who didnt actually want it. NI doesn't have 50 years of sectarian one party rule as it is more closely involved in the mainstream of British politics so there isn't the same level of discrimination meaning that The Troubles never happen.

On the dystopian end we could have the Provos or one of the other militant groups getting a hold of chemical weapons somehow and using them in a terror attack like Aum Shinrykio did in Japan.

I never really understood why Stormont was implemented in the first place, does anyone have a recommendation for a book about the why and wherefores of the decision?

Arachnid said:

I never really understood why Stormont was implemented in the first place, does anyone have a recommendation for a book about the why and wherefores of the decision?

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That way Westminster was still paying lip service to the idea of Home Rule across Ireland, merely with different devolved authorities. If direct rule remained then technically Britain wasn't honoring past promises. There's also the pragmatic fact that the new RUC and Stormont could deal with sectarianism from now on, as Ireland was a depressing, embarrassing (both because the Irish of all people were defying Empire, and the brutal state terror tactics, actually how Mosley first came to light attacking the Black and Tans) side-show for a British public trying to return to normalcy after WWI.