British constitutional academic meets the real world. Ireland left the Commonwealth (membership of which foisted on it by the 1922 Treaty (along with imposition of Government of Ireland Act) because of a calculated insult to the then Taoiseach. Bogdanor misses that misses that the North was set up to be an avowedly Unionist state, misusing religious confession as a binding force. Nothing independent Ireland did could change this. Irish citizens were treated as British citizens not out of generosity but rather