'Ireland out of England' plays with the ironies and follies of the campaign for a unified independent Ireland that has expressed little insight or care about what's involved.

The title essay recounts the constant trouping of Southern Irish artists and professionals to Britain where they live, are welcomed and flourish. They are the talented crests of historic waves of Irish for whom England is the land of opportunity, as warmly familiar as the towns and fields of Leinster, Munster and Connaught.

How do we square the Irish in Britain with the anti-Britishness of the politicians and pundits back home in Ireland, or with the clamour for the removal of Northern Ireland from the very UK in which so many Irish prosper?

The book reveals other inconvenient truths about the push for a united Ireland - that benign-sounding destination that to be reached seems to require a flight from reality and a refusal to let Northern Ireland heal and thrive before broaching down the line the vexed question of constitutional change. The Good Friday Agreement, Brexit, the peculiar inhibitions of unionism, the Northern Ireland Protocol and Windsor Framework, the Irish language, Ireland's own Belt & Road Initiative, an agenda for the touted debate on unification - these are some of the topics under the lamp.

We live in a volatile world, and "Pretendians" and other essays show connections between our situation on the island and the turmoil of identity politics, mass immigration, anti-colonialism and indigenisation in Canada and the United States.

In the real world, a united sovereign Ireland is a distracting mirage.