The stunning shoreline of Lifford and sea angling in Strabane

Some years ago, a  school textbook was issued to kids here in the 26 Counties.

However, it had a rather embarrassing error.

It drew the British Border from Coshquin in County Derry through Bridgend in Donegal and straight across through Burnfoot, Tooban and hitting the shoreline at Drongawn Lough facing Rathmullan.

In other words, it ceded the Donegal peninsula of Inis Eoghain to Narne Arne.

As far as I’m aware that schoolbook is still in use as it was too expensive to pulp and re-issue.

If it is then that might explain why the gifted toddlers at the Irish Times layout section decided to submerge the Six Counties in this instructive graphic.

Ironically, it was used to illustrate a story of a couple of youngsters who were adrift on a paddleboard of the coast of Galway.

These words blink to life on Ulster’s western seaboard.

According to the cartographers in the Irish Times, we now also have an eastern shoreline at Lifford.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity on Twitter to give them a quick geography lesson.

It is years since I was coaxed into trying scuba diving by a climbing buddy, and it certainly was an experience.

For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t fancy re-visiting that claustrophobic terror by going down on the sunken ruins of Sion Mills or sea angling in Tyrone.

However, if I did, I might file a colour piece to the Irish Times!

It is sometimes difficult to convey to folk out with this little island the enduring solidity of the Free State mindset within the Dublin elite.

For them the country ends at Dundalk and, to a large extent, it also ends at Sligo.

Of course, Dún na nGall is different, as Partition meant something very real indeed here.

The part of this Ulster county that was gifted to the UK via that school textbook howler was hit extremely hard.

The Border meant that Inis Eoghain was cut off from its natural urban centre for fifty years.

On the other side of that artificial boundary, the people of Derry lost their Donegal hinterland.

Candidly the imposition of a hostile armed frontier in this part of the island was economically disastrous for generations.

In many ways, it was almost as if Lloyd George and his Machiavellian colleagues had created a shoreline at Lifford during the Treaty negotiations in London.

Next year the Six-County statelet will be 100 years old.

Northern Ireland was, from the get-go, a confected polity which was set up on a sectarian headcount.

Of course, it was never Ulster as the nine-county province of Uladh simply had too many Taigs.

Now one hundred years later, the demographics of Narne Arne are starting to resemble the Nine Counties at the creation of the Stormont statelet.

If the Brits had cunning plan to create a unionist ethnostate in perpetuity, then that has run its course.

Here the economist David McWilliams, taking part in the Virtual Féile an Phobail this year lays out the long-term significance of those demographic changes and how Partition was an economic disaster for the northeast of this island.

I believe that McWilliams is correct when he states that the Six County statement is on borrowed time.

Consequently, folk who were happy with the Partition status quo have to get into the headspace that those arrangements are in the departure lounge of history.

It is time to #Think32.

However, that job of work is just as necessary in Baile Átha Cliath as it is in Béal Feirste.