Against all my better judgement, marksi, I've succumbed to temptation and your post has dragged me back to this.
marksi wrote:We use the term "Republic of Ireland" or "the Republic" in order to differentiate between Northern Ireland and well, what you're referring to here as Ireland.
The problem is that it's not "what I'm referring to here as Ireland". It's the sovereign state recognized
universally as Ireland.
It'd be confusing if there was a Korea, and a "North Korea", which is why they're referred to as North and South.
The difference being that Northern Ireland is not a country, but a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, whose title makes the division of sovereignty abundantly clear.
Ireland works perfectly well as a geographic term when referring to the island as a whole, and indeed when used within the borders of the 26 counties, but beyond that its use can easily create confusion.
Ireland is the name with which the Irish state has referred to itself for decades. I don't know what confusion you're referring to. Obviously for the sake of clarity or explanation, Republic of or Irish Republic can be used. And people with certain political viewpoints can and will continue to refer to various bits of these islands as whatever the hell they want.
My overarching point (and as I've already said, I'm not entirely sure about the wisdom of having made it in the first place) was that amongst some people there is a limited awareness that the name of the state is simply Ireland. The qualifier "Republic of" tends to be overused and "Eire" need never be used in English. Having had the Queen acknowledge this (and the language used in her speech will have been picked through with a fine-toothed comb) in recent days, it just seemed a good time to point it out.
Really though, for the vast majority of people nowadays, the language they choose to use is not politically loaded. It's something that you could waste a lot of time arguing over, as I've demonstrated today.
