The Guardian view on Irish politics: an enviable beauty is born | Editorial

As Britain cuts itself off from the modern world amid the delusions of Brexit, Ireland is playing its part with growing assurance

In the archipelago of offshore European islands we inhabit, a new nation is growing in importance. This new nation is not the divided, tragi-comic global" Britain of Boris Johnson's sloppy and incontinent imagination. It is not even the independent Scotland whose birth Mr Johnson is himself doing much to foster - though one day it may be, given his slapdash premiership.

The new nation is the Irish Republic. There are three connected reasons for saying a 98-year-old nation is new. The first is Ireland's latest government, which took office in June. For almost a century, Irish politics have been shaped by the civil war of 1922-23. Ever since then, the country has been ruled either by Fine Gael, which is descended from the group that supported the treaty of 1921 with Britain, or, more often, by Fianna Fail, whose forebears rejected it.