The British, bemused by Ireland, used to comfort themselves with the thought that whenever the Irish question was about to be answered, the Irish would change the question. But now, when we are again looking for answers, it is the British question that is changing. Slowly but profoundly, a seismic shift has been taking place. The question, now, for the first time is "What are we going to do about the British problem?" And for British read unionist - the crisis of Britishness is, at the sharp end, the crisis of unionism.
This is not, of course, to imply that the unionists alone have questions to answer. There is a very long way to go before the deadly strain of territorial and sectarian Irish nationalism is eradicated once and for all. But it is already a cultural and intellectual anachronism. Once the British government had acknowledged Irish self-determination and the Irish Government recognised that it could be exercised only with the consent of the majority in Northern Ireland, old-style Irish nationalism was dead.
Everyone, including Sinn Fein, knows that a united Ireland, if it ever happens, will be brought about, not by Irish nationalists, but by the active consent of those on the island whose ethnic identity is British. And it is now this British identity that is uncertain and unstable. For at least the last 200 years, the "problem" has been the threat to a self-confident British state posed by the troublesome Irish. Irish nationalism in its various forms has been the fly in the ointment, the flaw in the pattern. As Winston Churchill put it in his speech on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Ireland was a bog in which normally sure-footed Britons had been "wandering and floundering" for generations. British identity was firm and fertile; Irish identity soft, dark and treacherous.
Such generalisations are always stupid, and it would be foolish to simply reverse them. But it is clear that Britishness has become a bit boggy itself. The British settlement of 1688 which the Apprentice Boys of Derry will celebrate this weekend is falling to pieces.
The monarchy may survive its present crisis long enough for Queen Camilla to smile down on her subjects, but as a living embodiment of British sovereignty it is gone forever. The Empire is a painful memory. And the Union itself is up for grabs. Tony Blair may see Scottish and Welsh devolution as a way of shoring up the United Kingdom, but a Scottish parliament in particular is just as likely to encourage separatism as to stop it in its tracks.
It is, at one level, a pity that all of this coincides with attempts to negotiate a settlement to the Northern Ireland problem, for it undoubtedly inhibits the confidence that unionists need if they are to envisage change. But, in reality, such a complaint misses the point that it is this very process that makes a negotiated settlement possible. If the Britishness of the Glorious Revolution was completely intact, it could never manage the change in perspective that any conceivable settlement will require. Or, to put it another way, no one ever really negotiates from a position of strength - if you don't have problems, you don't need to talk about solutions. For Ulster unionists, the problems are particularly acute. They inhabit the part of the UK in which a strand of the old British identity that can be occluded elsewhere - its Protestantism - is at its most obvious. And they also have to cope with the loss not just of monarchy and empire, but also of another, perhaps more important marker of identity.
Ethnic groups define themselves as much by what they are not as by what they are, and in the case of the Ulster British, the easiest thing not to be was "Irish" - a word whose synonyms in this sense were Catholic, backward, superstitious, priest-ridden, rural. The problem is that the "Irish" have, for the most part, had the bad grace to drop the synonyms. As a comforting contrast, the citizens of the Republic of Ireland have outlived their usefulness.
These British questions underlie the present crisis in unionism. And they are worth discussing because they suggest that there is more to that crisis than mere petulance. Watching David Trimble, Ian Paisley and Bob McCartney, it is easy to believe that the difficulty is just that they are narrow-minded middle-aged men, too short-sighted to see the opportunities of the moment. And it is easy to forget that they are primarily involved in trying to answer, not the Irish question but the British question.
FROM an Irish historical perspective, they may look like isolated anachronisms. From a British one, they look like reluctant forerunners, pushed out ahead to face questions - what will it mean to be British in the 21st century? - that the main body has been avoiding.
This is why, for instance, it is useless to tell unionists as John Hume - and Irish post-nationalists so often do - that they should forget about questions of sovereignty and embrace the new Europe where sovereignty is, in any case, pooled. The Scottish political theorist, Tom Nairn, has pointed out recently that asking people to abandon old-fashioned notions of sovereignty is all very well, but that you can't give away what you don't have.
And the fact is that Ulster unionists don't possess a simple, clear sovereignty which they can bring to the European table. Europe, as the Conservative Party discovered in the process of tearing itself apart, does not provide an easy way of avoiding the British question. In asking unionists to negotiate a new future for themselves, the world is asking them, essentially, to re-invent Britishness in very difficult circumstances, when the English, the Scots and Welsh haven't managed to do it in relatively easy ones. The formidable nature of the task doesn't excuse their flight from it. But it does entitle them to two things.
One is that those of us brought up within Irish nationalism remember that we're not the only ones trying to cope with the collapse of an old national identity. We have to distinguish between bloody-minded intransigence and finding room to manoeuvre when you've been boxed into a corner. Unionists need space and nationalists have to provide it.
And the other entitlement of unionists is that British people watching the Apprentice Boys on the nine o'clock news refrain from throwing up their eyes at the antics of these quaint relics of history. For what they will be seeing are people who do not have the soft option of drifting cosily through the end of a British era. People who, on their own, are having to answer a question that their compatriots in Finchley and Fulham, in Liverpool and Leeds, are only beginning to ask. They will be seeing not just their own past but the first unsteady steps towards their own future.