Is it time to bully the people of Northern Ireland into co-operating with each other? It's easy enough working out how that might be done, writes Malachi O'Doherty.
Britain would just govern the place so roughly, and with so little regard for the threats of protest, that voters would start to plead with the political parties to mend their differences.
It would be an easy strategy for any party within a sniff of power in Britain, for none of them depend on Northern Irish votes.
The easy English assumption about Northern Ireland has often leaked out since Harold Wilson's famous "spongers" speech back in 1974. We are not remotely self-sufficient. We are parasites on a more prosperous Britain with trouble enough of its own.
Could this be the time for a British government to start pandering to prejudice and popular contempt and cutting Ulster adrift, at least until it is ready to pick up a paddle and start rowing too? Northern Ireland survived much of the depredation of the Thatcher era.
When the Iron Lady was cutting public housing in England, Scotland and Wales and telling people that they had to fend for themselves, public housing expanded and improved in Northern Ireland.
The prevailing philosophy of the state did not apply here. Perhaps Mrs Thatcher felt that people here were troublesome enough without being given more to complain about.
But Northern Ireland is viewed like a teenager who gets to drive Dad's car but doesn't pay for the petrol - or for the tax, or the insurance, and who doesn't even clean it.
The groaning from patrician Britain complains that for failure to settle differences Northern Ireland is being almost perpetually indulged.
And just look at how it has been indulged: US presidents, the PM and the Taoiseach come over every time there is a quarrel. Mountains of European peace funding pay for jobs for her ex-prisoners, even for public buses that cross the sectarian divide.
A population of 1 .5 million is treated to an incredible degree of international media and academic scrutiny, as if its conflict was as serious as Palestine's.
It really shouldn't be very important at all. Worse, many suspect that Northern Ireland thrives, emotionally, on this attention and would not easily adjust to life without it.
Well might the errant child, in thoughtful moments, wonder if the parent is going to get tough; and well might the errant child suspect, when cuts are made in public services, that overdue exasperation is behind them.
That is the explanation people find for the sudden pressure they feel. Regional hospital services are being cut; civil service jobs are about to fall away and a new water tax is about to be foisted upon us. The threat to the hospital in Omagh is a focus for anxiety about hospital services all over the place.
Don't get run over by a bus in mid-Ulster, whatever you do. The chances are that, with the depletion of services all around, you'll end up in Belfast, a long way to go for intensive care. Oh, there is Altnagelvin up in Derry, but the high-dependency unit is often closed for want of staff.
And direct rule ministers are fond of lecturing us about how our services are so much better than they would be in their own constituencies; how it's all the fault of the Royal College of Surgeons which wants big centres of excellence that provide the best possible training for doctors; and you can't help wondering when they will work out that it will take a fleet of air ambulances to keep those highly-professional, well-trained consultants in Belfast well supplied with patients.
And in the same vein we hear about school closures and more rationalisation.
Martin McGuinness, as education minister, deftly nutted the 11-Plus on his last day in office and no one has worked out yet what the alternative is.
There is a strong suspicion that we are kept in limbo deliberately. London would like us to get our devolved government sorted out and seems to be prepared to make direct rule uncomfortable by deferring the big decisions that affect us all.
Further evidence of British heavy-handedness is the sudden crackdown on republicans too. Within weeks of decommissioning, big names like Slab Murphy and Bobby Storey are under pressure, Murphy's money being investigated, Storey arrested on a charge of public disorder.
It is easy to imagine the Brits are up to something.
The alternative theory is that they are doing us a favour, that our local parties would secretly like London to make all the unpopular decisions before they re-enter the assembly.
Better to blame the Brits for closing hospitals than take the blame yourself.
The coming water tax supports the other theory, that we are to be punished for our failure to elect a viable assembly.
The deferral of the water tax reinforces the impression that we have a gun at our heads, a little extra time to come to our collective political senses, before London puts the boot in.
The problem is we don't have any collective political sense to come to.