The constitutional question: Where does Northern Ireland fit in the bigger picture?

As calls for a united Ireland grow louder, questions are being asked about how and where Northern Ireland would fit in the bigger picture.

Aside from the politics and the practicalities of what a referendum would mean for the two countries, what is it that culturally unites and divides us?

According to a recent census report in the Republic, the answers to the big questions are broadly similar.

Populations are both growing, with the population in the Republic hitting 5million people for the first time since the famine.

The number of people with dual citizenship has jumped by 63% - again a similar picture in Northern Ireland after the result of the EU referendum.

Both societies are also becoming more secular, with 10% less Irish people identifying as Roman Catholic.

Colin Coulter, who is a sociology professor at Maynooth University, has closely studied the two most recent census in Northern Ireland and the Republic.

"The population, like Northern Ireland, is growing but it's growing at a faster rate, which has all sorts of implications, not least in relation to Northern Ireland because if you go back to the beginning of the Troubles it had about a bit over a third of the population of the island - it now has barely a quarter.

"Secularisation is another one. The number of people saying they have no religion now is up at about 14%, which actually is lower than in Northern Ireland where it's about 17%, but both of those figures really seriously understate the level of secularisation both sides of the border."

Aoife Moore is a political journalist working in Dublin. She grew up in Derry and spent some time in Scotland during its referendum campaign before moving to the Republic.

She said: "I think in the Republic, you know they've moved on, their social progression has been a lot more than it has in the North, with things like equal marriage and abortion rights.

"The North was behind the South in that but we also had the conflict that kind of stalled social progress for quite a long time, so maybe it is inevitable that it would be a bit more socially conservative because we didn't really have the type of growing and progression that the Republic had - I think just north and south people just are moving away from organised religion."

Ask anyone on Dublin's most busy shopping area, Grafton Street, what they think of living in Ireland and they'll tell you, "it's expensive".

The housing crisis is no secret and the homelessness problem is one of the first things visitors see on the streets.

Dublin is currently the most expensive place to live in eurozone, but its social problems stretch far beyond its capital.

Compare this picture with one of Ireland boasting a 12% growth in 2022, more than treble its EU neighbours.

Paul MacFlynn from the Nevin Economic Research Institute explains why this figure misrepresents Ireland's true economy.

He said: "The Republic of Ireland is really two economies. There is a foreign dominated sector and nobody knows a lot about it because a lot of that is covered by privacy for certain firms and certain very large firms which affect a lot of the numbers which you see coming out of the ROI's economy, particularly GDP.

"But there is a disconnect between that and the domestic economy and that feeds through to issues such as the housing crisis, so while the coffers can look very plentiful in the Republic of Ireland, they're facing many of the same social challenges as Northern Ireland and the UK are but it doesn't translate between both economies, there is a significant gap between the two."

While so much of Northern Ireland's census in 2021 and Ireland's in 2022 appear to follow the same social trends, the two countries are far from the same and each has its own set of problems to tackle.

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