An LON organised plebiscite? Heheh – but why? Why would an unbeaten Britain allow any such thing on what she still considered her territory? I like your push to have a sub/proto-fascist uprising led by Collins later on, kind of get the comparison.
Though I think you gloss over the reality of the sort of problem an HR Ireland would have presented in terms of leaching defence away from the island of Britain during WWII. I mean ‘heavily bombed’ doesn’t do justice to what would have happened (map that onto Dublin and perhaps Cork and again and again because it would be easy due to less good defences).
Actually it is interesting to look at Robert Fisk’s overview of that issue. In November 1940 the Luftwaffe sent a single reconnaissance plane across NI which took photographs demonstrating that Belfast, with all its industrial significance, was defended by just 7 anti-aircraft batteries. Truth is the Unionist government simply didn’t take seriously the idea that Belfast could be attacked by the Germans until the bombing of cities on the western side of Britain. It gets worse, London was aware of the potential problem but because of the autonomy of Stormont British civil defence approaches weren’t applied to the North. One can easily imagine similar thinking going on in an HR Dublin. It gets worse again. In spring 1941 before German bombing of the city, as Robert Kees notes, Belfast had no search lights, no night fighters and no provisions for smoke screens. And, almost unbelievably, ‘in the entire province there were only 24 heavy anti-aircraft guns, 14 light anti-aircraft guns, 1 RAF Hurricane Squadron, 6 radar stations, one bomb disposal unit and 2 small balloon barrages. Three NI anti-aircraft regiments had actually been withdrawn from the Province’. The bombings of April were followed by an equally uncontested bombing on May 4. I think when we look at the reality of what actually happened as against what people would like to have happened it becomes very grim indeed.
But, really, the problem is that 1916 was probably inevitable, as much as any historical event can be. I think that 1913 Lockout’s influence, while sometimes overstated, perhaps provided an object example of what the reality of British rule in Ireland was. Place that in context with the failure to implement HR, the Curragh mutiny which showed very clearly that central parts of the British state were not willing to implement it, the arrival of guns not by constitutional Nationalists, but by very much unconstitutional Unionists, and the stage was set for sharp accentuated conflict in a very rapid way.