Quote Originally Posted by Burney View Post
To be fair, though, the idea behind partition was simply to keep Ulster Unionists from losing their shįt and beating the crap out of the rest of Ireland. There was no particular interest in retaining the province of Ulster for its own sake.

The big mistake everyone makes when thinking about the Troubles is thinking that it was solely about managing the republican problem. It wasn't. It was about the Brits managing the republican problem rather than the loyalists doing so, which would have been much, much uglier.
Another perspective might be that Britain had an empire at that point and losing your oldest colony doesn't look great, so some measure of authority had to be preserved. And not just over the colonial subjects; over the workers at home too, during a period of some instability.