The national conflict in Ireland has created, and feeds off, sharply uneven development between the island's north and south. This is reflected in a history of diverging socio-economic interests, conflicting ideological positions and divided institutions, which date back to the mid-19th century. Since the 1950s this unevenness has been reversed, first though economic convergence, and with increasing intensity, through ideological and institutional reorientations. Integration in the EU's single market has greatly accelerated this process, to the extent that the need for stronger north-south linkages has almost reached the status of conventional wisdom, north and south.