Well the all island vote wasn't the source of change, a war unfortunately had to follow.

And point of clarification - Ireland didn't "leave the UK" - the British were forced to withdraw from 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland.

"NI" was carved out of the island by Britain holding on to as much industrialised land as they could, with as big a majority of British settlers vs native Irish.

Substitute complicated with disputed and I agree lol. The Irish Government strongly dispute the term British Isles being applied against our wishes to this island, as it was invented to legitimise a land claim, not innocently by any neutral geographic body.

Unlike Scotland we've a treaty which now sets out our democratic pathway to getting the British government to finish their withdraw from our island, but we're no closer to holding the vote (and don't control the trigger).

Still raw Scotland missed their chance, but that too is a complicated topic!

As an Irish person born in the six counties of Ireland the British claim as "Northern Ireland", I can assure you that although our identity is complex, we have an international treaty (the Good Friday Agreement) between Britain and Ireland which recognises the residents of this part of Ireland have the right to identify as Irish, OR British OR both.

What's not in dispute is that Ireland has been partitioned and NI has existed for barely 100 years, and that our accents predate this political divide and are distinctly geographical - people from the island of Ireland have Irish accents

Haha, I promise I didn't intentionally make my point about how obscure imperial units are in conversion. I looked it up but clearly transcribed wrong!

No worries, I'm not trying to trick you, you of course are right, it's complicated.

Back to the original topic, what really gets me is shows like Rings of Power double down on Tolkien classism by accent - intelligent elegant Elf's in posh English, common men in northern English, rough ginger dwarfs in Scottish and then bottom of the class - mud dwelling, starving savage hobbits with Irish accents

Well with metric there are alot less words you need to know to use them I think is the point of difference.

Like you need to know that a stone represents a weight, and that that weight is 14 pounds. What's a pound? Oh it's 12 ounces. None of those words are the same out of context but all describe a weight and the size of the weight.

In metric you only need to know that grams measure weight, metres length, litres volume. Then everyday use is normal prefix increments like OP said.

And again the prefixes apply consistently across units too, so a millimetre, a millilitre or a milligram will all be the same fraction of their base.

Irish isn't complicated - we're a separate island from Britain.

I think the point op is making is with 'stones' or 'furlongs' etc you need to already know what that unit represents to make sense of it.

With metric units, even the infrequently used increments can be reasoned out just from the name of the unit, as it's a standard prefix in fixed multiples of 10, not a random number that must be learnt.

So they're neither similar or exactly the same in principle really.