(Please forgive me if this is ignorant. I don't know much about Irish politics)
Doesn't the Republic of Ireland have a lot of multinational businesses headquartered there as a tax dodge?
Perhaps they could make the mega corps pay their fair share of taxes and use that to fund reunification
I think I read once that was due to outdated standards related to low resolution television sets. If too much text was on screen at once you couldn't make it out on a standard definition TV. They kept doing it that way for a while after HD became ubiquitous just because that's how they always did it.
I share your frustration though