President Donald Trump arrived in Ireland this weekend and promptly waded into one of the island’s most politically sensitive debates.
Trump said Saturday that he would “love to see” Ireland reunified with Northern Ireland, breaking with the traditional neutrality of American presidents on the constitutional question.
“I don’t want to cause any problems, but I’d love to see it unified,” Trump said during a news conference alongside Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin. “It’s going to happen eventually.”
“It may as well happen now,” he added.
Northern Ireland has remained part of the United Kingdom since Ireland was partitioned more than a century ago. Decades of conflict between predominantly Catholic nationalists seeking Irish unity and largely Protestant unionists who wanted to remain in the United Kingdom culminated in the Troubles, which killed more than 3,500 people.
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement largely ended that violence and established a process through which Northern Ireland could eventually join the Republic of Ireland if voters supported doing so.
Trump’s suggestion that reunification should simply happen now quickly drew reactions from both sides of the border.
Democratic Unionist Party leader Gavin Robinson said Northern Ireland’s future would be decided by its people, “not by commentary in London, Dublin or Washington.”
Nationalists were considerably more receptive. Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald said Trump’s comments showed the debate over reunification had shifted and called on Martin’s government to begin preparing for the possibility.
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Trump’s comments came during a visit already generating attention for his interactions with Ireland’s political leaders.
Irish President Catherine Connolly, a longtime critic of Trump who protested his previous presidential visit in 2019, met privately with the president Saturday.
Afterward, Connolly said she told Trump that “the normalization of war and genocide can never be accepted,” citing Ireland’s own history of famine, colonization and the Troubles.
Connolly also presented Trump with a collection of poems by Michael Longley that includes “Ceasefire,” a poem inspired by the 1994 IRA ceasefire that helped pave the way for the Good Friday Agreement.
Asked later what he and Connolly discussed, Trump described their meeting as “very nice” and said only that they “discussed a lot of things, quickly.”
Trump spent Sunday at his Doonbeg golf resort, which is hosting the Irish Open, before his scheduled return to Washington.
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