DUBLIN — U.S. President Donald Trump waded into another age-old conflict Saturday, declaring on a golf-focused visit to Ireland that he’d like to see the island unified — the nightmare scenario for Northern Ireland’s British unionists.
Sitting beside Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin after an overnight flight from Washington, Trump said he couldn’t understand why Northern Ireland — the part of the island that remained in the U.K. when the rest of Ireland won independence over a century ago — hadn’t already joined the Republic of Ireland.
“I’d love to see it unified. I think it’d be great. A great feather in everybody’s cap if that happened. It’s going to happen eventually,” Trump said, gesturing to Martin, who has spent years trying behind the scenes to build better relations with unionists, to little avail. “You’ve got the right man over here to get it moving. But I think it would be a fantastic thing. Now the U.K. will have something to say about it obviously. But I think it’d be a great thing. How can it be bad?”
Nearly 3,700 people were killed in three decades of bloodshed over the constitutional future of Northern Ireland, a conflict largely settled by the U.S.-brokered Good Friday accord of 1998. Crucially, that peace deal specified that Northern Ireland should stay a separate part of the U.K. as long as most voters support this — a position unchanged, according to virtually all opinion polls, in the years since.