Trump calls a united Ireland fantastic and breaks a long U.S. silence

President Donald Trump stood next to Taoiseach Micheal Martin at Farmleigh House on Saturday and said he would love to see Ireland unified. He called the idea fantastic. He said it would happen eventually, and that it might as well happen now. He added that the United Kingdom would have something to say about it.

Those sentences break with decades of official American neutrality on the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. Washington brokered the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Successive U.S. administrations treated the question as one for the people of the island and the two governments, and avoided public cheerleading for either outcome. Trump did the opposite, on camera, on the first morning of a golf-centred weekend.

The visit was built around the Irish Open at Trump International Golf Links in Doonbeg, County Clare. Before flying to Shannon, Trump paid courtesy calls on President Catherine Connolly at Aras an Uachtarain and on Martin at Farmleigh in Phoenix Park. He later spoke to embassy staff and business leaders at the Deerfield Residence, the U.S. ambassador's house. There he repeated that unification would be a cool thing, then joked that half the room would empty if he kept talking.

Martin did not answer reporters who asked him to respond. He steered his remarks toward investment. U.S.-owned firms, mostly in technology and pharmaceuticals, employ about one in ten workers in the Republic after decades of policy that prized those jobs and the tax revenue that came with them. That is the relationship Dublin wanted in the frame. Unification is not.

In London the line was already set. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said weeks ago that a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom was off the table. Downing Street said on Saturday that the position had not changed. Unionist politicians in Belfast treated the remarks as a gift to republicans and a snub to the strand of the 1998 settlement that requires consent on both sides of the border.

The consent principle is not a talking point. The Good Friday Agreement says Northern Ireland remains in the United Kingdom unless a majority there votes otherwise, and that Irish unification would also require a majority in the Republic. The British secretary of state may call a poll only if it appears likely that a majority would vote to leave. Recent surveys have not shown that majority. Nearly 3,700 people were killed in three decades of conflict before the 1998 deal. The architecture of that deal is what Trump waved past.

He has tested the same idea before. Earlier this year he floated a merger between Northern Ireland and the Republic after watching Martin get along with Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly. Saturday was the first time he said it standing next to an Irish prime minister, with British officials watching the feed.

Protests ran in parallel. Thousands marched in Dublin against the visit and against U.S. policy in the wider Middle East war. Smaller demonstrations were planned in Shannon and near the Doonbeg resort. Trump is due to present the Irish Open trophy on Sunday evening and fly back to Washington.

The diplomatic cost is uneven. Dublin needs the investment relationship more than it needs a U.S. president to recite Good Friday language. London needs the consent principle to hold if Burnham is to keep a border poll off his desk. Belfast unionists now have a clip they will play for years. Irish republicans have a clip they did not expect from this White House.

Trump closed the Farmleigh session by asking how unification could be bad. The answer, for the governments that signed the 1998 text, is that the question is not his to close. The agreement gives that decision to voters in Northern Ireland and the Republic, on a timetable no American president controls.