Trump says a united Ireland 'may as well happen now' and London answers

Donald Trump said on Saturday that he would "love to see" Ireland unified and that, because it was "going to happen eventually," it "may as well happen now." He was standing with Taoiseach Micheál Martin in Dublin at the start of a two-day visit that also takes in his golf resort at Doonbeg. He added that a united Ireland would be "a great feather in everybody's cap" and told Martin he was "the right man over here to get it moving." Later, at the U.S. ambassador's residence, he called the idea "a very cool thing" and conceded that "no matter what you say or how you say it, there's no good answer."

American presidents have spent nearly thirty years avoiding that sentence. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which Washington helped to close, leaves the constitutional status of Northern Ireland to the people of the island through a border poll. U.S. policy since then has been to support the agreement, not to pick an outcome. Trump did not invent the debate. He put the weight of the presidency on one side of it while sitting next to the Irish prime minister.

The British response split along party lines and then converged on a single request: stop talking. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said he was "shooting from the hip as usual" and that "loose talk about the future of democratic countries is deeply unhelpful and creates unnecessary tension." Nigel Farage wrote that Northern Ireland is "a proud and integral part of the United Kingdom" and that its people "neither want a referendum, nor unification." Robert Jenrick, Reform UK's treasury spokesman, said the president "should have butted out." Downing Street restated Prime Minister Andy Burnham's line that the issue is not on the table and that London remains bound to the Good Friday framework.

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald called the remarks "timely" and said Martin should start planning for a united Ireland. Unionist politicians in Belfast compared the comments to Trump's earlier talk of taking Greenland or making Canada a state. The difference, as several Irish and British briefs noted on Sunday, is that Irish reunification has a legal path and an active argument. Greenland and Canada do not.

Trump said he had discussed the subject with Martin and with President Catherine Connolly. Martin did not adopt the president's timetable. He did not need to. The value of the remark for Sinn Féin is that it exists. The cost for Burnham is that he now has to spend part of a Sunday explaining why a visiting ally does not set the terms of the union.

The United States still has a formal role as a guarantor of the 1998 settlement. That role is harder to play once the president has said which result he would like. Trump tried to soften the line at a later event by saying there was no "good" answer. He did not withdraw the first statement. In Belfast and in Dublin the first statement is the one that will be quoted.