President Donald Trump said Saturday during a trip to Ireland that he would love to see the country unified.
The Republic of Ireland gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1922, while Northern Ireland, established in 1921, has remained part of the U.K.
“I don’t want to cause any problems, but I will tell you, I’d love to see it unified. I have friends on both sides, great people. They’re Irish people. How can they be bad, right?” Trump said in Dublin while on stage with Ireland’s prime minister, Micheál Martin. “I’d like to see a unified country. I think it would be a great feather in everybody’s cap if that happened. It’s going to happen eventually.”
He added that the U.K. “will have something to say about it obviously,” but reiterated that unification would be a “great thing.”
TRUMP SAYS IRAN CONFLICT COULD END AFTER MIDTERMS
In response to Trump’s comments, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said in a statement that the U.K. government’s stance on reunification remains unchanged.
“I am not aware that there is majority public support for another referendum, and until that changes, there will not be one,” Burnham told reporters in Parliament, according to Reuters.
Later Saturday, Trump addressed a crowd at the Deerfield Residence, the official home of the U.S. ambassador to Ireland.
U.S. Ambassador Edward S. Walsh introduced the president, who took the stage to the sound of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”
Early in his remarks, Trump revisited the question a reporter had asked during his meeting with Martin about the prospect of Irish reunification.
“That’s one of those questions where no matter what you say, no matter how well you say it, there’s no good answer, right?” he said, before saying reunification would be a “cool thing.”
The debate over whether Ireland should be one country has been one of the island’s most divisive political issues for decades.
At times, it was far more than a war of words. From the late 1960s through the late 1990s, Northern Ireland was gripped by decades of sectarian violence known as “the Troubles.”
Irish nationalists and republicans — drawn largely from Northern Ireland’s Catholic minority — sought to reunite the island under a single Irish state.
Unionists and loyalists, who mostly belonged to the Protestant majority, wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the U.K.
Throughout the conflict, more than 3,500 people were killed in violence involving Irish republican and loyalist paramilitary groups, as well as British security forces.
The fighting largely ceased with a peace deal in 1998, but in the decades since, tensions remain between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.
A 2024 U.K. Parliament report found that 90% of students in Northern Ireland attend schools that “are effectively segregated along religious lines.”
The peace deal signed in 1998 — known as the Good Friday Agreement or the Belfast Agreement — set up a new government that had representation for both nationalists and unionists.
It also established that Northern Ireland will remain part of the U.K. unless a majority of citizens vote to leave through a referendum.
Brexit reignited debate over Ireland’s future, with Northern Ireland voting to remain in the European Union even as the U.K. as a whole voted to leave. Still, no referendum has been proposed or scheduled on whether Northern Ireland should leave the United Kingdom.
Reuters contributed to this report.
