LONDON — The explosive debate over whether British-led Northern Ireland should reunify with the independent Ireland to the south has usually been treated with kid gloves by American presidents. But President Donald Trump seems to prefer boxing gloves.
After Trump on Saturday cast aside decades of White House neutrality and endorsed the idea of reunification as “fantastic,” officials on both sides of the dispute scrambled to tamp down the fallout, leverage it or just make sense of Trump’s latest diplomatic curveball.
Reunification is a tripwire in Anglo-Irish relations, seen as a doomsday event by British loyalists in Northern Ireland and by Great Britons who don’t want to see the United Kingdom diminished, leaving only England, Scotland and Wales.
But it is yearned for by Irish nationalists on both sides of the border as the return to a natural order of unity on the Irish isle that was sundered in the partition of 1921, when six northeastern counties stayed British after the fight for Irish independence.
“It’s a typical failure of international statecraft by the president,” Jon Burrows, the head of the Northern Ireland’s Ulster Unionist Party, said in an interview. “He’s weighed into a very sensitive discussion and caused some headlines. But I’m unperturbed because ultimately it’s the people of Northern Ireland who will decide our constitutional future … and not the president.”
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Trump’s remarks did not budge him from recent statements dismissing the chances of reunification anytime soon.
“I am not aware that there is majority public support for another referendum, and until that changes, there will not be one,” Burnham said in a statement.
But supporters of the concept, even those who oppose Trump on nearly every other issue, hailed his thumbs-up and tried to use it a starting gun.
“The Taoiseach [Irish prime minister] must now begin planning for a united Ireland,” Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald said in a statement. “Our national journey is now reunification.”
Sinn Fein, once the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, has become the second-largest party in the Irish parliament, with a focus on economic issues but maintaining its commitment to Irish nationalism.
Claire Hanna, head of the small Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland, told cheering supporters that Trump’s support was as welcome as it was surprising, needling the pro-British movement’s signature color: “Turns out he’s not as orange as he looks.”
“There won’t be many times when Donald Trump and I arrive at the same political conclusion, and I deplore much of what he stands for,” Hanna said. “But that is precisely why this intervention is worth noticing.”
The golf-loving president unexpectedly aligned with the pro-unification camp during a two-day visit to Ireland that was more personal than diplomatic, coinciding with the Irish Open being held at his golf club in County Clare. But after a courtesy meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, Trump responded to a reporter’s question on the issue with gusto.
“I will tell you, I’d love to see it unified,” he said. “It’s going to happen eventually.”
As is often the case, it was unclear if Trump’s comment was off the cuff or marked a meaningful shift in U.S. policy. He answered only after a direct question, and he did acknowledge that he was wading into sensitive territory. And later in the day, he seemed to make light of his answer.
“They asked me a question: ‘What do you think about unification?’ I gave a nice answer, I think,” Trump said. “It’s one of those questions that no matter what you say … there’s no good answer.”
On the other hand, he repeated his stance Sunday.
“I’ve always loved the people of Ireland, and it just seems to me that you have Northern Ireland and you have Ireland and it would seem to me that one of the naturals of all time is to put them together,” he said.
And he has signaled — or teased — his possible support before. During a St. Patrick’s Day event in Washington with Martin and a top Northern Ireland official, Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly, he riffed that he wanted to see a “merger” of the sides.
Little-Pengelly laughed off the president’s comment as “clearly a joke.” His repeating it in Dublin may make it harder to laugh off.
Some thought Trump’s unification comment might be a barb meant to troll Burnham and British officials who have drawn the president’s ire by declining to jump into his Iran war operations. He recently suggested that the U.S. might not help Britain if Argentina launched a new attack on the Falkland Islands, which many took as a similar barb.
“He may or may not feel strongly about this. It may just be something to irk the British,” said Sam McBride, Northern Ireland editor of the Belfast Telegraph and author of a new book on unification, “For and Against a United Ireland.”
In any case, it may not matter much, McBride said, given the settled, emotional stands taken by activists on both sides and the formal steps for reunification that are laid out in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
“I really don’t think it alters things a jot,” said McBride. “This is a question for the people of the island of Ireland. It doesn’t matter to a significant extent what the British prime minister thinks, it doesn’t matter what the European Union thinks, it doesn’t matter what President Trump thinks.”
The debate is more than a century old, but it has become more dynamic in recent years. Transport and cultural ties have increased for younger Brits in the north, with hourly unrestricted cross-border train service between Belfast and Dublin and a resurgence in Irish language studies on both sides.
The diminishing social role of the Catholic Church in Ireland — which was one of the first countries to legalize same-sex marriage and voted to repeal a long-standing ban on abortion in 2018 — has also narrowed one of the gulfs with the Protestant north.
Britain’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union also boosted the cause in Northern Ireland, where pro-unification camps sought to capitalize on frustrations with Britain’s stagnant post-Brexit economy.
“The last decade has seen more serious discussion about Irish unity than at any point since partition,” McBride said. “It would not be the radical rupture that it once would’ve been.”
But while support has grown, polls have not shown a clear majority favoring unification. The Good Friday Agreement stipulates that Britain’s top official in Belfast can order a public referendum on the question whenever she thinks a majority support the idea.
The sides disagree on exactly when that threshold would be reached. Burnham said last month in the House of Commons, soon after meeting with Unionist figures from Northern Ireland, that any such step is currently “off the table.”
Cat Zakrzewski in Dublin contributed to this report.
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