“It’s going to happen eventually”, the U.S. president said in Dublin during a golf-focused trip to the long-divided island.
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.
Trump’s out-of-the-blue endorsement of Irish unity spurred an immediate rejection from Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party, the Democratic Unionists, who have been the island’s main supporters of Trump’s MAGA movement.
“President Trump knows better than most that elections matter,” said Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson.
“Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because that is the settled democratic will of its people,” Robinson wrote on X. “As unionists we are not interested in the destruction of our country by joining with the Irish Republic.”
The Protestant unionist side of the community that once commanded a firm majority in Northern Ireland has been in seemingly terminal decline. Irish nationalists on the Catholic side of the divide, by contrast, have increasingly demanded a referendum on Irish unity following Britain’s exit from the European Union — a move that made it easier for Northern Ireland to trade goods with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member country, than with the rest of the United Kingdom.
Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party that leads the cross-community government in Northern Ireland created by the 1998 peace deal, offered no immediate reaction. Sinn Féin, a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, has boycotted meetings with Trump since his 2024 election.
But Sinn Féin’s moderate Irish nationalist rivals, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, offered a tongue-in-cheek welcome for Trump’s apparent endorsement of their position. SDLP leader Claire Hanna drew gasps and whoops from the audience at her party’s annual conference in Belfast when she declared: “Donald Trump in the last hour has announced that he is in favor of a united Ireland.”
“Turns out he’s not as orange as he looks,” she said, referencing Trump’s facial make-up as well as the main Protestant fraternal organization in Northern Ireland, the Orange Order.
Trump quickly acknowledged that his Irish unity remarks would raise eyebrows and make headlines.
At a later appearance at the official residence of U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Edward Walsh, Trump led his remarks by noting he’d just told journalists that a united Ireland would “be a very cool thing.”
“I gave a nice answer, I think. We’ll read about it tomorrow,” he said to laughter from the audience, which included many of Ireland’s political leaders and corporate kingpins. “There’s no good answer, right?”
This article was updated.