Trump in Dublin: United Ireland 'Fantastic… May As Well Happen Now'
Landing in Ireland for a golf-centred visit, the American president upended decades of US neutrality on Northern Ireland. Sitting beside the Taoiseach: “I’d love to see it unified… It’s going to happen eventually. It may as well happen now,” conceding “the UK will have something to say about it, obviously.” Thousands protested in Dublin; Mr Trump also claimed the Houthis “called us and they don’t want to fight with us” and named Iran as “probably” behind the Saudi pipeline attack.
American neutrality on partition was one of the diplomatic architecture’s oldest load-bearing walls — the guarantee that made Washington an acceptable broker of the Good Friday Agreement — and a president demolishing it beside the Taoiseach, casually, between golf rounds, converts Northern Ireland’s constitutional question from a devolved sensitivity into a bilateral irritant. The timing could hardly cut deeper: two weeks after the Prime Minister ruled a border poll “off the table”, and days before Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’s pro-independence leaders convene. Whether calculation or improvisation, the effect is identical — every separatist in the United Kingdom now quotes an American president. Watch Monday’s Celtic summit in Cardiff, which just received the best advance publicity money cannot buy.