Donald Trump has some choice words on Irish unification when he took a detour from his golf trip last week to visit the Taoiseach. At their meeting he unexpectedly announced: “They’re Irish people. How can they be bad, right? I’d love to see it unified,” adding later that it would be “a very cool thing”.
The president’s comments sent the whole unionist establishment into a frenzy. In a mad dash to show who was most upset, all of Trump’s supposed allies came out to denounce his comments in the strongest possible terms. TUV’s Jim Allister – in an unparalleled example of irony – poured scorn on Trump’s total disregard for… “the right to self-determination of the people of Northern Ireland”. You couldn’t make it up!
All of this, of course, only served to egg Trump on. The very next day, when asked about his comments, he doubled down: “I love my comments,” then adding he also loved the reaction they had provoked.
For Trump – if there were any serious thoughts behind his words – not one was spared for these ‘allies’. No doubt, his attention is these days directed at his (bleak) prospects for the coming midterm elections. Irish-Americans who traditionally supported the Democratic Party in recent years have begun to drift towards Trump. We suspect his comments have more to do with the fortunes of the Republican Party than the republican cause…
At the same time his words are intended as yet another jab at Britain (“Now, the UK will have something to say about it, obviously. But I think it would be a great thing. I mean, how can it be bad?”). Only a few days earlier, the president said he’s reconsidering US support for British sovereignty of the Falklands-Malvinas, making explicit reference to Britain’s inability to support his disastrous war in Iran.
Defending the Union from twitter, Allister wrote, “Northern Ireland is not a pawn in Trump’s dispute with the UK”. But, as is par for the course, the TUV leader completely misunderstands Britain’s relation to the North. The point is this: to the imperialists in Washington, London and beyond, the North really is only a small bargaining chip to be played for whatever small advantage can be scraped out of it.
DUP’s Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly also missed this point when she warned that Trump’s comments “should be a wake-up call for unionism,” adding that “the UK is stronger together”. Have the decades of skeletal budgets, the Brexit negotiation saga, the so-called Irish Sea Border, and so on, not been enough of a wake-up call? Clearly not just Trump but successive British Governments do not care a straw about ‘loyal Ulster’.
As for Sinn Féin and the SDLP, both of which were quick to jump on Trump’s bandwagon and announce again the time for a border poll had arrived, we have a similar warning: British imperialism does not concern itself with the rights of the people of the North, no matter what the Good Friday Agreement may or may not stipulate. Indeed, as Andy Burnham – wanting to present himself as the strong man who can hold Britain together – has already made clear last month, “a border poll is off the table”.
As for how to unite Ireland, Trump seemed to be convinced his fellow republican party leader Micheál Martin was the “right man to get it moving” – we won’t be holding our breath. In fact, this week Martin is off to visit Andy ‘off the table’ Burnham to reaffirm their commitment to the Good Friday Agreement – and hence to partition.
There remains only one force in Ireland capable of breaking from the chains of imperialism and establishing a 32-county socialist republic – in the words of James Connolly that is the “unconquered Irish working class”.
