Sinn Féin — which contests elections in both parts of Ireland — has spent nearly three decades appealing for the British government to permit a border poll in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin wants the north, a part of the U.K., to merge with the Republic of Ireland, which won independence from Britain more than a century ago.
Reflecting the party’s more complicated all-Ireland structure, Sinn Féin came to Cardiff represented both by O’Neill, who leads the cross-community government in Northern Ireland, and by party chief Mary Lou McDonald, a Dubliner who leads the opposition in Ireland’s parliament.
McDonald — who has boycotted traditional St. Patrick’s Day events at the White House since Trump’s 2024 re-election — billed the president’s pro-unity comment as part of an age-old American sympathy for the Irish, one of the country’s biggest ethnic identities.
“It’s surprising that there is surprise that a New Yorker, that an American president, would say that they see the logic, the good sense of unity … the inevitability, as he sees it,” McDonald told reporters.
Ireland’s leader, Taoiseach Micheál Martin of the center-ground Fianna Fáil party, didn’t comment on Trump’s intervention as they spent much of the weekend together — but broke his silence Monday to warn that simple-minded calls for unity did more harm than good.
Martin avoided mentioning Trump explicitly on that point, instead billing it as a problem for his opponents, Sinn Féin, which spent decades supporting Irish Republican Army violence in Northern Ireland. The main faction, the Provisional IRA, killed nearly 1,800 people from 1970 to 1997, when the outlawed group ceased fire.
“I believe in Irish unity, but I want an Irish unity that works. That takes hard work. I’m not into simplistic rhetoric,” Martin told RTÉ radio in Dublin. “I’m not into timelines. I’m not into saying we’ll do it all next week and it’ll be simple. And some of the rhetoric I’m listening to, even Sinn Féin at times, harkening back to the 1970s — I worry about that.”
