Former taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said he has not “given up” hope the Irish Government will lead Irish unity preparations, even though Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil both abandoned election pledges.
Speaking in Belfast, Mr Varadkar said the two parties had committed to making Irish unity an objective, not just an aspiration, in their election manifestos but dropped the promise when forming the Government.
Preparations for unification must be led by the Irish Government, he said. “They’re not there yet, but I haven’t given up, and I won’t. I hope during the period of this Government, it’ll still be possible to do exactly that and bring the conversation forward.
“Both parties in the Government got elected with a mandate that said that unification should be an objective, and aspirations are not just the same as objectives,” the former Fine Gael leader told the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) conference in Belfast.
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However, both now have the opportunity to restore the pledge, especially given that they should be in power until 2029, said Mr Varadkar in conversation with the former SDLP leader Colum Eastwood.
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“There’s plenty of time between now and then to show that the commitments in those two manifestos were meaningful and that more will be done to show people North and South of the Border that this is an objective and not just an aspiration,” he went on.
He said he had always “been struck” by the fact that Northern Ireland is handled by the Northern Ireland Secretary of State on the British side, but by the Minister for Foreign Affairs on the Irish side.
“But Northern Ireland’s not a foreign country, you see? It’s part of my country, maybe a different jurisdiction, but Ireland is one country and Northern Ireland issues are certainly not a foreign affair,” he said.
“So, you know, maybe that role should be changed in some way to be Minister for Foreign Affairs and Shared Island, or something like that.”
During his years in office, he said he had believed that the Brexit negotiations could have been finished quickly, or that it might even have been reversed, and that Stormont could have been working properly.
Then, he said he had hoped that spending under the Shared Island programme – an initiative pushed strongly by the leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin – would have led to meaningful North-South co-operation.
The fourth thing he had hoped to do was to establish “something like Garret FitzGerald’s New Ireland Forum to really examine bringing people together for a start, anyone who’s willing to be there, civil society, political parties, North and South.
“[It would] start to tease out some of the questions and issues about what unification might look like. What the question would be on the ballot paper, what sort of transition period there would be, because I think there would have to be one,” he said.
“I didn’t think it would take eight years to get to the point where we had an agreement on all the issues.”
“Things took a lot longer than I thought they would. I still think the next step and the right step isn’t just setting an arbitrary date for a Border vote, which I know is the position of the SDLP,” he said.
