The United Kingdom “in its current form is pretty dead” and it is “reasonable” there might be a united Ireland within 20 years, the former first minister of Scotland has said.
Speaking at the Magheramorne Literary Festival in Co Antrim on Sunday, Nicola Sturgeon told The Irish Times she “used to think the independent Scotland would come first, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe a united Ireland will come before that.”
She said following the elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments in May, “it’s not guaranteed but it is highly likely that three of the four nations of the United Kingdom will be led by nationalists, SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales and of course Sinn Féin here in the north of Ireland.
“Then, a few years from now, and I really hope this doesn’t happen, it’s not impossible though, that England will be led by a very different kind of nationalist, and I just don’t think that [the UK] holds together.”
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Accepting “I am coming at this from a very partial point of view”, she said “I’m not sure it’s right that we try to hold it together, because I actually think the relationship between the four countries of the UK might be better if we have a bit more equality in how we’re governed.”
Citing the example of British Irish Council summits, which are attended by the Irish and UK governments and the leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, she said the “players that sit around that table ... will all continue to sit around that table, even if we’re in a slightly different formulation.
“So, I do believe in certainly 20 years at the outset, I think Scotland will be independent, I think Wales will be more autonomous, maybe independent, I think, and it’s not a question for me, I think it’s a reasonable prospect that Ireland might be reunified,” Sturgeon said.
In a wide-ranging interview about her memoir, Frankly, with the festival curator, the author and former BBC political correspondent Stephen Walker, Sturgeon spoke of her recently-discovered Northern Irish ancestry and her friendship with the former IRA leader and later, deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness.
Growing up in the west of Scotland, she said Northern Ireland always felt “quite close” but discovered a few years ago “I actually have Northern Irish ancestry, my great, great grandparents were from Killinchy” in Co Down.
Walker asked about her relationships with other politicians, saying that in the autobiography, she talked “quite warmly” of McGuinness but how “difficult” it was to build a rapport with the former first minister, Arlene Foster.
“That’s fair. Arlene might say the same about me,” Sturgeon replied, adding the caveat that while perhaps some of this was down to the differences in their political outlook, “Arlene and I just didn’t get on, and that’s just how it was, and that was no doubt partly my fault”.
With McGuinness, she had a “very good relationship”, adding that “as somebody who came from the west of Scotland and had grown up during the Troubles and how that was reported into Scotland, at times made me feel a little bit conflicted, because I would have heard everything that Martin was supposedly involved in.”
“I judged him as I found him. He was one of the friendliest, kindest – to me – people that I’ve ever met,” she said.
Sturgeon said that at British Irish Council meetings “it was almost as if he sensed I was a bit shy and would always make a beeline for me and give me a big hug and tried to make me feel at my ease.
“We got on really well, I talked to him on the phone not long before he died ... I thought really highly of him.”
She also discussed her relationship with the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson – “It was rubbish. He was a buffoon,” she said to applause from the crowd – and her meetings with queen Elizabeth while first minister of Scotland, “just the two of us in a room, and she was always incredibly well informed.
“She enjoyed talking about her grandchildren, great grandchildren, she always wanted a bit of the gossip behind the headlines. It was really special,” she said.
