Irish border poll must follow no-deal Brexit: Sinn Fein

By Muhammad Mussa

LONDON (AA) - The president of the Northern Irish republican party Sinn Fein has said that a border poll on Irish unity must be held if the U.K. leaves the EU without a deal.

Following talks with Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday, McDonald said that the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, which has risen considerably, had alarmed many in Northern Ireland and would justify a unification referendum with the Republic of Ireland in the south.

“In the event of a crash Brexit, I don’t know for the life of me how anyone could sustain an argument that the status quo could pertain,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today program.

“I don’t know how the government could crash this part of Ireland out of the EU with all of the harm and damage, economically and politically, and with a straight face, suggest to any of us who live on this island, that we should not be given the democratic opportunity, as per the Good Friday agreement, to decide our future. I think that would be quite scandalous,” the Sinn Fein head added.

McDonald accused Johnson of being “complacent” on the damage Brexit would cause to Ireland.

“There is no doubt that Boris Johnson’s first priority coming to Ireland is his interest, Tory interest, British interests, as he sees them, and it seems to me that he is quite complacent at the idea of Ireland being the collateral damage,” McDonald said.

“He tells us that he will act with absolute impartiality. We’ve told him that nobody believes that. Nobody believes that because there are no grounds to believe that there is any kind of impartiality, much less strict impartiality” she added.

Moreover, Johnson was criticized on how he addressed the legacy issues surrounding the killings during the conflict in Northern Ireland when he told Tory officials that investigations of British soldiers accused of killing civilians must stop. McDonald said that such rhetoric was “damaging and very, very dangerous”.

The Sinn Fein head said that any attempts to enforce direct rule in the event of a no-deal Brexit would be unacceptable and dangerous. It would endanger the Good Friday agreement and return Northern Ireland back to the troubles and see conflict between republican and unionist groups.

The Troubles -- an era of conflict between the British government and pro-British paramilitaries on one side and Irish republicans and nationalists on the other -- ended in 1998 after the Belfast Agreement put an end to decades of armed struggle in the divided U.K. region of Northern Ireland.

The U.K. and the Republic of Ireland signed the deal, brokered by the U.S. and eight political parties in Northern Ireland, on April 10, 1998.

The deal -- dubbed the Good Friday Agreement -- largely saw the end of the Troubles-era violence, in which some 3,500 people lost their lives. The agreement committed the U.K. and Irish governments to respect the “principle of consent”.

If a vote on Irish unification got a positive result, the agreement specifies that "it will be a binding obligation on both governments to introduce and support in their respective parliaments legislation to give effect to that wish”.