Sinn Fein says 'hearts and minds' need to be won for Irish reunification

LONDON (AFP) - Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald predicted on Tuesday (May 24) that the reunification of Ireland would happen in the next decade, while acknowledging that her party still needed to make the case to the public.

The Irish nationalists won a historic victory at elections in Northern Ireland earlier this month, overturning a century of dominance by pro-UK unionists.

The party put reunification on the back burner, however, preferring to campaign on issues such as the rising cost of living to win over voters.

But Ms McDonald, the all-Ireland leader of the party, said reuniting north and south was now back in play due to changing attitudes on both sides of the border.

"We believe in the course of this decade we are poised for constitutional change, the reunification of Ireland," she told reporters in London.

"We need to do that peacefully, democratically and in an orderly fashion."

She added: "We're very clear that we have to win hearts and minds and there is still a big discussion to be had."

Northern Ireland was created as a British province with a Protestant-majority Parliament in Belfast in 1921, at the same time as Ireland was made independent of the British crown and given self-government rights.

In the 1960s, a civil rights movement by the Catholic pro-Irish minority against inequality and discrimination developed into serious unrest.

Sectarian violence between paramilitary groups over three decades left more than 3,500 dead until the Good Friday Agreement peace deal was signed in 1998.

Under the deal, the UK government can call a referendum on reunification "if at any time it appears likely... a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the UK and form part of a united Ireland".

Surveys are regularly conducted to gauge public opinion on both sides of the border.

Ms McDonald said Sinn Fein's recent win at the ballot box was not a one-off, but part of a "trend" across the island of Ireland.

The Good Friday Agreement established a power-sharing government between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland.

As head of the largest party, Sinn Fein's vice president Michelle O'Neill is poised to take up the first minister's post.

But the biggest unionist party, the DUP, has hobbled the assembly by refusing to nominate ministers to the executive in protest at post-Brexit trade rules in the province.

The DUP has the support of the UK government, which has angered Brussels by threatening to rewrite parts of the so-called Northern Ireland Protocol.

The protocol, which sets out the trading arrangement agreed as part of the UK's divorce deal with the EU, mandates checks on goods heading to Northern Ireland from mainland Great Britain.

But unionists argue those checks - designed to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland - threaten the province's place in the wider UK and make a united Ireland more likely.

Ms McDonald warned that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was "indulging unionism... for his own domestic agenda" and threatening the still-fragile peace.

In Dublin, a visiting delegation from the US Congress was critical of London's brinkmanship on the issue.

"The protocol dispute seems to me to be a manufactured issue," Democrat lawmaker Richard Neal said after a meeting with Ireland's Foreign Minister Simon Coveney.

"These issues on the trade front, if that's really the dispute, could be ironed out quickly," he told reporters, according to broadcaster RTE.

Mr Coveney has previously warned the UK about breaking international law and urged all sides to come together to discuss a way forward, rather than act unilaterally.

The UK acting alone "will cause a lot more problems than it will solve", he added.