OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
8:50 AM – Saturday, September 12, 2026
President Donald Trump said during his trip to Ireland that he would “love” to see the country unified, and predicted that it would “happen eventually.”
The president landed in Dublin early on Saturday, disembarking from Air Force One to be greeted by Deputy Prime Minister Simon Harris. He then traveled to the Farmleigh estate, where he spoke with Taoiseach (meaning the prime minister or head of government) Micheál Martin.
“I don’t want to cause any problems, but I will tell you, I’d love to see it unified. I have friends on both sides, great people. They’re Irish people. How can they be bad, right?” Trump told reporters during his meeting with Martin. “I’d like to see a unified country. I think it would be a great feather in everybody’s cap if that happened. It’s going to happen eventually. It may as well happen now. … I think it would be a fantastic thing.”
He added that the United Kingdom would “have something to say about it,” but maintained that “it would be a great thing.”
The Republic of Ireland gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1922, though Northern Ireland has remained a part of the UK.
Trump’s comments came two weeks after new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said that a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom was “off the table.”
Under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the British government holds the power to call a referendum in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland would need a majority vote, known as a border poll, to unify with the Republic of Ireland, meaning it remains part of the UK until a majority of its people decide otherwise.
The president then traveled to Deerfield, the U.S. ambassador’s official residence, where he joked about being questioned on the unification of Ireland earlier in the day. Trump informed his audience that there was “no good answer.”
“You have to understand, with me, every question’s a kill. This has been going on for 10 years now,” he said.
He continued, “I gave a nice answer, I think. We’ll read about it tomorrow. That’s one of those questions where no matter what you say, no matter how well you say it, there’s no good answer.”
“I actually said it would be I think a very cool thing, to be honest with you, I think it would be cool,” he added, joking that he might have offended half of the room by saying it.
The leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, Gavin Robinson, stressed that Northern Ireland is part of the UK “because that is the settled democratic will of its people.”
“President Trump knows better than most that elections matter,” he wrote in a post on X. “Northern Ireland’s constitutional future will be decided by the people of Northern Ireland, not by commentary in London, Dublin or Washington.”
“As unionists we are not interested in the destruction of our country by joining with the Irish Republic,” his statement concluded.
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