Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said it is inevitable that Ireland will become united in the future. He said there would need to be a "long process" to bring people together on Irish unification but suggested Northern Ireland's position may differ from Scotland, where he has staunchly opposed independence.
Brown's comments on unification
Mr Brown was serving in Tony Blair's Government when the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 to bring peace to Northern Ireland, and presided over a deal to devolve justice and policing powers to Stormont when he was Prime Minister.
On pressure for Scottish independence, Mr Brown told The Guardian: "Scotland’s got to find a way of living in cooperation with other countries, and independence would not be the right way forward. We’re geographically, economically, socially, culturally linked to the rest of the United Kingdom, whether it’s Wales, England or parts of Ireland."
Burnham rules out border poll
Asked if the proximity of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland meant it made sense to unite them, he said: "Yes. Well, of course, in the long term, Ireland will be united." He said it would be "a long process where people have got to come together and find a way of agreeing. Basically, that is the issue: whether people can actually agree."
Andy Burnham said discussion of a border poll was "off the table" on his first official visit to Northern Ireland this week. He said: "I think we’ve got to focus on bringing people together as best we can, and I think we’ve lived through a decade where there’s been a referendum on Brexit, we had Scottish independence just before it. What we find is the rifts that come from those situations take a long time to heal, and it sets you right back and you can’t focus on what’s right in front of us here and now, the cost-of-living pressures that are hurting people in Northern Ireland, the need to get that budget set so that public services can function as they should."
Mr Burnham added: "I think a decade since the Brexit referendum, I think we’ve had too much division, too much arguing, too much backward looking. We need to fix the things right in front of us in the here and now."
