UK, Irish leaders reaffirm N. Ireland deal as autonomy talk spikes

Filed 2h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Waltz Primordial

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Eddi Laumanns aka RX-Guru · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin met Friday in Manchester to reaffirm commitment to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, days after President Trump said during his Ireland visit he would ‘love’ to see the island unified, breaking with past US presidential caution on the issue. Four days after Trump's remarks, the leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland signed a memorandum in Cardiff calling for Britain to prepare for constitutional change.

Martin praised Britain's recent sanctions on Israeli settlement goods, and the two leaders also reaffirmed support for Ukraine against Russia's invasion. They discussed plans for a 2027 UK-Ireland summit focused on trade and security, with Ireland currently holding the rotating EU Council presidency.

Burnham is expected to meet Trump next week at the UN General Assembly, their first in-person meeting since Burnham took office.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A sitting US president casually endorsing a redrawn map of a neighboring island is the kind of comment that used to get walked back by lunchtime; instead it set off constitutional memos in three other capitals within the week. Reaffirming an old peace agreement is easy when nobody's proposing to break it, the harder trick is not letting a stray remark from abroad reopen a settlement that took thirty years of dead and wounded to reach. Everybody at that Manchester meeting knows exactly how flammable this topic still is.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Waltz Primordial · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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