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СпутникиРНSpaceXРоскосмосNASATaoiseach said party colleagues should concentrate on the benefits of the Shared Island initiative
Taoiseach Micheál Martin has told his TDs and Senators they should have the self-confidence to push back against calls for a Border poll.
Martin said he “goes bananas” when his own party colleagues call for a poll instead of focusing on the Shared Island initiative, which was set up in 2020 and will commit €2 billion to cross-Border projects between now and 2035.
He told a meeting in Tipperary as part his centenary tour marking 100 years of Fianna Fáil that Sinn Féin had called for a Border poll after the Brexit referendum 10 years ago, and “it hasn’t done them a whole lot of good electorally if you stand back from it”.
“And don’t underestimate the vast majority of the Irish people who understand what happened for 30 years and don’t want a return to it.
“They want a peaceful pathway to a new political construct on the island of Ireland, but it is to make sure that we bring as many people on that journey as we possibly can. It’s the key agenda item for Fianna Fáil.”
He said he never “looked over my shoulder” at Sinn Féin on the issue of a Border poll because there is a “shallowness there, a superficiality; it’s about the campaign, not the substance”.
The Taoiseach said: “They want to go back to rhetoric that will sound good and look good, but I don’t have the heart for that. I have a heart to make a difference.
“We are the party with the proven track record, and what I say to our own public representatives is that we should have far more self-confidence in ourselves.
“I go bananas when fellows talk to me and say, ‘What about a Border poll?’. In the name of God, we did the Good Friday Agreement, we did the Downing Street Agreement, we are doing Shared Ireland. We are people who care about it. We are not into rhetoric.”
In what was billed as a “fireside chat” with the chairman of the party’s centenary committee, Shane Moynihan, Martin recalled that in 1965 his predecessor Seán Lemass became the first taoiseach to meet with his Northern counterpart (Terence O’Neill) in 40 years because he was “brassed off with the rhetoric, singing songs about it and nothing happened”.
“We made it happen because we are genuine about it and we believe in it.”
Fianna Fáil has come under pressure from within and outside the party in relation to a Border poll. Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan, widely seen as Martin’s successor, recently told a SDLP-organised unity conference in Belfast that the next Irish government should begin preparing for unity, partly because the timetable for a Border poll could be set by English politicians in favour of English interests.
Fine Gael has said it will publish a blueprint for Irish unity in November ahead of its ardfheis.
Martin told the Tipperary meeting in the Horse and Jockey Hotel that he wanted to take the constitutional issue out of the Shared Island initiative lest it be seen by unionists as “a Trojan horse for Irish unity”.
“It has worked because communities all over Northern Ireland are applying with communities in the Republic for joint programmes,” he said.
Martin said the Shared Island initiative was kept low-key for years to allow it to embed, but the upgrade to the Enterprise train between Belfast and Dublin, the Narrow Water bridge and the Ulster Canal will be physical manifestations of the benefits that the initiative will bring to Border communities.
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