No-deal Brexit 'incompatible' with Good Friday Agreement
- Published
The Sinn Féin Vice President, Michelle O'Neill, has said a no-deal Brexit is "incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement" and if it occurs then a poll on Irish unity offers the only answer.
Speaking at a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference in Brighton, Michelle O'Neill said there "can not be a crash-out Brexit".
She claimed that Brexit had resulted in "the break up of the union".
The Mid Ulster MLA said a debate about a united Ireland was now under way.
She told the meeting that "the genie is out of the bottle and it is not going back".
Mrs O'Neill was sharing a platform with Sinn Féin MP Mickey Brady, Shadow Northern Ireland Minister Stephen Pound and journalist Dawn Foster.
She said the reunification of Ireland could happen with the support of other European countries.
She told the audience that "Germany was united in one year" and added that Irish unity can "no longer be dismissed as a pipe dream".
The MLA was also critical of the DUP and their confidence-and-supply arrangement with the Conservatives.
She said that the party had "traded power sharing for their bit of glory at Westminster".
Northern Ireland has been without a functioning power-sharing executive since January 2017.
Mrs O'Neill's remarks about a united Ireland referendum came after the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn spoke about the possibility of a border poll.
Last week, he told BBC News NI: "I don't think it [a border poll] is soon. It is some way off.
"If there is a demand for a border poll within the terms of the Belfast Agreement and supported by the government in Dublin, I think we would, obviously, consider it."
The leader of the opposition said that if a border poll was called, a Labour government would not take a position on Northern Ireland's future.
- Published31 August 2019
