Plan to hand Rathlin Island to the US as a thank-you gift from Northern Ireland, and to help Donald Trump boost American security
Rathlin could be offered to America by Stormont as a token of Northern Ireland's appreciation of US friendship and support over the years.
The plan is to woo President Donald Trump as an ally and possible golf investor in NI. Security experts think Rathlin could form part of a north Atlantic protection arc for the US, stretching from the island, which is just off the north coast and technically part of Co Antrim, up to the Faroe Islands, above Scotland, then Iceland to the northwest, then over to Greenland, and down to Newfoundland, off Canada.
The suggestion comes as President Trump considers seizing Greenland for security reasons. “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100 per cent,” Mr Trump told NBC. “There's a good possibility it could be done without military force.” But he added: “I don't take anything off the table.”
It is not clear if the main Stormont parties will reach agreement on the idea, but the source said: “They accept that if Rathlin became part of a superpower it would transform its fortunes, including a large but tasteful US military base.”
Advocates for the plan hope to get the former North Antrim MP, Ian Paisley Jnr, whose family is respected on Rathlin, behind it and also the ex-Labour MP Kate Hoey, who is so fond of the island she chose the title Baroness Hoey of Lylehill and Rathlin when made a peer. Both politicians attended Mr Trump’s inauguration in January in Washington DC.
President Trump wants Canada to become the 51st US state, but if there was a compromise in which Newfoundland, the Canadian island on its northeast coast, becomes a US state, rather than the entire country, then America could own an uninterrupted chain of land skirting the north Atlantic, from Maine, in the northeastern US, to Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Faroes, ending in Rathlin, on the edge of Europe.
One observer, long familiar with the island, said: “It is on this first day of April, as winter thaws, that you see both the beauty and the strategic value of Rathlin.”