Arlene Foster denounces ex-Prime Minister's forecast that Northern Ireland will quit the UK
The former First Minister of Northern Ireland has hit back at Gordon Brown for claiming that the Province will ultimately leave the UK.
Arlene Foster said there is no “immutable law” pushing Northern Ireland into unification with the Irish Republic.
In an interview with The Guardian, published last weekend, Mr Brown had said: “Yes. Well, of course, in the long term, Ireland will be united.”
He added that a united Ireland will be “a long process where people have got to come together and find a way of agreeing” adding: “Basically, that is the issue: whether people can actually agree.”
Mr Brown was chancellor from 1997 to 2007 and then Prime Minister until 2010.
An opponent of Scottish independence, Mr Brown’s impassioned speech days before the 2014 referendum has been credited with helping to secure the ‘no’ vote (the Daily Express, for example, ran an online headline that said: ‘Intervention of Gordon Brown was catalyst that saved the Union’).
Responding to Mr Brown in the conservative magazine The Spectator, Baroness Foster has now said that, in the former PM’s eyes, the Union “is indispensable in Fife but temporary in Fermanagh” and whilst his Britishness is permanent hers “comes with an expiry date”.
Dubbing his remarks on Irish unity “extraordinary”, she said: “Geography is not political destiny.
"Northern Ireland sharing a land border with the Republic no more makes Irish unity inevitable than Canada’s border with the United States makes North American unity inevitable.
"Brown should know this better than most.
"He was chancellor when the Belfast Agreement was signed.
"Its great constitutional achievement was to replace competing claims of inevitability with the principle of consent.
"Northern Ireland remains within the United Kingdom for as long as that is the democratic wish of its people.
"There is no majority for Irish unity today.
"Nor is there some immutable law saying there must eventually be one.”
Echoing comments from Jim Allister last week, she questioned why people in Northern Ireland would see it as an “inevitable improvement” to trade a relatively strong UK military and NATO membership for union with a Republic of Ireland that has neither.
She also pointed to displays of “increasingly ugly... antisemitism” and “pure sectarianism” in the Republic as disincentives for opting for Irish unity.
Baroness Foster’s comments came after UUP MLA Steve Aiken told the News Letter earlier in the week that “Gordon Brown has never been particularly prescient” and that he had stimulated Irish nationalists into “salivating about the unobtainable”.
Back in 2018, in a TV show hosted by broadcaster Paddy Kielty to mark the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Mrs Foster had said that in the event of Irish unity “I’m not sure that I would be able to continue to live here, I would feel so strongly about it”.
Writing in the News Letter in the days that followed, unionist commentator Owen Polley had said: “People like me and, presumably, Arlene Foster, whose British citizenship is bound up with a political loyalty to the United Kingdom, would lose both our nation state and our sense of belonging, by staying here.
"Effectively, our home would become a foreign country.
"No wonder we’d consider leaving very seriously.”
Baroness Foster was DUP leader from 2015 to 2021, and First Minister twice (during 2016/17 and again in 2020/21).