Nationalist chiefs sign pact to make Burnham ‘the last UK prime minister’
DUBLIN — The leaders of the three nationalist parties that want to break up the United Kingdom have signed a joint agreement to coordinate their rebel ambitions.
Monday’s signing ceremony by the Scottish National Party, Ireland’s Sinn Féin and Wales’ Plaid Cymru creates a fresh headache for U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham — who’s already on the constitutional defensive after the weekend’s surprise intervention by Donald Trump.
The nationalist leaders gathering in the Welsh capital, Cardiff — Wales First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth, Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill and Scotland First Minister John Sweeney — offered only a subdued, indirect welcome for Trump’s out-of-the-blue declaration that a united Ireland was “inevitable.” That lack of praise for Trump reflected their shared opposition to his wider policy agenda.
But all three agreed that Trump’s sentiments reinforced their own sense that the time was right for independence referendums in Scotland and Ireland, and a push for greater devolution of powers from Westminster to the Welsh Assembly.
“Each of our nations has the right to determine its own future, through democratic means and in accordance with the wishes of its people,” the three parties said in a joint statement.
They met in Cardiff to acknowledge the fact that all three devolved administrations in the U.K. are now led by nationalists for the first time following May’s electoral trouncing by Plaid Cymru of Burnham’s Labour, long the party of government in Wales.
Sweeney, Scotland’s leader since 2024, is seeking a second independence referendum following the failed 2014 vote. Burnham, who holds the levers on permitting such a ballot, has ruled it out.
“I think he [Burnham] will be the last prime minister of the United Kingdom, because the people of Scotland, if given the choice of independence in a referendum, will take that choice,” Sweeney said, citing recent polling trends.
Sinn Féin — which contests elections in both parts of Ireland — has spent nearly three decades appealing for the British government to permit a border poll in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin wants the north, a part of the U.K., to merge with the Republic of Ireland, which won independence from Britain more than a century ago.
Reflecting the party’s more complicated all-Ireland structure, Sinn Féin came to Cardiff represented both by O’Neill, who leads the cross-community government in Northern Ireland, and by party chief Mary Lou McDonald, a Dubliner who leads the opposition in Ireland’s parliament.
McDonald — who has boycotted traditional St. Patrick’s Day events at the White House since Trump’s 2024 re-election — billed the president’s pro-unity comment as part of an age-old American sympathy for the Irish, one of the country’s biggest ethnic identities.
“It’s surprising that there is surprise that a New Yorker, that an American president, would say that they see the logic, the good sense of unity … the inevitability, as he sees it,” McDonald told reporters.
Ireland’s leader, Taoiseach Micheál Martin of the center-ground Fianna Fáil party, didn’t comment on Trump’s intervention as they spent much of the weekend together — but broke his silence Monday to warn that simple-minded calls for unity did more harm than good.
Martin avoided mentioning Trump explicitly on that point, instead billing it as a problem for his opponents, Sinn Féin, which spent decades supporting Irish Republican Army violence in Northern Ireland. The main faction, the Provisional IRA, killed nearly 1,800 people from 1970 to 1997, when the outlawed group ceased fire.
“I believe in Irish unity, but I want an Irish unity that works. That takes hard work. I’m not into simplistic rhetoric,” Martin told RTÉ radio in Dublin. “I’m not into timelines. I’m not into saying we’ll do it all next week and it’ll be simple. And some of the rhetoric I’m listening to, even Sinn Féin at times, harkening back to the 1970s — I worry about that.”
