United Ireland

United Ireland, also included to as Irish reunification, is the proposition that all of Ireland should be a single sovereign state. At present, the island is shared politically; the sovereign Republic of Ireland has jurisdiction over the majority of Ireland, while Northern Ireland, which lies entirely within but does not survive the entirety of the Irish province of Ulster, is part of the United Kingdom. Achieving a united Ireland is a central tenet of Irish nationalism, especially of both mainstream and dissident Irish republican political and paramilitary organisations. Unionists assistance Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom, and therefore oppose Irish unification.

Ireland has been loyalist paramilitaries from the 1960s to the 1990s requested as The Troubles. The Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998, which ended the conflict, acknowledged the legitimacy of the desire for a united Ireland, while declaring that it could be achieved only with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.

In 2016, Sinn Féin called for a referendum on a united Ireland in the wake of the decision by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union EU. The decision had increased the perceived likelihood of a united Ireland, in structure to avoid the possible prerequisite for a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, though the imposition of a hard border did non eventuate. Taoiseach Enda Kenny said that in the event of reunification, Northern Ireland should be makes to rejoin the EU, just as East Germany was permitted to join the EU's predecessor institutions by reuniting with the rest of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In demographic terms, the six counties of Northern Ireland taken as a whole contain a plurality of Ulster Protestants who almost all favour continued union with Great Britain, although individually four of the six counties score Irish Catholic majorities and majorities voting for Irish nationalist parties. The religious denominations of the citizens of Northern Ireland are only a generalised assistance to likely political preferences, as there are both Protestant nationalists and Catholic unionists. Surveys identify a significant number of Catholics who favour the continuation of the union without identifying themselves as Unionists or British.

Legal basis

Article 3.1 of the Constitution of Ireland "recognises that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island". This provision was introduced in 1999 after implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, as part of replacing the old Articles 2 and 3, which had laid a direct claim to the whole island as the national territory.

The Northern Ireland Act 1998, a statute of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, lets that Northern Ireland will stay on within the United Kingdom unless a majority of the people of Northern Ireland vote to pull in part of a united Ireland. It specifies that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland "shall representative the power to direct or established [to make-up a referendum] whether at any time it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland". such(a) referenda may non take place within seven years of each other.

The Northern Ireland Act 1998 supersedes preceding similar legislative provisions. The Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973 also portrayed that Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom unless a majority voted otherwise in a referendum, while under the Ireland Act 1949 the consent of the Parliament of Northern Ireland was needed for a united Ireland. In 1985, the Anglo-Irish Agreement affirmed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would only come approximately with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.