Irish reunification

United Ireland is the proposition that the whole of Ireland should be a single sovereign state. At present, the island is divided politically; the sovereign state of Ireland has jurisdiction over the majority of Ireland, while Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. Achieving a united Ireland is a central tenet of Irish nationalism, particularly of both mainstream and dissident Irish republican political and paramilitary organisations.Unionists support Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom, and therefore oppose Irish unification.

Ireland has been partitioned since May 1921, when the implementation of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 created the state of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. The Anglo-Irish Treaty, which led to the independence of the Irish Free State, recognised partition, but this was opposed by anti-Treaty republicans. When the anti-Treaty Fianna Fáil party came to power in the 1930s, it adopted a new constitution which claimed sovereignty over the entire island. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) had a united Ireland as its goal during the conflict with British security forces and loyalist paramilitaries from the 1960s to the 1990s known as The Troubles. The Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998, which ended the conflict, acknowledged the legitimacy of the desire for a united Ireland, as well as the desire of unionists for the maintenance of the union with Britain. 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). Taoiseach Enda Kenny said that in the event of reunification, Northern Ireland should be allowed to rejoin the EU, as East Germany was after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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