The election of Reform Party leader, Nigel Farage, as British prime minister after the next Westminster election would accelerate support for Irish unification and Scottish independence, former taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.
Speaking on the BBC’s The View programme, shown on BBC Northern Ireland on Thursday night, Mr Varadkar praised British prime minister Keir Starmer’s attitudes towards Ireland since his election last year.
“Prime minister Starmer might be re-elected for a second term. It’s equally possible – not probable – but possible, that Nigel Farage could be prime minister of the UK in four years’ time, or in nine years’ time,” said Mr Varadkar.
“That would change the picture,” he said, and change opinions about Irish unification among “some people in the middle ground in Northern Ireland if in Westminster we had an English nationalist government”.
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Mr Farage’s party won hundreds of seats across England and Wales in May’s local elections and frequently leads national opinion polls ahead of Labour and the Conservatives.
Even the possibility of a Reform-led government in London strongly supports his contention that the Irish Government should be planning for Irish unification, even if it offered no view on when a referendum should be held, Mr Varadkar said.
“It makes sense to do a bit of horizon scanning, to do a bit of scenario planning, to think about some of those issues, even if it’s a just-in-case,” he said.
A Farage-led administration would “double down on Brexit” because those who supported the UK’s exit from the EU believed “it wasn’t done properly”, the former Fine Gael leader and taoiseach said.
“What you’d see is an attempt to rescind many of the things that prime minister Starmer and his government have done to bring the United Kingdom even further away from the European Union,” he said.
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Mr Varadkar said he believed a Farage-led UK government would put Irish unification “centre stage”.
“And it isn’t just because a right-wing nationalist government in London would want to bring the UK and Northern Ireland away from Europe,” he said.
Many conservative and populist attitudes pushed by Reform on social issues, such as gay rights, would not be liked by a majority of people in Northern Ireland, from both traditions, he said.
“[They] have a liberal and European outlook, and if that’s the kind of government they had in London versus a government in Dublin that was very different, it might make them more likely to vote yes to unification,” he said.
Mr Varadkar said he hoped a Farage-led government would not happen, “but I’m saying it could, and we should think about that”.
If Farage succeeds, it will be because of English voters showing “scant regard” for opinions in Northern Ireland and Scotland, he said. “We’ve seen that happen before, and we saw it happen with Brexit. Could it happen in four to nine years? It could.”
Since he stepped down as taoiseach, Mr Varadkar has repeatedly supported Irish unification, though he told the BBC programme that he had not begun planning for unity during his time in power because he was trying to secure an EU/UK deal.
Unification is “not inevitable” and must be worked towards, he said, but there are “a lot of factors that would suggest that we’re on that trajectory”, especially recent polling showing that a majority of young people in Northern Ireland favour it, he said.
“I think that will carry through, and that’s why I think it’s something that we should plan for,” he said.
“I think it’s something that shouldn’t just be an aspiration; it’s something that should be an objective of the Irish Government, and of Irish society.”
