It was, as one senior SDLP figure put it, “quite a moment, to have the American president saying that.”
The “that” in question was Donald Trump’s endorsement of Irish unity, delivered when answering questions from the media after his arrival in Ireland on Saturday.
“I’d love to see it unified”, Trump said; it would be “a fantastic thing … a great thing” and even “a very cool thing.”
At the SDLP conference, taking place in a south Belfast hotel as Trump was speaking in Dublin, they were already talking unity.
The “direction of travel” towards constitutional change was “clear”, the SDLP leader Claire Hanna told the party faithful in her speech. Addressing the recent assertion by the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, that a Border poll was “off the table”, Hanna responded: “A new Ireland isn’t just on the table, it’s on the move.”
Then the US president weighed in. “Donald Trump, in the last hour, has announced that he is in favour of united Ireland,” she said. “Turns out he’s not as orange as he looks,” she added, in an allusion to the Orange Order.
Her audience laughed. “I’m not sure if anybody’s checked on the DUP,” she continued. “I suspect they’re burning those Trump flags as we speak.”
But, she said, Trump’s comments underlined “as clearly as anything that change is happening, whether some parties here want to acknowledge it or not”.
On Saturday, those unionist parties disagreed, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) all issuing swift statements essentially telling Trump to keep out of it.
“Northern Ireland’s constitutional future will be decided by the people of Northern Ireland, not by commentary in London, Dublin or Washington,” was how the DUP leader Gavin Robinson put it.
UUP deputy leader Robbie Butler took a swipe at “those now cheering” Trump, accusing them of “cherry picking.
“One sentence about a united Ireland and he is apparently a statesman of rare vision,” he said.
The former SDLP leader Colum Eastwood, a long-standing critic of the US president, had his own tongue-in-cheek response, posting a video of Trump’s comments on social media with the caption: “Always liked him.”
“I think it’s a sign of the times,” Eastwood told The Irish Times. “We had the former British prime minister Gordon Brown last week saying he thinks a united Ireland will happen, now we have the current president of America saying he thinks a united Ireland will happen.
“I think there is a recognition around the world that, after Brexit, the direction of travel was clear, that we’re heading towards Irish unity.
“That doesn’t mean that those of us that want to see it don’t have to work very hard to make sure it happens.
“Whatever about all the conversation and the distraction about criteria and dates, there is going to be a Border poll, we are going to win it, and Ireland’s going to be united … so it’s good to see that the American president, even though I don’t agree with him very much, understands that reality.”
As Hanna said in a statement later on Saturday, “when even Donald Trump has clocked that Irish unity is no longer some distant or theoretical prospect, it tells you something about just how far this conversation has shifted”.
Or, as she put it in her speech earlier, it was “becoming clearer by the day that the future of this island is changing” and “more and more people are talking about our constitutional future.
“Don’t just take it from me,” she said. “Take it from the leader of the free world.”