Martin said: “The whole campaign was on cost of living, on health, and on housing. The border poll was nearly buried from its [Sinn Fein’s] documentation and its manifesto but as soon as the votes are counted, it is brought back into centre stage.”
The Taoiseach’s comments come as Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis prepares to meet the leaders of all the main parties at Stormont in a bid to push through the return of devolved government.
The Stormont Executive has not functioned since February when the First Minister Paul Givan, of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), resigned in an attempt to force the renegotiation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
In elections on May 5 Sinn Fein overtook the DUP—the largest unionist party—which meant Sinn Fein’s leader in the north, Michelle O’Neill, was in line to become the first minister, a historic precedent for an Irish republican party.
But the DUP is reluctant to take up the role of deputy first minister and DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has said the British government has to listen to concerns about the Northern Ireland Protocol before he will nominate ministers to be part of the power-sharing executive.
Jonathan Buckley, of the DUP, said on May 8, “Either the secretary of state wants an executive, or a protocol, he can’t have both.”
Martin said he believed agreement could still be reached on renegotiating the Northern Ireland Protocol but he added, “The European Union has been flexible, has demonstrated flexibility, but every time up to now that the European Union has demonstrated flexibility, it hasn’t been reciprocated, and that has made the EU more cautious in terms of the discussions with the United Kingdom government.”
He added, “All of us now have to have due regard to stability within the North, to the full workings of the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement.”
