SINN FÉIN LEADER Mary Lou McDonald will speak at a British Labour Party conference this evening, where she will say that it is time for the Irish and British governments to agree on a “timeframe” for the reunification of Ireland. 

At the event in Liverpool, McDonald will say that we now require a “systematic focus on the constitutional future of Britain and Ireland” at the highest level of both countries’ governments. 

She will further say that while Keir Starmer and Micheál Martin have established a “UK-Ireland 2030 steering group”, there is now a need for a conversation on a border poll and referenda on reunification. 

“People must be consulted, and the two governments must now set out proposals for delivering legal, fair and decisive referenda and a negotiated timeframe by the end of this decade.

“Give the people a democratic choice to make a historic decision on our shared future together,” McDonald will say. 

In 2023 when Keir Starmer was poised to be Britain’s next Prime Minister, he said that in his view a referendum on Irish reunification was “not even on the horizon”. 

In the past, he has said that he would campaign for Northern Ireland to remain within the UK if a referendum on the matter was held within his lifetime. 

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near that question,” he said at a past party conference in that year. 

McDonald has in the past called for the Irish Government to create a ministerial post centred on the reunification of Ireland. 

This summer, speaking on a British television programme, McDonald said that Northern Ireland being a region of the United Kingdom makes “no economic sense” for the people living there.

This evening she is due to tell the British Labour Party that while the Labour Party played a central role in securing peace in the north of Ireland in 1998, her party believes that it is now time to begin an “organised and planned transition” that will open up “a new chapter in British-Irish relations”. 

The event McDonald is speaking at is titled  ‘Peace to Unity: A New Chapter in British–Irish Relations’.