The priority in Northern Ireland must be on mending relationships and not planning for a border poll, Ireland’s Foreign Affairs Minister has said. “The focus for now in Northern Ireland has got to be on relationships,” Mr Coveney told RTE’s Morning Ireland programme. “We have a lot of work to do in the context of trying to settle the Northern Ireland Protocol issue. “We have to listen to unionism as well as, of course, to everybody else in Northern Ireland, and we have to try to make sure that the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement are functioning again because they have not been functioning for quite some time.”Mr Coveney’s comments come after census figures showed Catholics outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time since the partition of the island. Mr Coveney said nobody involved in the politics of Northern Ireland who has seen “how things are changing were surprised by that census result”.

Source: The Herald September 23, 2022 09:32 UTC