“Dialogue is crucial. The solution is for everyone to sit around a table.” Michelle O’Neill, Chief Minister of Northern Ireland, has shown her support for the dialogue process that Pere Aragonès has led during his mandate to try to agree on the conditions of a self-determination referendum in Catalonia. The president of the Generalitat and the vice president of Sinn Féin met this Wednesday in Belfast, in the Northern Irish Assembly, to strengthen ties, something that above all has translated into support from the leader for the clarity agreement promoted by Esquerra.
O’Neill recalled the Good Friday agreements. “We are very lucky, because we reached an understanding,” he remarked. And among these agreements, signed in 1998, is the possibility of allowing a self-determination referendum for Northern Ireland as long as there is a plausible and recognizable nationalist majority for reunification, which must be confirmed in elections for both the Parliament of the Republic of Ireland as for that of Ulster.
The fact is that Sinn Féin was the most voted party in the 2020 elections in the Republic of Ireland, with 24.5% of the total. Two years later, the party also achieved victory in Ulster, taking 29% of the vote. The forecast in the party is that this referendum can be held within ten years.
Aragonès sees in this situation some parallels with his proposal for a clarity agreement to hold a referendum agreed with the State, “because in Ireland there is an agreement to hold a referendum if certain conditions are met.” “And that is what we are looking for for Catalonia,” said the head of the Government, while highlighting that his number one objective “for the next four years”, especially if he is re-elected president of the Generalitat, “is that an agreement can be reached in which all parties set the conditions for a referendum”, as was agreed for Ireland.
“It will be the people who will end up deciding, and it is the people of Cataunya who will have to decide their constitutional future,” added O’Neill. Aragonès has received assistance on a platter from the chief minister to affirm: “Here an agreement was reached between people with very different positions; “We must put the democratic solution first.”
Thus, Aragonès ends his mandate with a trip with a marked political charge. He has moved to Northern Ireland to meet with O’Neill, who has led the nation’s government in the United Kingdom since February of this year. It will be the last of the visits that the president will make during his mandate before his Government takes office. The Catalan elections are on May 12 and Esquerra is confident that the meeting with the prime minister will give a boost to the electoral campaign, which begins this Thursday night.
On a political level, the meeting with Michelle O’Neill was not the only one. In the morning, accompanied by the delegate of the Government of the United Kingdom and Ireland, Francesc Claret, the president of the Generalitat met with Ryan Murphy, mayor of Belfas since June 2023 and also a member of Sinn Féin. Aragonès has assured that they have found many common points when it comes to social policies and economic progress. In fact, the head of the Government, although he has not specified, has stated that there are opportunities for collaboration between Catalonia and Northern Ireland in areas of research, innovation and social policies that he hopes, as he has said, that some Catalan municipalities will attend to.