The UK’s new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland “deliberately” avoided answering when asked if he believed there would be a united Ireland, in his first visit to the North since his appointment.Responding to the question from The Irish Times at a press conference in Belfast on Friday, Chris Bryant replied: “I believe lots of things. I’m sort of avoiding answering the question. I’m deliberately avoiding answering the question.”Asked if this was a sustainable position to take, given the significance of issues around Northern Ireland’s constitutional position, Bryant responded that he was “not starting a [Border] poll now, or this week, or this month, or, I would suggest, this year. “So, you’re going to have to live with this answer for now.”Asked if the UK government would publish the criteria specifying the threshold for calling a Border poll, he said “the criteria are laid down in the Good Friday Agreement” and “it was not top of my list of priorities”.Bryant was appointed Northern Secretary by the new UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, earlier this month. The MP for the Welsh constituency of Rhondda and Ogmore replaced Hilary Benn. A former Anglican priest who quit over the church’s stance on homosexuality, Bryant is also a published historian and a prominent Remainer with a reputation for being outspoken on key issues. Asked by Sky News 2024 if he agreed with Sinn Féin vice-president and Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill that a vote on Irish unity was “inevitable”, Bryant said he always avoided the word “because you can never predict what’s going to happen in the future … but yes, that may come at some point”.At Friday’s press conference, Bryant emphasised that “the things I want to get done at the moment” included getting the Troubles Bill on legacy in Northern Ireland “sorted”.[ Who is Chris Bryant, the newly appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland?Opens in new window ]He said there was a “complex balancing act there, and just to remember, why we need to get that right, is because there are an awful lot of families who simply don’t know what happened, and that’s just morally offensive, let alone socially divisive, and a kind of, a form of cancer in society.“For me, as a historian, that’s just a really important part of getting things right.”Another priority, the Northern Secretary said, was getting Northern Ireland’s budget “sorted”. He is due hold meetings with the North’s political parties later on Friday, but said he was “not expecting us to make decisions today”.He said “quite a few politicians have already raised with me, are you coming with a chequebook, and actually I’m coming with a bit of a checklist, of things that I want to get sorted and done. “One of those is, of course, we’ve got to get to a situation where we can have a proper budget, but we also need to make sure that public services in Northern Ireland really are delivering for people.”