In The Green and White House, an account of the ancestral ties that have linked so many American leaders to Ireland since the 19th century, Joe Biden is described as the most deeply “connected” president of all. Throughout his career, Mr Biden has placed his Irish roots at the heart of his political identity, and played an influential role in promoting the Northern Ireland peace process.
Cometh the hour, cometh the Potus? As he visits Belfast to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement, there is widespread hope that Mr Biden can put his backstory to profitable use at a delicate moment, along with the unique clout that goes with his office. As a kind of restless, ominous gridlock grips Northern Ireland’s body politic, that would constitute a notable success.
In recent months, the Democratic Unionist party’s ongoing boycott of the Stormont parliament has created a corrosive power vacuum at the heart of Northern Irish politics. Democratic stasis has been accompanied by a rise in politically motivated violence by dissident groups. On the eve of Mr Biden’s visit, petrol bomb attacks on police in Derry underlined the sulphurous mood on the dissident fringes.
Mr Biden’s personal sense of commitment is unlikely to mean he can single-handedly broker a solution to the impasse. Its root cause is structural, residing in the hard Brexit irresponsibly pursued by successive Conservative governments, which resulted in a border in the Irish Sea. Despite improvements to the Northern Ireland protocol negotiated by Rishi Sunak in the Windsor framework, Brexit has undermined the meticulous balancing of unionist and nationalist interests that lay at the core of the Good Friday agreement. Trust has been eroded; rebuilding it will be a slow process.
The immediate priority is persuading the DUP to rejoin power-sharing arrangements at Stormont. Mr Biden will doubtless do his best to cajole. But given the party’s fears of being outflanked to its right by the still more hardline Traditional Unionist Voice, any return seems highly unlikely until after the mid-May elections. Nevertheless, Mr Biden can usefully focus minds on the merits of being on good terms with the world’s largest economy.
Writing in a unionist newspaper prior to the trip, the US trade envoy to Northern Ireland, Joe Kennedy, who is accompanying Mr Biden, emphasised that over the past decade, political stability had attracted almost £1.5bn of US investment to Northern Ireland. Rather than refighting old conflicts, Mr Kennedy wrote, families and communities are interested in the opportunities that a spirit of pragmatism and compromise can bring. Overwhelming public support for the Windsor framework, which the DUP continues flatly to reject, testifies to the truth of Mr Kennedy’s claim. That is a platform to work from.
Before flying to Belfast, Mr Biden told reporters that the main aim of his visit was to safeguard the legacy of the Good Friday agreement. Acknowledged as a peacemaking model around the world, the power-sharing logic of the 1998 accords saved hundreds of lives that could otherwise have been lost. Northern Ireland today is a transformed place as a result of the peace dividend, and a rising proportion of the population eschews old sectarian identities. But as Mr Biden is well aware, in the wake of Brexit’s disastrous impact, there is more work to be done.
