BELFAST (Reuters): US President Joe Biden will meet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Northern Irish political leaders in Belfast on Wednesday, kicking off a three-day Irish tour with a speech to mark the 25th anniversary of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace deal.
Biden, who is fiercely proud of his Irish heritage, will spend just over half a day in the UK region before traveling south to the Irish Republic for two-and-a-half days of speeches and meetings with officials and distant relatives.
The brief Belfast stop comes against the backdrop of the latest political stalemate in which the devolved powersharing government, a key part of the 1998 peace deal, has not met for more than a year due to a row about post-Brexit trade arrangements.
“It is a huge pity and a huge disappointment that the president of the free world is not addressing the (devolved) assembly,” former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, one of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement, told Channel 4 News.
“There’s no good hiding that fact. It’s a big own goal.”
Speaking to reporters before leaving Washington, Biden said his priority was to help “keep the peace” as Northern Ireland marks the anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that largely ended 30 years of bloodshed between mainly Catholic opponents and mainly Protestant supporters of British rule.
He also said he would seek to make sure the recent Windsor Framework deal between the European Union and Britain to ease post-Brexit trade barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom remained in place.
That deal has so far failed to convince the region’s largest pro-British party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), to end a more than year-long boycott of the local assembly. Powersharing has endured multiple breakdowns and suspensions since 1998, including the assembly not sitting between 2017 and 2020 over a different row.
Biden will discuss the latest developments in Ukraine with Sunak but is not expected to speak about a potential free trade agreement with Britain, White House official Amanda Sloat told a news conference.
’KNOCKING HEADS TOGETHER’
The DUP has said Biden’s visit — the first to the region by a US president in 10 years — will not convince it to end its protest at the trade rules that treat the province differently to the rest of the UK.
A senior US administration official said that Biden was not planning to pressure the parties.
Ahern said he knew from experience that “knocking heads together” did not usually work in Northern Ireland and that Biden should point out the obvious case that, in any democracy, institutions of parliament were essential.
The local party leaders will have a short opportunity to speak to Biden individually at Ulster University where he will make his speech, said Naomi Long, the leader of the Alliance party, which identifies as neither nationalist or unionist.
“It’s sad that it’s happening in the context of not having a sitting assembly, of the Good Friday Agreement not being fully functional, but we have to make the best of the situation we find ourselves in,” Long told Irish national broadcaster RTE.
Biden, flanked by new US special envoy to Northern Ireland for economic affairs Joseph Kennedy III on his arrival, will also float the possibility of closer US/Northern Ireland investment ties to try to encourage an end to the impasse.
Biden will travel later on Wednesday to County Louth — midway between Belfast and Dublin — where his great-grandfather was born. Stormy weather is expected across the island.
Biden will meet relatives from another side of his family in the western county of Mayo on Friday.
Biden’s great-great-grandfather Owen Finnegan, a shoemaker from County Louth, emigrated to the United States in 1849. His family, including Biden’s great-grandfather James Finnegan, followed him in 1850.
