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Joe Biden is wrong to claim credit for peace in Ireland

The anti-British President is touring Ireland on the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Yet he did nothing to help make it happen

President Joe Biden

At a moment when peace in Northern Ireland rests delicately on a knife edge, the last thing the province needs is the presence of US President Joe Biden and his deeply jaundiced view of Irish history.

Biden’s forthcoming visit to Ireland has been timed to coincide with celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The visit is taking place against a background of highly credible warnings from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) that dissident republicans are planning to mark the occasion by carrying out terrorist attacks.

Throughout his long political career, Biden has made no secret of his visceral affection for the republican cause, an attitude he inherited from his mother, whose hatred for England was so intense that, as Biden himself once boasted, she chose to sleep on a hotel floor rather than in a bed that the late Queen had once slept on. She even committed her loathing for the English to verse. The British screenwriter of Veep, Georgia Pritchett, who interviewed Biden as part of her research, recalls hundreds of poems demanding that “God must smite the English and rain blood on our heads”.

In his own comments, Biden appears to share his mother’s sentiments. As vice president, Biden caused great offence to Northern Ireland’s Unionist community when, while attending a St Patrick’s day event, he quipped: “If you’re wearing orange you’re not welcome here.” He has been in a similarly combative mood in the run-up to next week’s visit. When asked if concerns about possible sectarian violence in the province might affect his visit, he remarked: “They can’t keep me out.”

Biden will spend three of the four days of his trip in the Republic, where he will pay homage to his ancestral roots in counties Louth and Mayo.

The President’s blinkered view of the Irish conflict is so pronounced that his administration has totally failed to grasp the constitutional implications of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Despite Rishi Sunak’s recent amendments, it still means that the province remains subject to EU diktat.

As someone who is sympathetic to the cause of a united Ireland, Biden no doubt believes this is a useful construct, even if it has succeeded in alienating Northern Ireland’s Unionist community, to the extent that the Democratic Unionist Party remains unwilling to participate in the Stormont assembly.

The power-sharing body was one of the more tangible achievements to emerge from the Good Friday Agreement. But rather than acting to ensure its survival, Biden’s natural inclination to back the EU in its dispute with the British Government over post-Brexit trading arrangements for the province has contributed to Stormont’s collapse.

Biden’s unhelpful involvement in the conflict is another example of how the US, rather than aiding the cause of peace, has often achieved the opposite.

For much of the Troubles, funds raised in the US for the IRA helped buy the weapons used to carry out terrorist attacks. And when a peace agreement was eventually brokered, it was down to pressure from Washington that IRA terrorists were given immunity from prosecution – a concession not afforded to British veterans.

If peace prevails in Northern Ireland, it will be no thanks to the Biden administration’s ill-judged contribution.

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