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Joe Biden will struggle to win over Unionists when his colours are nailed to Ireland’s mast
US president will urge loyalists to return to power-sharing at Stormont, but his Irish roots make him a divisive figure for many
Joe Biden is the most Irish president since John F. Kennedy, and that is why he is not the right man to convince the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to back Rishi Sunak’s Brexit deal and return to Stormont.
Ten of Mr Biden’s 16 great-great-grandparents came from Ireland, where he is guaranteed a rapturous “homecoming” on a state visit from Wednesday afternoon.
But he will receive a far cooler welcome when he arrives in Belfast on Tuesday evening amid celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
Mr Biden, a Catholic who is fiercely proud of his Irish roots, will meet the leaders of Northern Ireland’s major political parties on Wednesday.
He will urge the DUP to return to power-sharing, after the party collapsed Stormont more than a year ago, over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Mr Sunak struck a deal with the European Union over the Irish Sea border in February, but DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has demanded more changes before he will end the boycott.
Now, Mr Biden will throw the weight of his office behind the pressure building on Sir Jeffrey to restore the devolved institutions created by the Good Friday Agreement.
Senior DUP politicians have already warned they will not cave into the demands of the world’s most powerful man, who has become a figure of hate for hardline unionists and loyalists.
Unionists accuse Mr Biden of being on the side of Brussels and Dublin, and a supporter of the cause of Irish reunification and republicanism.
When Mr Biden threatened Britain with the loss of a US trade deal if the UK carried out its threat to tear up the Irish Sea border treaty with the EU, attitudes towards this very “green” president hardened further.
Love for Ireland
One reason was Mr Biden’s outspoken love for Ireland, which stretches to publishing a family tree of his Irish ancestors and going by the secret service codename “Celtic”.
Once in the Republic, he will visit his ancestral homes in the western county of Mayo and eastern county of Lough, the homes of the Blewitts and the Finnegans, on his mother’s side.
Both branches of the family fled a famine-ravaged Ireland for a better life in the US in about 1851.
Mr Biden is on record as saying they left in a “coffin ship” because of “what the Brits were doing”.
There is other evidence of an apparent apathy towards the Brits from a man who has made his Irish heritage central to his public persona.
Mr Biden has said his hero is Wolfe Tone, an 18th-century Irishman who was sentenced to death for leading a revolt against British rule, and he names Seamus Heaney as his favourite poet.
As a senator in 1985, Mr Biden opposed and watered down an extradition treaty with Britain that would have made it easier to extradite IRA terrorists.
“If you are wearing orange, you are not welcome here,” he said when welcoming the Irish prime minister to the White House in 2015.
Even if Mr Biden was less proudly Irish, he would struggle to convince Sir Jeffrey to end the boycott and effectively back the new Brexit deal before local elections in May.
The DUP fears bleeding support to hardline unionists, who believe the Windsor Framework is cutting Northern Ireland off from the rest of the UK.
Another bloody nose after May’s Stormont elections, which saw the DUP lose its status as Northern Ireland’s biggest party to Sinn Fein for the first time, could spell the end of his leadership.
Unionism’s psychodrama is exacerbated by the fresh impetus behind Irish reunification since Brexit and last year’s census, showing Catholics now outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time in its 100-year history.
Sir Jeffrey is struggling to contain divides between his Westminster MPs, who favour prolonging the boycott, and Members of the Legislative Assembly, who prefer a return to Stormont after a year’s deadlock that delayed action on the NHS and cost of living crisis.
In the anniversary week of the Good Friday Agreement, he will remember the fate of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which was once the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland.
The UUP backed the peace deal, but was hollowed out by a string of defections to the DUP, including Sir Jeffrey himself, and has since slid into irrelevance.
The DUP will lose support if it accepts the Windsor Framework, but no Brexit deal will satisfy the most hardline unionists.
Sir Jeffrey now faces a similar choice to his old UUP boss, David Trimble: should he be the statesman and compromise, but lose his loyalist base?
Even if, as some suspect, Sir Jeffrey is minded to ultimately accept the deal, he cannot be seen to do it under pressure from a US president whose colours are nailed so firmly to Ireland’s mast.