Joe Biden calls on Northern Ireland’s leaders to compromise
US President Joe Biden, during a short visit, has called for a political compromise in Northern Ireland to promote the benefits of lasting peace and investment in the region.
Biden spent just over half a day in Northern Ireland, meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, before traveling south to the Republic of Ireland for two and a half days of speeches and meetings with officials and distant relatives.
“It took long, hard years to get to this place,” Biden said in a speech at Ulster University’s new campus in Belfast on Wednesday, noting how the city had transformed since he first moved there as a young senator. traveled.
“Today’s Belfast is the beating heart of Northern Ireland and is poised to offer unprecedented economic opportunities,” he said. “There are plenty of big American companies that want to come here, that want to invest.”
Biden said power-sharing remains crucial to Northern Ireland’s future and that an effective devolved government would “create even more opportunity in this region”.
“I hope that the assembly and the executive will be restored soon. That’s a judgment for you to make, not me, but I hope it happens,” he told an audience including the leaders of Northern Ireland’s five main political parties, 25 years after a peace deal brokered by mediation of the US government.
That agreement, called the Good Friday Agreement, ended 30 years of sectarian conflict and established shared rule between the predominantly Protestant Unionists, who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the predominantly Catholic Nationalists or Republicans, who want it to remain part of the United Kingdom. become part of the Republic of Ireland.
The US president visited the country at a time when power sharing has broken down and Northern Ireland has been left without a government of its own.
Biden said on Tuesday the priority for his trip was to “keep the peace” in Northern Ireland. He praised people willing to “risk boldly for the future” for reaching the agreement, reminding the public that “peace was not inevitable”.
But senior figures in the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which is under pressure to resume local power-sharing, have been strikingly undiplomatic about the US president.
Sammy Wilson, a DUP member of the British parliament in Westminster, branded Biden “anti-British” and accused the second Catholic US president of having “made his antipathy towards Protestants particularly very public.”
Another DUP legislator, Nigel Dodds, suggested that any mediation efforts would prove futile.
“Pressure from a US government that is so transparently pro-nationalist does not put pressure on us at all,” he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Neil Given, an official living in Belfast, welcomed Biden’s visit but said he “does not have high hopes” for it to break the political deadlock.
“We have been battling it out for over a year now and since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement there have been numerous interruptions of Stormont institutions,” he said.
“Whether Mr. Biden’s visit in 24, 48 hours can bring people together and maybe get a message that we really need to get back to government, I don’t know, but hopefully he can do that,” he said. Given. “I know there isn’t a more powerful person left for sure who can spread that message.”
The devolved government in Belfast is a key part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, but it collapsed 14 months ago over the DUP’s opposition to post-Brexit trade arrangements in Northern Ireland.
Despite the UK and European Union agreeing to review them this year, the party has yet to back the new trade terms and allow the Stormont legislature to be reinstated in Belfast.
Nevertheless, Biden’s visit marked “enormous progress” made since the signing of the peace deal, the White House said.
Biden’s defenders noted that his delegation includes Joe Kennedy III, a scion of the Irish-American Kennedy clan, who was appointed special envoy for economic affairs in Northern Ireland. He will stay in Belfast for a few days.
“I think the president’s record shows he is not anti-British,” Amanda Sloat, senior director of the National Security Council for Europe, told reporters on Wednesday.
“The President has been very actively involved in the peace process in Northern Ireland throughout his career, dating back to his time as a Senator,” she said.
Less than 24 hours after arriving in Northern Ireland, Biden was on his way to Ireland, which he says is “a part of my soul”. He plans to visit the birthplaces of his 19th century ancestors.