US President Joe Biden has left for Northern Ireland to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. His journey also begins with a three-day visit to Ireland.
Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One, Biden said the trip would try to ensure the lasting legacy of the deal brokered by Washington and ratified by London and Dublin.
The Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, established a fragile peace between unionist parties who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK and nationalists who favored reunification with Ireland. The breakthrough largely ended three decades of violence that left more than 3,500 people dead.
Biden said his trip would also try to support a controversial trade deal between the UK and Ireland known as the Windsor Framework, reached in the wake of Brexit.
Although the UK, and thus Northern Ireland, have left the European Union, the country of Ireland remains part of the EU alliance. The Windsor Framework grants special status to Northern Ireland to keep its border with Ireland open, avoiding historically contentious divisions.
The deal nevertheless faced deep-seated opposition from the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which has boycotted the formation of a government since May, threatening the delicate power-sharing agreement reached in the 1998 Good Friday deal .
Biden told reporters the priority of the trip was “to make sure the Irish Accords and the Windsor Agreement remain in place, to keep the peace.”
“That’s the most important thing,” he added. “And it looks like we — keep your fingers crossed.”
Biden will meet with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on the tarmac in Belfast on Tuesday.
The following day, he will deliver a speech at Ulster University in Belfast, “to mark the huge progress” since the 1998 peace accords were signed, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
British media has also reported that Biden will meet with Northern Ireland’s main political parties, although the meetings are not on Biden’s official schedule.
US Congressman Richard Neal, a close ally of Biden, told the BBC program HARDtalk that the Biden administration would “gently push” and “prod” the DUP.
Still, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who helped broker the 1998 peace deal, warned Biden on Tuesday about putting excessive pressure on the party in Belfast.
“If you try to pressure them to do something they fundamentally disagree with, it’s usually pointless pressure, even if it comes from the US,” he told the BBC.
Meanwhile, in a sign of continued unrest in the region, masked youths pelted petrol bombs at police vehicles on Monday during an illegal republican march in Londonderry, also known as Derry, a city on the border of Northern Ireland and Ireland with a long, symbolic history in the tensions.
visit to Ireland
On Wednesday, Biden will travel to Dublin and then County Louth, where the 80-year-old will be reacquainted with his oft-cited Irish heritage.
Ireland’s Irish Family History Center says Biden is “one of the most ‘Irish’ of all US presidents,” noting that 10 of his 16 great-great-grandparents were from the Emerald Isle. All left for the US during the Great Famine of the mid-1800s, which killed an estimated one million people.
Biden will hold separate meetings in Dublin on Thursday with Irish President Michael Higgins and Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who visited Biden in the Oval Office on St. Patrick’s Day last month. He will then address the Irish Parliament and hold a dinner banquet.
The president will spend Friday, the last day of the trip, in County Mayo to research the family’s genealogy and deliver a speech on US-Ireland ties.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that Biden will speak there in front of a 19th-century cathedral built with bricks supplied by his great-great-grandfather, civil engineer and brickmaker Edward Blewitt.
It will be an opportunity to “celebrate the deep, historic ties that bind our countries and people together,” she said.
The visit comes ahead of a three-day conference beginning April 17 hosted by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as part of the commemorations of the 1998 peace agreement.
Her husband, Bill Clinton, as US president from 1993 to 2001, played a pivotal role in securing the deal.