LONDON — It seemed like barely a drop-by, a quick stopover in Northern Ireland by President Biden before he made a pivot south for a roots tour in his beloved Irish Republic. He stayed in Belfast just 18 hours. He was attacked by some unionist officials and some conservative columnists. He gave a modest speech and then he was gone. One might ask: What was the point?
Biden was in Belfast in part to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the pact that helped end years of bloodshed between largely Protestant unionists allied with the United Kingdom and largely Catholic nationalists whose eventual goal was to join the Republic of Ireland. The decades-long conflict was known as the Troubles.
But there was another mission, forward-looking, not backward-, one designed to help restore a functioning government in Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. For Biden, that meant a mission to do no harm, and by that measure, his British hosts were gratified by how it all went.
The optics of his time in Belfast were not always ideal. The crowds that turned out were modest in comparison with some previous U.S. presidential visits to Northern Ireland in the past 25 years. His speech lacked rhetorical flourish. The White House appeared to downgrade to a coffee what the British had said was to be a bilateral, or bilat, with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Reporters cheekily dubbed the short meeting a “bi-latte.” British officials said the meeting was swell nevertheless.
Biden then traveled south to Ireland, his ancestral homeland. Arriving at his first stop, he was unstrained about how happy he was to be there, saying, “It feels like home.”
Visiting the residence of the Irish president on Thursday, he said, “I’m not going home. I’m staying here, because this is an incredible place.” Northern Ireland seemed in his rearview mirror.
Biden has always worn his Irishness as a badge of pride, and those in the pro-unionist camp in Northern Ireland and their allies elsewhere in the United Kingdom took that as an opportunity to attack him. In Belfast, Amanda Sloat, a National Security Council official traveling with Biden, felt compelled to vouch for the president’s respect and affection for the United Kingdom after Arlene Foster of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) claimed that the president “hates” the United Kingdom. Sloat told reporters: “I think the track record of the president shows he is not anti-British.”
Biden also made an unfortunate gaffe in Ireland that allowed for more ridicule from his critics in the United Kingdom. While talking about a relative who had been an Irish rugby player, he mixed up the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team with the Black and Tans, a brutal British military unit that fought against rebel forces in the Irish war for independence. So it goes with Biden.
Northern Ireland today is more peaceful than it was three decades ago, but the current condition has been rightly called a cold peace and not one without hardship and economic inequalities on both sides of the divide. Sectarian divisions remain, inked into the Good Friday Agreement. Progress doesn’t always come easily.
Politically, the unionists are in decline, because of changing demographics and other factors. The DUP is no longer the largest party in Northern Ireland. Some of what transpired during Biden’s visit might be interpreted as a reflection of a shrinking community feeling under siege and harboring resentment toward Biden as someone who tips the scales toward the Irish and nationalism.
But as Martin Kettle, a columnist for the Guardian, noted about the attacks on the president, “They speak to the lack of trust that still permeates Northern Ireland politics, a quarter of a century after the Good Friday agreement ended 30 years of the Troubles.”
It was the lack of trust at this moment in Northern Ireland’s history that put Biden in a delicate position. He had once hoped to speak from Stormont, the seat of the devolved, power-sharing government in Northern Ireland. But the government has been shut down for almost a year after the DUP withdrew in protest over the way Northern Ireland was treated under the terms of Brexit, the 2016 referendum that resulted in the United Kingdom pulling out of the European Union.
Complex trade and border issues were at the heart of the problem, and the issue festered for years, frustrating one British prime minister after another. Biden had made clear numerous times how important he thought it was to have the issue resolved satisfactorily.
Sunak, new to his role as prime minister, successfully did just that, negotiating earlier this year an agreement with the E.U. known as the Windsor Framework. He then won the support of Parliament, despite opposition from unionist members. But the DUP has yet to return to government in Northern Ireland.
A quarter of a century ago, U.S. political leaders were forceful participants in moving Northern Ireland from violence to relative peace, prodding publicly and pushing steadily behind the scenes. President Bill Clinton played a central role in setting the stage for serious peace talks. Former senator George Mitchell (D-Maine) chaired lengthy negotiations in Belfast between representatives of the warring parties with patience, equanimity and a firm hand. Tony Blair, then British prime minister, and Bertie Ahern, Ireland’s prime minister at the time, were instrumental throughout, but especially in helping forge the final agreement.
Equally important were the people of Northern Ireland and the leaders of the parties. Those leaders included Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble, John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin, the party whose ties to the Irish Republican Army long were an obstacle to peace. The Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, a cross-party organization, also played a key role in pushing for peace, in calling “enough,” as Biden said in Belfast.
Trimble and Hume were later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and today, Sinn Féin is the largest party in Northern Ireland’s nonfunctioning legislature. Adams, now gray in the beard, paid tribute to many of those participants during an interview with Sky News on the day of Biden’s visit, while urging the unionists to end their boycott of the government.
Some of the Americans who helped make the peace will join British and Irish leaders in Belfast in coming days for a more formal marking of the 25th anniversary of the agreement — among them Bill Clinton, Mitchell and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, whose engagement with Northern Ireland began when she was first lady.
Biden was the advance party, and in contrast to what was needed when Clinton was president, his role was not to go to Belfast to prod or lecture. It was to tread carefully. A fear was that some unionists were eager to stand up to any hint that they were being pushed around by the president. Biden did not offer them the opportunity.
With the leaders of the five parties in Northern Ireland in the audience at Ulster University, he sought to avoid inserting himself directly into internal affairs. He was careful and evenhanded, in the tradition of Mitchell at the negotiating table. He even mentioned that, in addition to his Irish heritage, he also has English ancestry, something he rarely talks about. He focused not on old, sectarian grievances but on the promise of economic investment by U.S. firms if old antagonisms can be set aside.
When Biden spoke about the absence of a functioning government, he was not prescriptive, merely hopeful.
“As a friend,” he told his audience, “I hope it’s not too presumptuous for me to say that I believe democratic institutions established through the Good Friday Agreement remain critical for the future of Northern Ireland. It’s a decision for you to make, not for me to make. … I hope that the Assembly and the Executive will soon be restored — that’s a judgment for you to make, not me, but I hope it happens.”
Biden spoke for 22 minutes, and then he was away. Nothing this president or any president can say can change the reality of the tensions that remain 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement. The power-sharing government has ebbed and flowed over those years. This is not the first time it has been shut down. It has been nonfunctioning 40 percent of the time since the power-sharing agreement was sealed.
In the estimation of British officials, Biden’s brief visit accomplished what they had hoped, a quiet message with carefully chosen words that did not aggravate the dynamic and might eventually help lead to another restoration of government. Biden could point but not forcefully persuade. As always in Northern Ireland, it remains in the hands of the leaders and the people there to make the way forward.