Biden is on a diplomatic and personal mission in Ireland

Indelible Impacts on a Son of Ireland: An Invitation to Northern Ireland, with an Empty Regard to U.S. Support for the Good Friday Agreement

Biden was hailed by Ireland’s prime minister last month as an “unmistakably a son of Ireland”, a description he attributed to his Irish roots. The most well-known passage from Yeats’ “Easter 1916” has appeared in Biden’s public remarks at least 12 times.

Many modern American presidents have claimed Irish ancestry — from John Fitzgerald Kennedy to Barack Obama (or should we say “O’Bama”?), who has Irish relatives on his mom’s side. Biden was forward about it. The nation’s second Irish-Catholic president will go to Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Tuesday and to the Republic of Ireland on Wednesday. He heads back to the U.S. on Friday.

The message Biden will give when he arrives in Northern Ireland is about continued U.S. support for the Good Friday Agreement. That agreement, which the U.S. was pivotal in negotiating, brought an end to decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles.

John Finucane, a member of the British Parliament from Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, said Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland this week would be a “huge help” toward resolving some of the lingering differences.

When Biden travels to County Louth later Wednesday, he will be looking for his family roots. The region along the border with Northern Ireland was where Biden’s great-great-great-grandfather, Owen Finnegan, was born in 1818.

“As many of you know, I, like all of you, take pride in my Irish ancestry,” he said during a St. Patrick’s Day luncheon last month. “And as long as I can remember, it’s been sort of part of my soul.”

Ahead of the trip, the White House distributed an extensive family genealogy stretching as far back as the year 1803 to the shoemakers and civil engineers who would eventually leave Ireland on ships bound for America. The Irish famine in the 1840s and 1850s left most of thecoffin ships, which were used for transporting people, in ruins.

His ancestors’ experiences have left indelible impressions on Biden, whose persona is defined by eternal optimism despite his own experience of profound loss.

He wrote that one of his Senate colleagues once said that it was important to understand Irishness because life is going to knock you down.

The Good Friday Agreement with Edward Blewitt: A Great Example of Getting Real Bipartisan Buy-in in the United States, according to Biden

Biden will likely talk about that universal experience in remarks outside St. Muredach’s Cathedral later this week. According to the White House, Biden’s great-great-great grandfather Edward Blewitt sold 27,000 bricks that helped build that County Mayo cathedral, and used the money to bring his family on a ship to America.

He will be accompanied by a number of his family members. When he visited as vice president in 2016, he spent six days crisscrossing the island with several grandchildren and his sister, a newly generated family-tree in hand.

“President Biden has been talking about liberal internationalism as something that can return, he talks about democracy versus autocracy, all of this kind of stuff. I think he wants to see examples of the rule of law in US foreign policy. And this is a great example of that. Liam Kennedy is the director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at the University College Dublin.

“The Good Friday Agreement is certainly one of those things where you can get real bipartisan buy-in in Washington,” Kennedy said. “Believe me, that’s a pretty unusual thing.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/11/politics/joe-biden-ireland-trip/index.html

Joe Biden, the Most Irish President of the United Kingdom and his Distinction from Britain with the First Treaty of the Collapse of Ireland

The bloody tensions between Protestant Unionists, who support remaining part of the United Kingdom, and Catholic Irish Nationalists, who support reunification with the Republic, have mostly been left in another era. The Troubles led to more than 3,500 deaths, most of them civilians, and even more casualties.

In the Irish America magazine cover story in 1988, he stated that as president he would be actively involved in trying to reach a peace.

“If we have a moral obligation in other parts of the world, why in God’s name don’t we have a moral obligation to Ireland? It’s part of our blood. He said it was the blood of his bone.

Yet that government has functioned only sporadically in the quarter-century since the accord was signed and has been frozen for more than a year after the Democratic Unionists withdrew because of the Brexit trade dispute.

Biden is remembered by a lawyer who lost his father to Loyalist paramilitaries in 1989 as a reminder of America’s role in brokering peace.

Still, the threat of violence has never entirely disappeared, a reality made evident when British intelligence services raised the terrorism threat level in Northern Ireland from “substantial” to “severe” in late March.

The police service said that the operation would cost nearly 8 million euro and include motorcycle escort officers, firearms specialists and search specialists.

According to a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Joe Biden is the most Irish of American presidents.

It isn’t clear if there will be a stop into the pub or not, but grabbing a beer is not something you should do. “You’ve never met anyone who hasn’t had a drink, but I’m the only Irishman that does,” Biden said, like his predecessor did not drink alcohol.

Kennedy’s election was significant. Biden, on the other hand, is free to wear his heritage on his sleeve, O’Leary said, since electing an Irish Catholic to the highest office in the land is no longer a taboo.

According to O’Leary, Kennedy attended an elite private boarding school and then Harvard, making his lived experience much more Anglophile, and he’s much more than an Ordinary Joe, an average Irish American.

The U.S. made a big deal out of the Good Friday Agreement, but the Belfast University campus is a cathedral of learning for Northern Ireland

“This was a … huge deal,” said Max Bergmann at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He thinks Biden will show how active US engagement made a difference in the Good Friday Agreement.

But Brexit has tested the peace accord. The United Kingdom’s move to withdraw from the European Union created new tensions over trade and risked stoking disputes over borders. The political situation in Northern Ireland remains difficult despite the existence of the Windsor Framework.

“America is not trying to interfere in the management of the power sharing arrangements within Northern Ireland,” O’Leary said. If those work, there will be encouragement from the United States for foreign and direct investment.

Biden’s connections to his roots are important but so is building strong relationships between the U.S. and its European allies.

“We learn anew with every generation a democracy needs champions,” he said, adding later: “As a friend, I hope it’s not too presumptuous of me to say that I believe democratic institutions established in the Good Friday Agreement remain critical for the future of Northern Ireland.”

Departing Washington on Tuesday, Biden described the goal of his brief 15-hour visit to Northern Ireland bluntly: ensuring the US-brokered accord remains in place.

While Biden was invited to speak from Stormont, he turned down the offer, because the power-sharing arrangement remains deadlocked. Since it was formed, the regional government has operated intermittently, but hasn’t been in place for over a year as the main unionistparty resists new trade rules.

At the time of Biden’s visit to Britain, both he and the Prime Minister hoped they would be able to resolve their differences. One of the main objectives of the Good Friday Agreement was left unfulfilled when the accord was being celebrated.

The new campus of the University of Ulster in Belfast cost millions of dollars to build and can hold thousands of students, making it an ideal location for the speech Biden was scheduled to give.

Biden recalled the violent era before the accord known as The Troubles when car bombs and assassinations became part of everyday life in Northern Ireland.

While barbed wire sliced up the city, a cathedral of learning was built with glass to let the light shine in and out. He said that it had a profound impact. “And for someone who’s come back to see it, you know it’s an incredible testament to the power and the possibilities of peace.”

Some students in the audience didn’t experience violence from The Troubles first-hand so it isn’t a distant memory. Instead, it is economic opportunity that appears top of mind, particularly as Britain’s exit from the European Union complicates trade relations in the region.

Biden predicted that scores of American businesses would invest in Northern Ireland, because of the peace and economic opportunity.

Before the speech, Biden sat for a short talk with Sunak, but will not engage in any major public events with him while he is here. The White House denies that Biden is attending the royal wedding of King Charles III in London due to the negative attitude towards the United Kingdom.

It remains to be seen how successful he will be, however, and some Loyalists have quietly questioned how evenhanded the proudly Irish-American president can be when it comes to matters relating to his beloved ancestral homeland.

That includes the former leader of the Democratic Unionist Party Arlene Foster, who previously served as the first minister of Northern Ireland. She told the local radio earlier that Biden “hates the United Kingdom,” a charge later rejected by senior US officials.

The president has a track record that proves he is not anti-British, says the senior director for Europe at the National Security Council. “The president has been very actively engaged throughout his career, dating back to when he was a senator, in the peace process in Northern Ireland.”

A tour of the Carlingford Castle, where Owen Finnegan met Andrew Biden on his first visit to the USA in 1849–1900

The Carlingford Castle is where Owen Finnegan set out for the US in 1849, and Biden will be able to look out from the castle tower when he tours it.