A homecoming and reckoning await Biden in Ireland with spotlight on trip
Christian Datoc
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President Joe Biden will travel to Ireland on Tuesday, one day after the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of violence on the Emerald Isle.
Biden is the eighth president to visit Ireland but just the second Irish Catholic to hold the nation’s highest office. On the trip, he will hold bilateral meetings with Irish President Michael Higgins, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who visited the White House on St. Patrick’s Day in March, and United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
BIDEN’S IRELAND TRIP COMES WITH COMPLICATIONS BELOW THE SURFACE
The president recently traveled to Poland and Ukraine to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian invasion and is expected to take part in the G-7 meeting in Japan. White House aides said those meetings and the Ireland trip are part of the president’s broader efforts to assure foreign allies of the United States’s place in the global community as the president moves toward the announcement of his 2024 reelection campaign later this year.
However, Biden’s visit comes amid renewed tension in Northern Ireland. The power-sharing plan brokered by the Good Friday Agreement, which allows Northern Ireland a degree of sovereignty while remaining part of the U.K., is failing following Brexit, which prompted pro-British Democratic Unionists to refuse to form a unity government after the past Stormont election.
And though the Irish Republican Army bombings that characterized the Troubles have largely ceased following the accords, the terror warning for Northern Ireland was raised to “severe” ahead of Biden’s visit after law enforcement uncovered a bombing plan by the New IRA in Londonderry.
“The president is grateful for the work that Northern Ireland security forces have done and continue to do to protect all communities and certainly the people in Northern Ireland. And he’s, again, very much looking forward to going to Belfast,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters during Monday’s briefing when asked about the threats of violence. “The timing of this is really timed around the 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, an agreement that the president has a personal connection to and obviously is very, very proud to see has really changed lives and livelihoods in Northern Ireland. And again, that’s really what’s driving this.”
Past diplomatic breakthroughs, such as the Good Friday Agreement, have all but disappeared in the 21st century. The president thus far has failed to broker a new nuclear deal with Iran, is stuck firmly between escalating violence in the Isreali-Palestinian conflict, and the billions worth of security and humanitarian aid the U.S. and allies are providing Ukraine have blunted but not reversed Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s invasion of its Western-aligned neighbor.
The White House even declined to set expectations for Biden’s bilateral meetings with Irish and British leaders, essentially scuttling hopes for reaching a new trade deal with the U.K. in the near future.
Still, White House officials told reporters Monday that Biden “is very much looking forward” to the trip and “celebrating the deep, historic ties that our two countries and our two people continue to share.”
In addition to his political meetings, Biden will deliver remarks at Ulster University, tour Carlingford Castle, and head to his family’s ancestral homes in County Mayo and Louth, a possible highlight for a president who frequently touts his heritage and peppers in Irish poetry to formal remarks.
“Growing up Irish American gave me the pride that spoke to both sides of the Atlantic, heart and soul that drew from the old and new,” Biden joked during Varadkar’s White House visit. “I often say: We Irish are the only people in the world who are nostalgic for the future.”
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Biden is even expected to speak on Friday at St. Muredach’s Cathedral, a near-mythological site on his path to the White House. The president’s great-great-great-grandfather, Edward Blewitt, sold 27,000 bricks to the cathedral’s builders, and he used the proceeds to purchase tickets for his family to move to the U.S. in 1851, according to White House aides.