As Biden Sets Sights for Ireland, Dreams of Unification, and Threats of Violence, Refuse To Die
The president will visit his ancestral home to mark one of the 20th century’s signature peace accords.
President Biden’s upcoming trip to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement will take him to both Northern Ireland and the Republic. It is meant to be a victory lap that doubles as a homecoming for America’s second Irish-American president, but it transpires against a backdrop of simmering tensions and an uncertain fate for the Emerald Isle.
Mr. Biden will first visit Belfast, and then proceed to Dublin, County Louth, and County Mayo. He will make an appearance at Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of Ireland’s president, and address the Oireachtas, Ireland’s parliament. He will deliver an address at Ballina, his ancestral home on Ireland’s western coast.
The Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, brought an end to the 30-year spasm of violence known as the Troubles. Casualties are estimated at 3,500 dead and more than 50,000 wounded, as the Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army battled the British Army and paramilitary groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Association.
The Agreement, signed by Prime Minister Blair and the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and mediated by a special envoy, George Mitchell, it ordained that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom and provided for amnesty and disarmament. It provided for a referendum should Northern Ireland ever seek to join the Republic.
The roots of the Troubles snake back a century, to the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922, the culmination of a revolutionary push to toss off the yoke of English rule that began with the Easter Rising of 1916. The Free State, and subsequently, the Republic, encompassed only 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties.
The six counties of Northern Ireland — historically Protestant, loyal to the Crown — are ruled from a devolved assembly called the Stormont. The recently concluded Windsor Framework, named so because it was celebrated over tea with England’s Sovereign, clarifies provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol relating to the movement of goods between Northern Ireland — part of England’s Brexit — and the Republic, loyal to Brussels.
The Framework comes after months of political stalemate in the North, with the Democratic Unionist Party bringing the Stormont to a halt after Sinn Féin, a republican and democratic socialist party, won a plurality of seats in elections last May. While Sinn Féin is not in power in the Republic, current opinion polls have it surging, garnering 35 percent support. The other main parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, clock in at 21 and 16 percent respectively.
The specter of reunification — that old dream of 1916 — appears to be coming into sharper definition. Sinn Féin’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, recently told Der Spiegel that she hoped it would be achieved in “an orderly, planned, democratic and peaceful manner.” Of the Unionists in the North, she predicted that “they are now British living in a partitioned Ireland. In the future, they would be British in a united Ireland.”
Not everyone in the North shares that vision. While peace has largely held, the prospect of violence looms. Ahead of Mr. Biden’s visit, the Police Service of Northern Ireland cites “very strong” intelligence that there “may be attempts to draw police into serious public disorder and to use that then as a platform to launch terrorist attacks on police as well.”
The British domestic counterintelligence and security agency, MI5, last week raised its threat assessment level for Northern Ireland to “severe” from “substantial.” That means the spooks judge an attack to be “highly likely.” February saw the attempted murder of a senior detective in County Tyrone, John Caldwell.
A typed note that appeared on a wall close to the site of the attack on Mr. Caldwell, at Londonderry, claimed that “an active service unit of the IRA was in position to target the enemy within our chosen kill zone.” It also asserted that “The Irish Republican Army claims responsibility for the military operation targeting senior Crown Force member John Caldwell.”
Mr. Biden, or his speechwriters, could do well to recall the address that his childhood hero, President Kennedy, spoke to the Oireachtas in 1963, during his triumphant trip just months before he was slain at Dallas. He told lawmakers that “Ireland’s hour has come. You have something to give to the world — and that is a future of peace with freedom.”
