Can Biden break the Stormont stalemate?

Amid the ceremony of Joe Biden’s arrival in Belfast to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, doubts have been raised over whether the US president’s visit might end the stalemate at Stormont.

Biden was met by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he touched down last night at RAF Aldergrove, near Belfast, in Air Force One. The pair shook hands before the American leader was escorted away in his armoured vehicle known as “The Beast”.

Biden has vowed to “keep the peace” as he tours the island of Ireland on a historic four-day trip to mark a quarter of a century since the power-sharing deal was signed, but the visit will be a “hollow celebration”, said Politico, considering that the agreement “is failing” amid an ongoing power-sharing blockade by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

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What did the papers say?

Biden’s arrival to celebrate what the White House hoped would be the return of power sharing at Stormont was meant to be a “moment of triumph”, but the DUP “clearly didn’t get the White House memo”, said the BBC’s Northern Ireland political editor Enda McClafferty.

Currently, the Stormont power-sharing Assembly, which was formed as part of the Good Friday Agreement, is not sitting due to an ongoing blockade by the DUP, the biggest unionist party in Northern Ireland, concerning post-Brexit trading arrangements.

Plans had been made for the president to deliver a speech to the Northern Ireland Assembly chamber upon the return of the assembly members (MLAs), but ahead of his visit, the DUP showed no signs of lifting their Stormont boycott, leaving the president’s grand plans “in tatters”, McClafferty said.

Consequently, his trip has been scaled back, with just one public appearance in Belfast of just over an hour. When asked about his priority for the visit as he boarded Air Force One yesterday, Biden replied: “Make sure the Irish accords and the Windsor agreement stay in place – keep the peace, that’s the main thing.”

Former British PM Tony Blair, who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement, had previously commented that the visit could have a “positive” impact on restoring power-sharing but he warned against putting “futile pressure” on the DUP.

Nationalist leaders have also warned that Biden should be careful not to make any “gaffes” by emphasising his Irish heritage, which would be seized upon by unionists.

The American leader has been hailed as “the most Irish of US presidents” after JFK, The Times said, and Biden “inherited a strong sense of this identity from his mother”.

His family’s history obviously “still rankles”, the newspaper said: in March 2021, Biden recalled that his great-grandfather was forced to leave Ireland “because of what the Brits had been doing”. He added: “They were in real, real trouble. They didn’t want to leave. But they had no choice.”

While most US presidents “pride themselves on being ‘American as apple pie’, Biden identifies as ‘Irish as Paddy’s pig’”, said Lee Cohen, a former adviser on Great Britain to the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, in The Spectator. But “indulging his distant inherited grievance at the cost of a strong relationship with Britain, our most stalwart of allies, is pernicious and self-indulgent”.

What next?

The absence of Rishi Sunak for Biden’s speech at Ulster University “adds to reports of strained relations between Downing Street and the White House over the scaled-down visit”, said McClafferty on the BBC.

Downing Street has been working hard to make the two leaders’ meeting over coffee sound as substantial as possible, characterising the meeting as a “bilateral”, said the Irish Times, rather than merely a “bi-latte” as one White House official had joked.

But while Biden has “repeatedly endorsed” Sunak’s Windsor Framework as a way to overcome the impasse over the Northern Ireland protocol, no one is expecting him to “push the DUP on the issue”, said the Irish newspaper, adding “it is not expected that Biden will seek to ‘twist arms’ in the way that former president Bill Clinton did at key points in the peace process during the 1990s.”

Before he has even finished his tour, the significance of the presidential visit is already being downplayed by unionists.

Last night Ian Paisley Jr, the DUP MP, told TalkTV’s First Edition that Biden’s “real Irish visit” was to the Republic, not Northern Ireland.

“I think this visit has shown we really don’t matter that much,” Paisley said. “He’s here for less than 24 hours, he’s speaking at one meeting. The idea that this is a major intervention of any great economic or political significance, I think we need to dismiss quite quickly.”