Would-be president’s issue with Good Friday Agreement is bogus
We shouldn’t worry that a “President” Joe Biden might wreck a UK-US trade agreement. After all, the issue he, Nancy Pelosi and four congressmen raise about the danger Brexit poses to the Good Friday Agreement is bogus.
No one in these two islands, except some dissident republican terrorists hoping to reignite a murder campaign, wants a hard border and if the EU insists on it to spite us, the Republic would have to build and operate it.
But while the EU is happy to throw small nations to the dogs, as it did with Greece and Ireland, it would be weird for a democratic administration to use its influence to endanger the peace process. Of course, a Biden presidency could rely on any Irish government to blame the Brits. There is between the Democrats and the Irish a bizarre emotional bond since Ireland fell in love with JFK in the Fifties. I was at university in Dublin when he was assassinated; the mourning was epic. It wasn’t just JFK: Ireland loved Jackie, Bobby, Ted, their kin and any Democratic politician to claim a Kennedy link, especially if they had Irish grandparents and produced the appropriate emotional rhetoric.
The Irish roots of Nixon, Reagan and Bush counted for nothing, but Obama’s maternal great-great-great grandfather made him one of us. Bill Clinton was a hit, for though he scored zero on the ancestor front, he made up for it with the remarkable interest he took in the island, in Northern Ireland, but mainly its nationalist inhabitants.
To oblige Ted Kennedy, who helped get him through the Monica Lewinsky crisis, Clinton made his sister Jean Kennedy Smith ambassador to Ireland, where she embraced the republican agenda and effectively acted as their ambassador to Washington.
Before the Agreement, few US politicians approved of murder in Ireland, but relentless lobbying by Sinn Fein succeeded in making them a serious force in Washington, which imbibed its Most Oppressed People Ever narrative. It’s almost exclusively Democratic politicians who were the most enthusiastic lobbyists for Irish nationalism.
Joe Biden often brags about his pedigree as “a proud descendant of the Finnegans of County Louth”. In a tweet, he said: “We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit. Any trade deal between the US and UK must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”
Does he understand the Agreement? Probably not. Is he a sucker for the republican narrative? Yes.
It is time for UK diplomats to get the rhetoric right and the truth out.