Biden’s Ireland visit to keep eye on ‘the Brits’
President claims Good Friday anniversary trip was to prevent any ‘screwing around’ with treaty
JOE BIDEN has said he went to Ireland last month to make “sure the Brits didn’t screw around” with the Good Friday Agreement.
The US president visited Northern Ireland and the Republic during the 25th anniversary week of the Good Friday Agreement in April. Mr Biden said he went for “the Irish Accords, to make sure they weren’t – the Brits didn’t screw around ... didn’t walk away from their commitments”.
His latest criticism of Britain came during a fund-raising speech in New York at a Democratic National Committee reception on Wednesday.
The president and other senior Democrats saw Brexit as a threat to the peace process because it risked the need for a return to a hard border on the island of Ireland. Before the new Windsor Framework was agreed, the President warned Britain it could forget about a UK-US trade deal if it carried out its threat to tear up the Irish Sea border treaty with the EU.
In Belfast, Mr Biden urged the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to back Rishi Sunak’s new Brexit deal for Northern Ireland and raised the prospect of billions of US investment if they ended their boycott of Stormont.
Almost immediately after leaving Northern Ireland, where he was accused of hating Britain by DUP politicians, Mr Biden made a gaffe while visiting Dundalk in the Republic.
He mixed up the New Zealand All Blacks with the Black and Tans, who were former British soldiers infamous for reprisals against Irish citizens during Ireland’s war of independence.
Paying tribute to Rob Kearney, a distant cousin who played rugby for Ireland, Mr Biden said: “He was a hell of a rugby player, and he beat the hell out of the Black and Tans.”
Mr Biden later acknowledged the gaffe in a speech to the Irish parliament, correcting himself to laughter from politicians in Dublin. But he also went on to rebuke Mr Sunak for not working closely enough with Dublin to get Stormont back up and running.
Mr Biden is a Catholic who is fiercely proud of his Irish heritage and is suspected by some unionists of wanting a united Ireland. His ancestors fled a famine-ravaged Ireland for a better life in the US in about 1851. The President has said they left in a “coffin ship” because of “what the Brits were doing”.
He says his hero is Wolfe Tone, an 18th-century Irishman who was sentenced to death for leading a revolt against British rule. As a senator in 1985, Mr Biden opposed and watered down an extradition treaty with Britain that would have made it easier to extradite IRA terrorists.
In his New York speech on Wednesday, Mr Biden, who is running for a second term, warned against the prospect of Donald Trump winning the next presidential election.
He said that he told European leaders at the G7 meeting in Britain in 2021 that “America was back”. But he revealed: “Macron looked at me, and he said, ‘For how long?’”
Mr Biden added that Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, asked him what America would think if British voters broke down the doors of the House of Commons to overturn an election. He said the world was “stunned” after the Jan 6 riots in Washington.