The Irish are coming! Biden visits Northern Ireland
This most Irish of US presidents visited Northern Ireland this week; how did his image play out, and was there any progress?
Joseph Robinette Biden Junior is the president’s full name. Robinette is his paternal grandmother’s maiden name, a French surname originally, but its arrival in his moniker is mysterious. With typical vagueness he once told reporters, “Allegedly the Robinettes came over with Lafayette and never went home”. Biden, by contrast, is an English name which may originate as far back as the Anglo-Saxons, or may derive from the Old French word “boton”, or button, and denote a button-maker. In any event, it appears first in English records in the 13th century, and the president’s ancestor William Biden, a stonemason from Westbourne in Sussex, emigrated to Maryland in his early 30s in 1820.
And yet, if you know only one thing, just one single fact about the 46th President of the United States, it is that he is “Irish”.
Let me set out some parameters. There is a great deal I could say about President Biden, whom I don’t rate particularly highly, and his approach to foreign policy, but this is not the place. What I want to do is look briefly at the extent and use of Biden’s Irish heritage, the effect it has had, and what influence he can have on the peace process in Northern Ireland, like many of his predecessors.
When we think of Irish-American presidents, or politicians more broadly, the epitome is, of course, President John F. Kennedy. No fewer than half of all US presidents have Irish heritage, and yet, until Kennedy’s arrival, the ancestors of those presidents came almost exclusively from Ulster. Jackson, Polk, Buchanan, Johnson, Grant, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt (T.), Wilson and Truman could all trace their families to the north-eastern province of Ireland, while Taft had roots in Louth, abutting Ulster in the north of Leinster. And those presidents came from Protestant stock, too, generally Presbyterian with a smattering of Anglicanism and Methodism.
Kennedy changed all that. The first Catholic president, his ancestry and religion were seen as possible handicaps when he declared his candidacy in 1960. He was not just Irish but Boston Irish, and that was controversial. The city had once been a stronghold of the Puritan aristocracy—the Boston Brahmins—and the Irish had only arrived in significant numbers in the middle of the 19th century, particularly after the beginning of the Famine in Ireland. Distrust and resentment of Catholic Irish immigration led to the foundation in 1844 of the Native American Party (otherwise known as the Know-Nothings) which campaigned under the banner of “Temperance, Liberty, and Protestantism”. This fierce controversy was still just within living memory when Kennedy was born in 1917, and, although his paternal grandfather had served in both houses of the Massachusetts state legislature and his maternal grandfather had represented the state in Washington, they were both children of Irish immigrants, as were their wives.
Although his family was wealthy and influential on both sides, Kennedy changed the narrative of Irish heritage. After 1960, being Irish-American meant coming from a close-knit Roman Catholic community, soberly and respectably pious but with the easy charm and gregariousness of the Irish stereotype. But it also spoke, however softly or loudly, of immigrant roots and eventual triumph over dreadful misfortune (for what misfortune could be more dreadful than the Great Famine, known by the Irish as An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger?). And it came with its own soft-focus comfort, the warmth of stories of the old country, mournful fiddle tunes and hard men tearful after too much beer or whiskey. It was prêt-à-porter, electorally powerful and presentationally priceless. After Kennedy, every president would be in its thrall, and all but one would discover his own Irish roots, from the Regans of Tipperary to Barack Obama’s ancestor Fulmuth Kearney, an Irish immigrant from Offaly. In the last 60 years, the only president unable to prove a family connection to the Emerald Isle has been the one who arguably had more influence there than any, and who seemed by temperament still to have the whiff of peat smoke about him: Bill Clinton.
Joe Biden has immersed himself in his Irishness. And his links to Ireland are substantial: 10 of his 16 great-great-grandparents were born there, according to the Irish Family History Centre in Dublin, making him, for what these fractions are worth, five-eights Irish: essentially half. The phenomenon of the “hyphenated American” is a familiar one: Irish-American, Italian-American, African-American. And it is a kind of shorthand, denoting not only lineage and characteristics, but also, as in the 1899 Puck cartoon above, voting habits and loyalties. Biden often takes this exercise in identity one step further, however, eliding or eliminating the “American” aspect and describing himself simply as “Irish”.
Usually it is done is a rather straightforward, simplistic way, reinforcing a (benign) stereotype of Irish-Americans. A teetotaller, he has jokingly described himself as “not really Irish” on the grounds that he has “never had a drink”, but even that prima facie denial only underlines his identity. When he visited County Louth as vice-president in 2016, someone called to him “Welcome to Ireland, Joe”, to which Biden swiftly replied “You mean ‘Welcome home’”. Mixed with charming self-deprecation, it is a message hammered home again and again; at a recent St Patrick’s Day parade, Biden joked “I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid”. Not everyone thought the remark was helpful.
The president has also steeped himself in the legendary lyricism of Ireland. As a child, Joe Biden suffered from a severe stutter, but he trained himself out of it, in the tale he tells, not through professional therapy but by reading aloud from his uncle’s volume of poetry by W.B. Yeats. When he accepted the nomination of his party for president at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in August 2020, in a speech wringing with emotion, he quoted the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney, promising his audience that “The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up/And hope and history rhyme”.
So deeply is Biden’s Irishness ingrained in his image that other will fill in the gaps for him. Despite his childhood speech impediment, the president is by nature a talker, a habit which was certainly not curbed by his 36 years representing Delaware in the US Senate. Howard Fineman of Newsweek described the young Biden as “a loquacious loudmouth”. Analysing his political gifts, Fineman continued:
Joe Biden is not an academic, he’s not a theoretical thinker, he’s a great street pol. He comes from a long line of working people in Scranton—auto salesmen, car dealers, people who know how to make a sale. He has that great Irish gift.
He is an emotional man. This too he dresses in green. He and his staff refer to his “black Irish moods”, while E.J. Dionne, contrasting Biden with his chief, Barack Obama, said Joe “is good at malarkey, and malarkey is not something Obama is given to”. Ahead of Biden’s current visit to Northern Ireland and the Republic, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, called the president “unmistakably a son of Ireland”. The president himself, in his 2017 memoir Promise Me, Dad, told the following story:
One of my colleagues in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once made this simple but profound observation about us Irish: ‘To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life’.
Even when he expressed his profound attachment to the state he represented in the Senate, Biden reached reflexively for a comparison which invoked his identity.
James Joyce was said to have told a friend that when it comes his time to pass, when he dies he said Dublin will be written on my heart, well, excuse my emotion, but when I die, Delaware will be written on my heart.
This is all folksy and charming and playing in part to a political constituency, but it has its sharper edges. He uses the analogy of British governance of Ireland to pledge fellow feeling with minorities across the world. When he visited Jerusalem in 2022, he attempted to connect with the experience of the Palestinian population through supposedly shared suffering.
My background and the background of my family is Irish American, and we have a long history of—not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish-Catholics over the years, for 400 years.
It has also been suggested, not without reason, that his thorough creation of an Irish identity has instilled in him an instinctive antipathy towards the British. After his election victory in 2020, a BBC journalist asked the president-elect for a quick word for his employer. Biden’s response was swift and sharp: “The BBC? I’m Irish!” It is not at all clear that he was joking. Inevitably he was sympathetic to the Republican cause in Northern Ireland in his earlier career; in 1986, he had opposed the ratification of an agreement between the US and the United Kingdom which allowed the extradition of wanted criminals including those accused of terrorist offences for the Provisional IRA. During a Senate debate, he said angrily, “If we ratify this treaty, we will be admitting that the justice system in Northern Ireland is fair—a notion I absolutely abhor.” His reputation has been such that the White House was forced to deny that the president was “anti-British” in advance of his visit to Northern Ireland this week.
American sympathy for Republicans since the beginning of the Troubles has always irritated and offended Unionists. As early as 1969, when the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland gave way to a wider and more violent conflict, Irish-Americans founded the Irish Northern Aid Committee, better known as NORAID. Its mission statement committed it to “the establishment of a socialist and democratic 32-county Ireland”; and it pledged to uphold the principles of the Proclamation of the Republic issued in 1916 and read outside the General Post Office on O’Connell Street in Dublin by Padraig Pearse (who is widely held to have been its main author). Although NORAID was committed to “peaceful means” of achieving its objectives, the money that it raised, ostensibly for humanitarian relief, was believed by the governments of the US, the UK and Ireland to have been used by the IRA for military purposes, including procuring arms.
At its height, NORAID had around 80 chapters on the East Coast of the US and sold a a pro-IRA “newspaper”, The Irish Weekly (not to be confused with the defunct Ulster-based publication of the same name). Evidence published by NORAID itself in the 1970s suggests that the organisation was raising something like $300,000 a year, hardly a king’s ransom but enough for a few magazines and ounces of plastique. Last year two American authors, Nate Lavey and Michael McCanne, made a podcast for Novara Media on NORAID, entitled Foreign Agent. Interviewed for The Irish Examiner, the creators were in no doubt about the significance of the group and its fundraising. McCanne was emphatic: “whether you agree or disagree with what these activists did, they knew what they were doing. They were not duped or fooled into supporting the Provisional IRA.”
The president was also part of a group of Democratic legislators who pressed President Clinton to grant Gerry Adams, then head of Sinn Féin, a US visa in 1994. The administration had been reluctant to allow Adams to enter the country; in January of that year, the IRA’s Army Council had rejected the Downing Street Declaration, which effectively conceded that Northern Ireland’s constitutional status would not change except by consent, and the movement remained active until calling a ceasefire in August. The British government was outraged; the Northern Ireland secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, had told the US ambassador in London, Raymond Seitz, that giving Adams a visa “would be completely wrong—in NI terms and also dangerous in terms of the US/UK relationship”. The prime minister, John Major, was said to be so angry at the decision that he could not speak to President Clinton for some hours after it was announced. In Washington, the State Department was sympathetic to the British position, but it was clear that, among other factors, pressure from Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Biden himself had been critical in moving things Adams’s way.
For all of these reasons, Joe Biden’s accession to the presidency in 2021 and his visit to Northern Ireland this week have been eyed warily by Unionism. It is true that Biden has made his support for the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement abundantly clear again and again (though one should recall that a substantial section of the Unionist community did not support the agreement when it was published 25 years ago, including the Democratic Unionist Party). It is also true that, however sour a taste in the mouth it leaves for some Unionists, the involvement of the US government in the peace process as a whole has been vital and heavy for decades. The all-party talks which produced the B/GFA had, after all, been chaired by an American, George Mitchell, Bill Clinton’s special envoy for Northern Ireland and a former Democratic senator from Maine.
(I met Senator Mitchell once, when I was an undergraduate and he came to St Andrews to receive an honorary degree. His father was Irish by birth but he was adopted by a Lebanese-American couple and raised as a Maronite Catholic, a church founded in the 4th century AD by a monk who was a friend of St John Chrysostom, and which is strong in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and parts of Israel, but is in communion with the Roman Church. Mitchell is quiet and unassuming, witty but a good listener and easy to warm to. I could see why he had been chosen for the bed of nails which was the peace process.)
President Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland has come at a challenging time (though in Northern Ireland, when are they anything else?). The protracted crisis over the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol has been to some extent defused by the agreement between the UK and the European Commission of the Windsor Framework, a “best attempt” at regularising relations between post-Brexit Northern Ireland and the Republic, particularly in terms of trade. But the Northern Ireland Assembly remains in abeyance, despite elections in May last year in which, for the first time, Sinn Féin emerged as the largest party. The assembly cannot sit until parties agree to nominate a speaker on a cross-community basis, and the DUP has refused to participate in that process so long as the Northern Ireland Protocol remained in place. In fairness, the assembly and the Northern Ireland Executive drawn from it—“the institutions”, as they are simply known by veterans—have been suspended for a little over a third of their lives since 1998, so this is not an unprecedented crisis.
There were hopes that the Windsor Framework would satisfy the DUP’s concerns and bring the party back into the democratic process, but in the end its MPs voted against the measure in the House of Commons last month, although it was overwhelmingly approved overall. The DUP may be criticised by the British government and other political parties, but it seems that its leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, knows his audience: last month, a poll for The Belfast Telegraph suggested three-quarters of DUP voters would oppose the Windsor Framework in a referendum. It is not easy to see where the party goes from here, though isolation holds no terrors for the creation of Ian Paisley.
As President Biden’s visit, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement on 10 April, drew closer, it became increasingly clear that there would be no resolution to the impasse before the event, as many had hoped. The timetable has simply been too compressed: the Windsor Framework was only signed on 27 February and ratified by Parliament on 22 March, with a great deal of legalistic head-scratching and tooth-sucking by the DUP and other groups like the Conservative Party’s now-shrunken European Research Group. The implicit desire not to fight in front of visitors has not been sufficiently persuasive.
Has Biden’s visit helped the process? For the reasons we have explored, the US president is not hugely popular in the more intransigent sections of the Unionist community. If Biden is regarded as emotionally committed to the Republican cause, his secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, who was in charge of strategic planning for the National Security Council from 1994 to 1998 and then European and Canadian affairs from 1998 to 2001, has played the straightest of bats in following the White House line: he had continually reaffirmed the central importance of the B/GFA and, through it, the “political and economic well-being of Northern Ireland”, as he told the BBC in 2021. But in the politics of Ulster, words can have many meanings, and Blinken’s repeated policy has left a number of more detailed questions unanswered.
On Wednesday, President Biden gave an address at the University of Ulster’s new Belfast Campus on York Street. He began positively, remarking that “the dividends of peace are all around us”, and noting that the heavily glazed building in which the speech was delivered would not have been built in bomb-raddled Belfast when he had visited in 1991. He went on to praise the achievement of the architects of the B/GFA in 1998 and remind his audience that the American people supported them and longed for the peace which the agreement had brought to continue. In the rather torture phrase “Your history is our history. But even more importantly your future is America’s future”, he emphasised the economic potential of Northern Ireland if peace was maintained, and noted that Northern Ireland’s GDP had doubled in the 25 years since the agreement.
However, Biden acknowledged the challenges to democracy, citing the attempted coup of 6 January 2021 in Washington. On the critical issue of the institutions, he was absolutely clear:
An effective devolved government reflects the people of Northern Ireland and is accountable to them. A government that works to find ways through hard problems together is going to draw even greater opportunity in this region. So I hope the Assembly and the Executive will soon be restored.
He invoked the regenerative spirit of Easter to hope for better times ahead, and emphasised that political progress was the key to greater prosperity: “So let’s celebrate 25 extraordinary years by recommitting to renewal, repair.”
Has the president moved the dial? Is the political process further on than it was before his visit? Has American influence been helpful? We must be careful not to expect too much. President Biden is an old man (he will be 81 this autumn) and, while his emotional nature can summon up moving phrases and heartfelt feelings, he is not characterised by energy and dynamism in the way that President Clinton was, nor does he have President Obama’s lofty sense of the span of human history.
The DUP reacted relatively mildly to the president’s address. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said it was “good” to see Biden in Northern Ireland and described his speech as “measured”, surely not an adjective often deployed to refer to the president. But there was little in the way of optimism. Donaldson characterised the address as having looked back over 25 years of progress rather than looking forward, warned that “We made clear it is not his job, as we heard in his speech, to take decisions for political leaders in Northern Ireland”, and said that the presence of Biden “doesn’t change the political dynamic in Northern Ireland”.
Essentially Donaldson’s message was that it was all fun and games to see the carnival of a presidential visit, but that his party wants and needs to engage with one interlocutor above all, the UK government. “I am clear what needs to happen to make the progress we all desire. It is very much for the UK government to honour the commitments to the people of Northern Ireland.”
Where does this leave us? For all the hullaballoo and, to use Biden’s favoured word, “malarkey”, we have not made much progress. The trade border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains a sticking point for the DUP and they are still set against compromise on that issue. Negotiation has not budged them, as we have seen with the Windsor Framework, and they have not been dazzled or swayed by the stardust of Washington DC. Nor is it likely, on current form, that they will be shamed into action by accusations of intransigence. They have been here before, they know what isolation feels like, and they do not mind it so much.
It is hard to see what else the US administration can do. Biden has appointed a new special envoy for Northern Ireland, with weary predictability a member of the Kennedy family: Joseph Kennedy III, grandson of Robert Kennedy and grand-nephew of John F. Kennedy. The envoy is not without experience. He was a public prosecutor in Massachusetts before spending eight years in the US House of Representatives. But his ability to influence the DUP and therefore revitalise the democratic process in Northern Ireland would seem limited, unless he could somehow show that there were concrete economic benefits to be had but only if the assembly and executive were restarted. Such clarity is rare in politics, and as rare as rocking horse shit in Northern Ireland politics.
It seems extraordinary to conclude that this most Irish of American presidents has come to Northern Ireland (and the Republic), and, when all the dust has settled and the craic has faded, not much has changed. His fine words about progress and hope and prosperity are admitted by most, but the goal of political stability which underpins economic success remains no closer than it was. But Biden is an optimist, so we should, perhaps, concede no harm has been done and matters are no worse. In Ireland, that is sometimes a lot.