KATE HOEY: Any unionist with sense knows Joe Biden's NOT their friend

KATE HOEY: Joe Biden cheerfully posed for pictures with an IRA terrorist. Any unionist with an ounce of sense knows he’s NOT their friend

President Joe Biden has already left Northern Ireland. In truth, he was barely here.

The U.S. leader quit Belfast as soon as he could and jetted to where he really wanted to be: exploring his ancestral roots in the Irish Republic.

Biden’s 17-hour visit to Northern Ireland — he may have spent half that time asleep — ended with a speech at the University of Ulster, carefully scripted to ensure the notoriously gaffe-prone premier didn’t make any diplomatic blunders.

The official reason for his Belfast stopover, of course, was to mark the 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement.

The visit was meant to feature a presidential address to the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont as well as photographs with smiling politicians.

But it wasn’t to be.

Pictured: US President Joe Biden with Gerry Adams and IRA terrorist Rita O’Hare back in September 2017

Pictured: Biden speaks at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant in Dundalk, Ireland, on April 12, 2023

Jaunt

There remains no functioning government in Belfast since the Democratic Unionist Party pulled out of Stormont in protest at the imposition of the Northern Ireland Protocol, the EU trading arrangement agreed by Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, which became law in January 2021.

If Biden’s visit had one purpose, it was to help restore a working government in Northern Ireland. But this, too, was always going to elude him.

The president’s understanding of both the 1998 Agreement and of Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework — signed last month with the EU and aimed at reducing checks on goods arriving in Northern Ireland from Great Britain — is elementary at best.

As he boarded Air Force One for his Dublin jaunt yesterday afternoon, Biden cheerfully told the Press he was going to ensure that what he called the ‘Irish accord’ and ‘Windsor Agreement’ remained in place.

Needless to say, neither of these things exist. He meant the Good Friday Agreement and the Windsor Framework.

His malapropisms do not inspire confidence. Biden’s forbears apparently left Ireland in what he has called ‘coffin ships’ more than 150 years ago.

Nevertheless, he considers himself the most ‘Irish’ president since John F Kennedy — and is also, like his rather more charismatic predecessor, a Catholic.

When Bill Clinton visited Northern Ireland in a ‘swansong’ in 2000, shortly before concluding his presidency, thousands poured into the streets to watch the cavalcade.

At Belfast’s Odyssey Arena, Clinton gave an electrifying speech, telling the crowd how ‘profoundly important peace in Northern Ireland is to the rest of the world’.

With Biden yesterday, the mood was vastly different.

Biden talks to people in a pub in Dundalk, Ireland, April 12, 2023

The motorway near the international airport was closed for three hours before his arrival. Hundreds of police were brought from England to help with security, some happy to tell residents that they too thought the security measures were over the top.

There was no real excitement and many jokes about whether the increasingly elderly president would even understand where he was. (Last September’s visit of King Charles after the death of the Queen aroused genuine excitement — with a fraction of the security.)

Why the apathy? After all, a visit from the leader of the free world to the UK’s smallest country should make any Ulsterman or woman proud — especially given the region’s complicated history, which I know all too well myself.

I was born on a small farm in Co Antrim, where I am writing these words today. Even as a child, I remember the sporadic IRA terrorism of the 1950s.

By the 1970s, the worst era of the Troubles, I had left for London. Going home regularly to visit family, I saw how different life had become.

There were streets you could enter only through a gate and after searches. You had to open your bag for inspection before entering a shop. Bomb scares were a fact of life.

My younger brother was still at school then: trips to the centre of Belfast quickly became too dangerous. The television every night would bring news of another bomb, another soldier shot — and the terrible thing is that it became such a regular occurrence, people often just shrugged.

All this was the background to the Belfast Agreement. I endorsed the accord even if I found it abhorrent that convicted IRA terrorists were to be released from prison as a result of it. I thought it would bring peace — and it did.

But it didn’t bring real community cohesion — as a raft of recent violence has shown.

When I left the Commons in 2019 having spent 30 years as a London MP, I moved back home, though I travel to the Lords most weeks.

So if I and other loyal British citizens could not bring ourselves to cheer Biden this week, it’s clear something has gone badly wrong. The truth is that any unionist with an ounce of sense realises Biden will never be their friend.

Pictured: Biden meets members of the local public on April 12, 2023 in Dundalk, Ireland

Hated

He is an ardent republican, and little time needs to be spent in research to find a litany of his offensive remarks to the unionist community.

He has been pictured smiling alongside former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams — long suspected of involvement in the Provisional IRA, although Adams has always denied this — and draping his arm around the late fugitive IRA terrorist Rita O’Hare in Washington.

Biden also loves to tell the story of his mother Jean who so hated the English that she once slept on the floor of a hotel bedroom rather than rest her head in a bed where the late Queen was said to have slept.

Addressing a St Patrick’s Day event in 2015, he proclaimed: ‘If you’re orange, you’re not welcome here!’ His words were cheered by the hordes of Americans who love to dress up in green, recite Irish poetry and take a misty-eyed, saccharine view of an Ireland that millions of them have never seen.

But these and other remarks are deeply offensive to Unionists who for more than 30 years faced down an IRA terror campaign largely funded by Irish Americans.

What does all this mean for the future of the Union and the prospects of peace and stability?

Well, for as long as Biden is president, any reconciliation at Stormont feels very far off.

Think on this for a moment: there is an internal customs border between two countries of the United Kingdon. Biden appears happy with this.

Biden pauses as he speaks at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant in Dundalk, Ireland, on April 12, 2023

Foreign

The truth is that, even under the Windsor Framework, importing and exporting in Northern Ireland remains highly problematic.

Gardeners buying seeds and plants from specialist sellers in Great Britain need to fill out complex ‘phytosanitary certificates’.

Bring your pet across the Irish Sea and you still need paperwork, including a declaration that Fido will not be taken into the Republic.

Passengers leaving Belfast on flights to the EU can’t buy duty-free goods — but anyone leaving England, Scotland or Wales can.

No self-respecting sovereign country in the world would peacefully allow a part of its territory to be ceded to a foreign institution: the EU and its court. Yet still Biden calls on Unionists to go back to Stormont to implement these rules. Would he say the same to a state in the U.S?

Interest from any well-informed and non-partisan world leader in the peace and prosperity of ‘our wee country’ is always welcome.

But the anti-British and ardently republican Biden is not such a person.

Perhaps, on reflection, it’s just as well he didn’t stay long.

Baroness Hoey was Labour MP for Vauxhall 1989-2019.

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