Joe Biden vowed the US would be a “partner for peace” in Northern Ireland, as he called on political leaders in the region to restore power-sharing at Stormont at an event marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
Speaking at Ulster University in Belfast on Wednesday afternoon, the US president celebrated the 1998 accord, which ended three decades of conflict in Northern Ireland and established a power-sharing executive.
“We forget how hard-earned, how astounding, that peace was at the moment. It shifted the political gravity of the world,” Biden said. “Peace was not inevitable. You can’t ever forget that. There was nothing inevitable about it.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Biden briefly met with the region’s political leaders and publicly called on them to end a long-running stalemate at Stormont. The region’s biggest unionist party has boycotted Northern Ireland’s power-sharing assembly since May 2022 over objections to post-Brexit trading arrangements.
“As a friend, I hope it is not too presumptuous of me to say that I believe democratic institutions established by the Good Friday Agreement remain critical to the future of Northern Ireland,” Biden said.
The US president added that it was not a decision “for me to make” and that he hoped the region’s executive and assembly “will soon be restored”.
After arriving in Belfast late on Tuesday, Biden met UK prime minister Rishi Sunak over a cup of tea in the Northern Irish capital on Wednesday morning.
The relatively short meeting between the two leaders took place less than two months after Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, clinched the Windsor framework, a deal on post-Brexit trading arrangements in Northern Ireland.
The UK government had hoped the Windsor agreement would pave the way for power-sharing to be restored at Stormont ahead of Biden’s visit. But analysts said the persistent political stalemate in the region was an “embarrassment”.
“Politics is dead or dormant in Northern Ireland, there is no local power-sharing and an American president can’t gloss over that fact,” said Jon Tonge, politics professor at the University of Liverpool.
Biden highlighted the economic potential for Northern Ireland in his remarks at Ulster University, telling an audience of dignitaries and local figures: “There are scores of major American corporations wanting to come here, wanting to invest.”
The US president said Joe Kennedy III, his appointed special envoy to Northern Ireland and the grandnephew of former president John F Kennedy, would lead a trade delegation of US executives to the region this year.
Biden will travel to Dublin later on Wednesday for several days of engagements in the Republic of Ireland, including a retracing of the Irish-American president’s ancestry.
The brevity of his trip to Northern Ireland has raised questions among some in the UK about Biden’s commitment to Britain.
Baroness Arlene Foster, a former DUP first minister, told GB News this week that Biden “hates the UK” and is “seen by so many people as pro-republican and pro-nationalist”.
Amanda Sloat, senior director for the US National Security Council, rejected Foster’s comments, saying: “The record of the president shows that he’s not anti-British. The president has been very actively engaged throughout his career . . . in the peace process in Northern Ireland.
“President Biden obviously is a very proud Irish-American. He is proud of those Irish roots,” she added. “But he is also a strong supporter of our bilateral partnership with the UK.”
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