When President Joe Biden speaks here Wednesday to mark a quarter-century of the Good Friday Agreement, it won’t be from the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly – currently suspended over a Brexit trade dispute – but from a new university campus downtown.
His choice of venue is a symbolic one. While decades of violence between Nationalists and Unionists has been mostly left to another era, the peace is fragile and the politics are broken – making Biden’s speech to students as much about the future of this region as its bloody past.
Departing Washington on Tuesday, Biden described his goal in Northern Ireland bluntly: ensuring the US-brokered accord remains in place.
“Keep the peace, that’s the main thing,” he said before boarding Air Force One. “Keep your fingers crossed.”
Biden’s frank outlook for his one-night visit to Northern Ireland was a reflection of the tensions that remain 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. The agreement called for a power-sharing government between those who want to remain part of the United Kingdom and those who favor a united Ireland.
While Biden was invited to speak from Stormont, the stately parliament building overlooking Belfast, he turned down the offer while the power-sharing arrangement remains mired in dysfunction. The regional government has operated only sporadically since it was formed and hasn’t been in place for more than a year as the main unionist party resists new Brexit-related trade rules.
Both Biden and the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had once hoped those differences might be resolved by the time of Biden’s visit this week. But they weren’t, leaving one of the primary accomplishments of the Good Friday Agreement unfulfilled at just the moment the accord is being celebrated.
Biden’s aides worked around the disappointment by…
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