How Joe Biden’s ‘special relationship’ with Ireland affects Britain

There is a long history of US presidents trying to find some distant Irish ancestry to burnish their credentials, capture the Irish vote and indulge in some back-slapping with self-consciously heavyweight senators of proud Irish extraction.

Some, such as John Fitzgerald Kennedy, did not have to glance very far back (only as far as his grandfather). Others such as Barack Obama had to make more of stretch. “President O’Bama” had no problem posing with a pint of Guinness on St Patrick’s Day (Obama managed to discover a maternal great-great-great grandfather from Moneygall, on the Tipperary-Offaly border).

Joe Biden is famously proud of his Irish roots and is the first American president to really weaponise them in international relations. The clip of him rushing down a corridor declining a request for a quote for the BBC with a smile and the quip “I’m Irish” was jokey but revealing. Some months ago, he made it apparent that the United States stood by the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, the Irish peace process and, indeed, the latest bulwark of that historic achievement, the Northern Ireland Protocol in the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement. It is unusual for a US president to respond to rioting in another country, strictly speaking an internal affair, but president Biden felt no inhibitions in intervening when he saw the images emanating from the Shankill.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said: “We are concerned by the violence in Northern Ireland and we join the British, Irish, and Northern Irish leaders in their calls for calm. We remain steadfast supporters of a secure and prosperous Northern Ireland in which all communities have a voice and enjoy the gains of the hard-won peace.”

Though benevolent-sounding and superficially platitudinous, the timing and the very act of commenting in this way indicates that the US retains an intense interest in the Irish question. Interestingly, Biden is unusual in seeming to take more interest in the peace process than in the Middle East, where he has appointed no envoy nor launched any initiatives. It would not be surprising if he appointed a personal representative to lobby for peace and dialogue.

The president has never made much secret of his lack of enthusiasm for Brexit, in stark contrast to Donald Trump. He has also taken an unusually vocal line in backing the current agreed arrangements for an economic border in the Irish Sea. Though he is too wily a statesman to need to say so openly, there will be no UK-US free trade agreement until and unless interested parties in Ireland signal their approval. President Trump might well have played things a little differently but in reality no US leader can afford to offend the Irish lobby. It is a fact of political life in Washington, and, increasingly, in London, Belfast, Dublin and Brussels.

Joe Biden can claim ancestors in County Mayo and County Louth, so the west and the north of the Republic. One of Biden’s great-great grandfathers, a Patrick Blewitt, was born in 1832 in the grand town of Ballina, Mayo, and left in 1850, aged 17 for America. Another of Biden’s great-great grandfathers was an Owen Finnegan, from the Cooley Peninsula, County Louth. More than that, Biden seems to self-identify as culturally Irish, open and emotional however tenuous the ethnic ties.

Only Bill Clinton can rival Joe Biden for his commitment to the Irish peace process. It was kick-started by an application from Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams for a visa to visit the US in 1994. The British had usually opposed this, not least because it was used for Republican fundraising but prime minister John Major suggested president Clinton use the visa as leverage to get Adams to back the recent Downing Street Declaration by Major and his Irish counterpart, Albert Reynolds. Adams equivocated but Clinton gave him the visa anyway and talking, and a role for Washington, was established.

For many years in the 1990s, working first with Major and then more intensively with Tony Blair, Clinton took risks and pushed the terrorists towards disarmament and the politicians towards reconciliation. It was a time when the IRA was still blowing up shopping malls and peace seemed a very long way off. Clinton appointed a special envoy, Senator George Mitchell, and the tortuous, stumbling halting road to a lasting stalemate continued. By the time Blair become prime minister in 1997 there was still enough momentum to justify the effort, and Clinton and Blair were in almost constant touch. Blair later recalled: “It was something of a mission all the way through for Bill Clinton during those days. I phoned him virtually at every point of the day and night; he immediately got what the politics was. I don’t know how many calls he made to the various leaders but you know they were crucial really.”

For his part, Clinton regarded the Good Friday Agreement as the greatest foreign policy achievement of his presidency. You get the impression that president Biden places its preservation as one of his more pressing priorities. The British-American “special relationship” has been joined by an Irish-American one.