It is an official visit tinged with personal feelings that Joe Biden began on Tuesday, April 11. Arrived in the evening in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he was welcomed by the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, the American president was to meet, this Wednesday, the leaders of the main political parties in Northern Ireland, while the institutions in this province of the United Kingdom have been paralyzed for a year.
In question, the refusal of the Democratic Unionist Party to agree with the independence party of Sinn Fein on the “Windsor framework”, a cooperation plan established jointly by the European Union and the United Kingdom, supposed to facilitate trade. between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Because if, after Brexit, the United Kingdom left the European internal market for goods, Northern Ireland remained there.
A visit under close surveillance
It is therefore in a context of great tension that Joe Biden travels to the Irish province of the United Kingdom first, and then to Ireland, to carry out a joint action: to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreements of April 10 1998, and promote the “Windsor framework”. If the American presence makes sense, it is because Washington took part in the negotiations leading to the end of thirty years of civil war, and that the current disorder worries it. The British intelligence services have also raised the level of threat in Northern Ireland, fearing the preparation of an attack, as tend to show the Molotov cocktails launched Monday against the police, on the sidelines of a demonstration of opponents to the “Windsor setting”. Police also said they found four homemade bombs on Tuesday in a cemetery near the town of Londonderry, about 100 miles from Windsor.
Calmer should be his stay in Ireland, which begins this Wednesday. On this occasion, he will travel to County Louth, where his great-grandfather was born. Joe Biden is only the second president of the United States of Irish and Catholic descent, after Kennedy, and he is proud of it. For example, he likes to quote Irish poets in his speeches, and has adopted the code name “Celtic” to communicate with his security service. This Thursday, he will meet the president and the head of the Irish government, before speaking in front of the Parliament, in a speech where will be exposed the American-Irish friendship and cooperation projects between Dublin and Washington, signs of the links of the past. and buildings of the future.
