Ben Lowry: Joe Biden did not in Belfast say the things that Irish republicans would have wanted him to say

Many people will scoff at such an analysis, and say that it is a parochial lens through which to view a visit from an American president. In normal times, I would agree and say that Northern Ireland – a place with a small population the size of Kent, and only a third as big of that as Yorkshire’s – is extraordinarily fortunate ever to have had a sitting US president visit. Joe Biden in fact was the fourth such visitor, after Bill Clinton in 1995 (and 1998 and 2000), George Bush in 2003 and Barack Obama in 2013.

This is an astonishing level of visits from recent heads of the world’s superpower. Even the Republic of Ireland, an independent country more than twice our size, had only had visits from President John F Kennedy (1963), Richard Nixon (1970) and Ronald Reagan (1984). I was aged 12 at the time of the latter, and it was exciting enough to think a US president was on the island, even if not in NI.

That I was born in the US no doubt heightens my interest in such events, and I did smile when the US ambassador to the UK, Jane Hartley, who preceded president Biden on stage at the University of Ulster, made reference to Belfast Maine and Belfast Northern Ireland (I sometimes say I was born in Bangor Maine and grew up in Bangor Northern Ireland, which is not in entirely true because I was born in Portland Maine, down the road a bit from Bangor). But as the large crowds that gather on the streets to see US presidents in NI show, you do not have to have be born there to be impressed by such an occasion.

And yet this was potentially a fraught visit for unionists, who feared an exercise in humiliating them over the absence of Stormont when Sinn Fein collapsed the assembly for three years, without a whisper of criticism from London, let alone Washington.

President Biden has identified as Irish over the years, yet some of his better known anti British of anti unionist comments such as spurning a BBC reporter or saying Orange were not welcome were good humoured, albeit gauche. He came on to my radar in 1986 when, as a left wing teen, I was pleased by an anti apartheid outburst of his in the US senate. My sense over the decades was that while he seemed to accept Irish republican distortions about Northern Ireland, as did many Washington politicians, he was not a bitter Irish American – or one of those Capitol Hill politicians who had a close relationship with Sinn Fein.

Only a few years ago did I come across a 1982 video clip that reaffirmed that sense, which showed the then Senator Biden strongly backing the UK in the Falklands War, and describing Britain as one of America’s closest allies. He had a reason for that as one of the more liberal Democratic Party politicians and resented those right-wing Republican Party rivals who were sympathetic to the Argentinian junta, as they were to all anti communist regimes in South America. Even so, Mr Biden was not among those Irish Americans whose hatred of Britain caused them to quietly hope for its defeat in that conflict.

President Biden has immense understanding and experience of American foreign interests and cannot be unaware of the importance of the UK as a US ally. Britain has, if anything, more clout in Washington than it did a few decades ago, given the perils of Russia and China. France, for example, a country of roughly equal global clout to the UK, is not such a reliable friend to America.

Think of the presidential visits to NI that I listed above. The latter three were at the behest of UK prime ministers, all of whom consider Northern Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdoms, as such premiers almost invariably do. And yet, there was a real chance that this invitation would make the local political stalemate worse. However much he respects the UK as an ally, Mr Biden’s greater affinity with Ireland seems real. And while Britain might be a more influential global partner for the US, the Republic nonetheless has influence in Washington massively disproportionate to its size.

Yet Mr Biden didn’t say any of the things Sinn Fein would have wanted him to say. He, and his officials, from Ambassador Hartley to the US economic envoy to NI, Joe Kennedy III (who hails from Irish American royalty), only used the word Northern Ireland when referring to our country. That is not trivial. Note how the Irish national broadcaster RTE and the supposed paper of record, the Irish Times, give subtle weight to the de-legitimising of NI by calling it ‘the North’. And note how – I believe deliberately – Mr Biden’s leading Democratic Party colleague Senator Chuck Schumer recently made a speech in which he used ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘the North’ interchangeably. Suffice to say if Mr Biden had in Belfast on Wednesday had adopted such terminology, downplaying the official name of a country that the Belfast Agreement recognised had a right to exist within the UK by consent, unionism would this weekend be in deeper difficulty than it already is.

Our front page on Thursday led on the fact that Mr Biden talked up the Ulster Scots. Even the phrase is a nod to unionism (Americans call Ulster Protestants the Scots Irish). He joked about his English heritage. He even, when he put pressure on the DUP to return to Stormont, avoided embarrassing them by name and made clear that such choices were a matter for Northern Ireland, not Americans (Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi has rarely shown no such tact).

OK, Mr Biden was diplomatic partly because the Brexit border has been resolved to the satisfaction of nationalist Ireland. And the next day in Dublin he told the UK to engage more with Ireland. That comment showed that his diplomacy in Belfast was not entirely sincere. Engaging with a Republic of Ireland that helped establish a disastrous NI Protocol that it latterly claimed to want to scale down, and which scolds the UK on legacy by making demands on the past that are indistinguishable from those of Sinn Fein, should not be a UK priority. But we should be grateful for small mercies and this week illustrated that America is not inclined to pick a fight with Britain now.