Editorial: It is the UK that has brought Northern Ireland the stability that American companies and other businesses here need

Ulster has links with north America that pre-date the creation of Northern Ireland by more than a century, indeed pre-date the establishment of the United States.

The earliest surviving News Letters from the 1730s have ads for boats going to the new world, which carried Scots Irish emigrants who would help build the society that became the US.

In Northern Ireland we are always honoured to play host to American visitors including, over the last 30 years, four sitting US presidents. The US ambassador to the UK Jane Hartley is the latest such American envoy to take an interest in NI, and this is welcome. She has been speaking about the coming visit of US companies to here in a delegation led by special envoy Joe Kennedy.

Ambassador Hartley has, in a diplomatic way, leaned on the DUP to return to Stormont. She said companies expect a sitting government.

NI should have been under formal direct rule in the last two years when the dysfunctional system of mandatory coalition became temporarily inoperable due to the Irish Sea border. It was London rule of NI that brought the stability companies need, when the UK patiently saw off three decades of IRA terror. Since then a party that wants NI to fail, Sinn Fein, but which has to be in power at all time has kept Stormont down for three years until it got an Irish language act. There was no criticism of SF by London or Washington DC.

Now, amidst other challenges, the DUP is navigating a possible return to power-sharing with a party that won’t condemn Hamas. None of this would be tolerated in America – a US state’s trade falling under the jurisdiction of another nation or Hamas sympathisers in government.

Ambassador Hartley advises Sir Jeffrey to “keep trying”. It seems clear he is trying to reconcile a path for forward for NI with huge demands on unionists that are rarely made of others.