Editorial: President Biden is most welcome in Northern Ireland, but partisan American interventions are not

​The prospect the US President visiting Northern Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement has been played down by one of his allies.

A Democratic Party congressman called Brendan Boyle, who has Irish republican sympathies, said that although President Joe Biden is keen “to visit Ireland”, a trip will probably not take place before April.

The Belfast Agreement was signed on April 10, 1998, creating a new power-sharing executive and assembly at Stormont. There have been suggestions that President Biden would visit Northern Ireland to mark the anniversary.

Everyone in the province should welcome the prospect of a US president visiting NI. It is hard to think of a similarly small country in the world that is so fortunate as to have such high-level American interest in it.

The links between Ulster and the US go back to the very foundation of the latter, when many Scots Irish settlers were leading lights in the fledgling superpower. There has been a consulate in Belfast from 1796.

But there has been ugly talk around this particular suggested US trip. It has been said that President Biden wanted the UK to get the protocol sorted and Stormont restored before he visited. Whether or not he actually said that, or whether partisan Irish Americans claimed as much, is unclear. Let us hope he didn’t.

In the 1990s the US Democratic Party under Bill Clinton built trust by dropping its pro Irish nationalist stance on NI, as the Labour Party ended its united Ireland aim. But anger at Brexit has threatened a return to anti unionist thinking.

That would be regrettable. A more thoughtful US approach would be to recognise how, as this 25th anniversary of 1998 approaches, the principle of consent, which got unionists to back the deal, has been gravely damaged by the protocol.