Editorial: President Biden is welcome to Northern Ireland, but unionists won't be able to stand grinning with him as if the Irish Sea border did not happen

​President Joe Biden will visit Northern Ireland for April’s Belfast Agreement 25th anniversary.

​It is a remarkable honour for an American president to visit a country as small as NI. No White House incumbent visited a nation as then powerful as the UK until 1918, almost 150 years after the Declaration of Independence. This was partly due to primitive transport and an awkward history between Britain and early America, but also reflected the fact that US leaders are too busy running a superpower to visit other countries often. Yet Mr Biden will be NI’s fourth presidential guest in 30 years.

But while such a venerable visitor is deeply welcome, the highly political nature of this visit cannot be denied, nor its unfortunate background. For months we heard that Mr Biden would only visit if the protocol was sorted (ie to his satisfaction) and so it has been. The Irish Sea border has been modified to assuage unionist concerns, which is very welcome, but it is fundamentally still an arrangement that has its primary goal keeping nationalist Ireland happy. NI is outside of the UK internal market to ensure not even CCTV at the land border.

Unionists are right to take time studying the new deal, but delay has allowed its advocates to over sell it grossly. Meanwhile, Irish America has heaped pressure on London to resolve Troubles legacy (which again means to republican satisfaction, which is only possible via structures that hound UK security forces and vindicate Irish terror).

This will be tricky for unionists. We must woo our American friends and remind them we are part of a UK that is a key US ally. They can’t stand sourly beside Mr Biden, but nor can they join any gushing about a 1998 accord that has been distorted, with the help of Biden’s Democratic Party, as if it is an Irish nationalist document.