Editorial: ​President Joe Biden should indeed be made aware of the Disappeared

​Next week the leader of the free world will visit Northern Ireland.

It is a very great honour for the province to receive a sitting president of the United States of America.

The visit is of course complicated by the fact that the occasion is the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, celebrated yesterday by one of the key parties to the deal - the Ulster Unionist Party.

In that accord, David Trimble led the unionist acceptance of the political wing of terrorists into government.

It was an act of massive political generosity.

The outworking of the Belfast Agreement has been fraught with difficulty, not least because Sinn Fein has become the largest party.

The two leading parties of 1998, the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP, have long since been supplanted by the DUP and SF.

There was a period in the 1990s when the US Democratic Party, which President Biden represents, dropped its historical position of support for Irish nationalists, and won the respect of unionists by taking a more neutral approach (in much the same way that the Labour Party in the UK dropped its policy of arguing for an all Ireland state).

Regrettably, after Brexit much of the Democratic Party establishment has reverted to a partisan stance on NI. This is quite bad enough when it comes to constitutional matters such as the Northern Ireland Protocol.

It is positively contemptible when America starts agitating on legacy, as some Democratic Party politicians have done.

They should be told to get lost (although unionists and London are far too polite to do so).

It is almost laughable to imagine America being as soft with terrorists as Britain was towards the IRA.

Dympna Kerr, the sister of Columba McVeigh, 19, who is one of the people who were abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA and whose bodies are yet to be found, wants Mr Biden to be made aware of the plight of the Disappeared families when he visits NI.

So he should be. And made aware of the extent of the IRA campaign and the way the security forces who patiently saw it off have been hounded by Irish nationalists.