Editorial: The remarkable sight of a United States president stepping off a plane in Northern Ireland

​The pictures you can see on pages one, two and three and on these pages show something remarkable. The president of the world’s only superpower is in Northern Ireland. Only hours ago Joe Biden was talking to American reporters in bright sunshine before boarding Air Force One to take him across the Atlantic. Plane spotters were able to track the flight and accompanying planes for some, but not all of the journey, due to the remarkable technology that we all take for granted.

President Biden, not dissimilar to the late Queen, has lived through an astonishing time in global history. He has been in high level politics for half a century, having been elected to America’s upper legislative house, the senate, as he turned 30, the youngest age at which anyone can to sit in the esteemed chamber. The president has much more pressing problems than Northern Ireland, and will be here for less than 24 hours. Nonetheless, we should never get complacent about such a visit, which might be the last for many decades (if a situation returns that prevailed for most of the history of the US, in which presidents did not turn up in a society as small as Ulster).

It might be that the duration of Mr Biden’s time in NI has been curtailed because of the stalemate at Stormont, and because unionists have not embraced the Windsor Framework as, for whatever reason, Mr Sunak believed (or had been led to believe) that they would. Northern Ireland should be very grateful to have American attention and even unionists should welcome it, despite the recent dominance of Irish influence on Washington’s take on what is happening here. Unionists have deep historic ties in north America, deeper than southern Irish links, but they do need to work on harnessing them.