Biden marks NI anniversary

US president to tour UK province 25 years after peace deal ended violence

Former United Kingdom prime minister Tony Blair has warned that United States President Joe Biden must exercise his nation's influence on politics in Northern Ireland with "care and sensitivity" ahead of his visit to the province.

A quarter of a century after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to decades of violent conflict in Northern Ireland that also frequently spilled beyond its boundaries, Biden is paying a visit to, in his words "underscore the US commitment to preserving peace and encouraging prosperity".

But the province's unionist politicians are refusing to return to the discussion table as part of their boycott of Northern Ireland's devolved assembly.

They are concerned that Britain's post-Brexit negotiations with the European Union over the status of Northern Ireland, which has the UK's only land border with an EU member state, the Republic of Ireland, puts their British status at risk.

For historic reasons, the US has close cultural and political ties with Ireland, which is why its security is of such significance to Biden, and why his visit matters so much.

"There's a difference between influencing and pressurizing," Blair, a key figure in the Good Friday Agreement talks, told the BBC. "One tends to be positive and the other can be negative.

"One thing I learned about the unionists is if you try to pressurize them to do something they are fundamentally in disagreement with, it's usually futile pressure."

Although much has changed during the last 25 years, many of the same tensions that underpinned the divided province for decades remain perilously close to the surface, with recent outbreaks of violence showing the potential for trouble to reignite at any time.

For decades, the unionist community, whose political affiliation is to the UK, and who see themselves as British, has been the majority in the six counties that make up Northern Ireland, but at the 2022 election for Northern Ireland's devolved assembly, for the first time politicians representing the nationalist or republican groups overtook them.

The status of Northern Ireland has been a major stumbling block in post-Brexit discussions, and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's latest attempt to unlock the situation with a proposal known as the Windsor Framework has gone down badly with unionists, making them more entrenched in the opposition. But Biden has given it his enthusiastic backing, saying that he "very strongly supports" it.

The ongoing stalemate around the devolved assembly, known as Stormont, means Biden will not have the opportunity to address its members, something that Ireland's former ambassador to the US, Daniel Mulhall, said he would have liked to have done.

Instead, the main public engagement of his brief visit to Northern Ireland, before a longer visit to the Republic of Ireland, will be an address at Ulster University's new campus, which Mulhall said would be "very carefully crafted to get across the message that, essentially, America is here to help".