Does Irish Joe Biden understand the Good Friday Agreement?

Joe Biden has often challenged the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement. Standing alongside former Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny on St Patrick’s Day 2015, Biden famously quipped: “Anyone wearing orange is not welcome in here.” He later claimed it was a joke with no further meaning, but the damage was done with Northern Ireland’s protestants.

“Whether they were intended as a joke or not, the comments are a slur on those who would be known as ‘orange’ ie Protestants,” wrote the Reverend Lord William McCrea in a letter to the then Vice President. “This term is much wider than anyone who is a member of the Orange Order. It has traditionally been used to define people from the Protestant faith.”

Understandably, Biden takes his Irish heritage seriously. One of his most repeated anecdotes is of his father telling him, “the best drop of blood in you is Irish”. The Irish wordsmith Seamus Heaney took pride of place in Biden’s nomination acceptance speech, the most important speech of his political career thus far, in which he channeled a tradition of Irish pessimistic-hope to tell the nation: “History says, don’t hope on this side of the grave.

“But then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tide wave of justice can rise up. And hope and history rhyme. This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.”

Biden has studied Heaney’s poetry since he was a child, reading to improve his severe stutter. When the presidential candidate met a young man called Brayden Harrington on the campaign trail and learnt that he too had a severe stutter, he told Brayden about a book of poems by William Butler Yeats, another Irish writer, which he would read out loud to practice speaking.

Irish Catholicism similarly dominates Biden’s character. He was educated by nuns at a catholic school in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “Wherever there were nuns, there was home,” he would later write. When tragedy struck, first in the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash and later in the loss of his son Beau to brain cancer, he leaned on that religious education for support.

“What my faith has done is sort of take everything about my life with my parents and my siblings and all the comforting things and all the good things that have happened, around the culture of my religion and the theology of my religion, and I don’t know how to explain it more than that,” he later told TV interviewer Stephen Colbert.

These two elements, the cultural and the religious, have made the likely next President of the United States one of the strongest supporters of Ireland’s interests in Washington. As he himself wrote on a 2016 trip to his ancestral counties of Louth, Mayo and Meath: “Northeast Pennsylvania will be written on my heart. But Ireland will be written on my soul.”

Before Brexit, this pride was a harmless fetish which the British could indulge in almost as much as the Irish; the British ambassador to Washington is often invited to the White House’s traditional St Patrick’s day lunch. But since the question of the Irish border came to the fore again, Biden’s pro-Irish sentiments have translated into increasingly forthright denunciations of Downing Street’s policies. Yesterday, following a meeting between Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he tweeted this blunt warning to the British government:

“We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit. Any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K. must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”

The tweet directly conflates the removal of the land border in Ireland with the Good Friday Agreement itself, which is itself a misreading of the GFA. As The Atlantic’s Tom McTague notes, “At its core, it was an agreement that affirmed the border until a majority in Northern Ireland wanted otherwise, in exchange for power sharing, not majoritarian [Protestant] rule.” The tweet also does nothing to recognise British guarantees against a hard border, which was emphasised by Dominic Raab just hours before.

There are two readings in London of the attitude of senior Democrats. The first is that they genuinely misunderstand the Good Friday Agreement. Boris Johnson said yesterday that “the vital importance of protecting the symmetry of the Good Friday Agreement is something that may have been lost so far in the presentation of this matter” by Nancy Pelosi. And Conor Burns, a Conservative MP and a catholic, today responded to Biden’s tweet with a short lecture: “It is also called the Belfast Agreement so it doesn’t offend both traditions. Did you actually know that?”

The second reading is that Biden and Pelosi are purposely misinterpreting the Good Friday Agreement because they personally believe in a united Ireland. Northern Irish regulatory divergence from the EU – and Ireland – would “break their dream,” one Conservative parliamentary adviser told Reaction. “They don’t care about the UK’s point [about a regulatory border down the Irish Sea] because they don’t believe in Northern Ireland’s place in the UK.”

The staffer noted that of the four congressmen who signed the letter threatening to derail a UK-US trade deal, which Biden’s tweet linked to, one has actively supported the IRA in the past – including attending their rallies. Another has called for political asylum for an IRA terrorist jailed in New York, and another caused an incident when he invited Gerry Adams to Obama’s White House.

Whichever reading is true, Biden is serious about protecting Ireland’s interests, and Downing Street will have to accommodate that fact if he becomes president. Such is the strength of his pro-Irish sentiments that Britain’s perceived mistreatment of Ireland could disrupt other areas of the British-American alliance, such as strategic defence and diplomacy.

Biden’s foreign policy advisers already think Berlin should be the White House’s new first-call capital in Europe, taking London’s traditional place, which will remain the case even if there is a Brexit deal. There will have to be an almighty diplomatic effort to repair the UK-Democratic relationship if Biden becomes president-elect in six weeks’ time.

Ahead of that, it should be remembered that there is an election on and everything can be seen through that prism. More than 30m Americans identify to some extent as Irish-American. In a close contest, when even small numbers of votes could make the difference in key states, Biden’s targeted message is delivered with that in mind too.