THE AMERICAN CONNECTION
The election of Irish American Joe Biden as US president in the 2020 November election presaged a change in the relationships between Washington, London and Dublin that would profoundly influence the growing debate about unification and the benefits and timing of a referendum. It also directly influenced the strategy of the British government as the Brexit negotiations were reaching their December climax and the end of the transition period agreed a year previously.
In the wake of US election, the Johnson government withdrew its controversial Internal Market Bill, which had threatened to derail the Brexit negotiations. Within days of Biden’s victory, his key adviser, senior US congressman Richie Neal, gave an interview to journalist Martina Devlin for an IF online event, during which he spoke of his Irish background – his mother hailed from Kerry and his father from County Down – and stated that he was hopeful of a united Ireland within his lifetime. In his early seventies, the influential congressman is also chair of the Friends of Ireland, a US organisation that supports initiatives for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. During the Clinton years, he had successfully lobbied for a re-balancing of the longstanding and special relationship between the US and UK administrations. Neal and his colleagues believed that a more balanced view was required in relation to ‘the issue of Ireland and, in particular, to the North of Ireland. … We succeeded I think in having great influence on Bill Clinton, who levelled it up as we might say.’
Neal believes the Biden administration shares the same enthusiasm for engagement on Ireland and of the importance of protecting the success achieved during Clinton’s time in brokering the Good Friday Agreement: ‘I’ve talked to them and they have my enthusiasm. We understand that America is a guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement. George Mitchell is a close friend of mine, he was an honest broker. Bill Clinton took great pains to make sure that all sides were included.’
Neal said that, during his recent visits to the North and in engagements with senior British politicians, he and the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, insisted that there will not be a post-Brexit trade deal between the US and the UK if there is any dilution of the GFA, particularly in relation to the border:
I made it clear, as speaker Pelosi did with me. We travelled to the border, we made it clear to the Brexiteers … that there would be no bilateral trade agreement with the United States if the Good Friday Agreement was disturbed. That border, symbolically, politically and substantively, had to be abolished. And that’s our bottom line as it relates to a trade agreement with the UK.
More than 30 years ago I was on a delegation visit with the speaker of the house Tom Foley. As we travelled from Donegal to Derry the bus was stopped, it was an armed encampment. British soldiers mounted the bus with night vision, heavy armaments and they searched that bus from top to bottom and the speaker of the house was part of the entourage. When I visited the border with speaker Pelosi not long ago, my phone pinged as I crossed from Donegal to Derry. I think that’s a pretty good description of the success we’ve had.
In Neal’s view, the current debate around Irish unity should result in unification, with the agreement of those of the unionist tradition. As he told Devlin during the interview, he regards former DUP leader Peter Robinson as a friend and one who is open to the idea of an agreed Ireland:
We hope that convincing people of both traditions, that economically, politically and again substantively, that [it] makes the most sense for everybody … Peter Robinson over the last couple of years has said really encouraging things. I do regard him as a friend now. I think that when people you disagree with do the right thing, we all need to say so. Robinson has certainly argued for what could become an agreed upon Ireland and that means hopefully eventually the six counties joining the Republic.
I think again one of the lessons that was learned from the Troubles, even though this was an 800-year dispute, or at least a 300-year dispute, the 30 years of violence [took place] in an area the size of the state of Connecticut. There were 30,000 British soldiers in that geographic area. I’ve not met or heard of anybody who would ever suggest that we should go back to those bad old days … [For many years] the argument was that the North was the most prosperous part of the island. I don’t think there’s anybody that would make that argument any longer.
Asked by Devlin whether he thought he would see a united Ireland in his lifetime, Neal replied:
I’m hopeful.
I think it would have to come about according to the Good Friday Agreement and that would be based upon a democratic vote that would take place and I think an energetic effort to convince the unionist tradition that they have nothing to fear about living in the Republic of Ireland, a modern, prosperous nation. I think threatening them or trying to bomb them into a united Ireland, as John Hume used to say, won’t work.
I don’t anticipate that there would be any other route other than a referendum question. It would not be seen as hostile or threatening to the unionist tradition as well as the recognition that living in a unified nation would in many ways best represent their fortunes.
Certainly, in his first public comments on Ireland just weeks after the election, President Biden had foreshadowed Neal’s sentiments when he told reporters in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware that he did not wish to see a ‘guarded border’ on the island after Brexit. As reported on RTÉ News on 25 November 2020, Biden also revealed that, since his election victory, he had talked to Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Micheál Martin: ‘We do not want a guarded border. We want to make sure. We have worked too hard to get Ireland worked out. … The idea of having the border North and South once again being closed – it’s just not right. We have got to keep the border open.’
During the campaign, Biden had repeated the warnings by Nancy Pelosi and Richie Neal that any threat to the Good Friday Agreement would jeopardise a future trade agreement between the US and the UK. If the British government was under any illusions about the intentions of the new administration regarding Ireland, and indeed its wider foreign policy objectives in contrast to those of his more isolationist and Brexit-supporting predecessor, Donald Trump, his comments in Delaware made them transparent.
Biden’s appointments of Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, Jen O’Malley Dillon as deputy chief of staff and Carmel Martin as member of the domestic policy council, as well as other Irish Americans to senior posts across his team, confirmed that the administration would reflect the new president’s leanings towards his ancestral roots. The former vice-president of Irish American Democrats, John McCarthy, was appointed as a senior White House adviser, while Amanda Sloat, a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast, was named as a senior director of foreign affairs at the National Security Council. Biden also appointed Marty Walsh, an Irish American former trade union leader and Boston mayor, as secretary of state for labour, a key position in devising strategy for post-pandemic recovery and the return to work of millions of Americans. Walsh was among those who signed the IF letter to the Taoiseach in November 2019.
Raised in a traditional Irish-Catholic family in Scranton, Pennsylvania and with family origins in County Mayo and County Louth, Biden has been a frequent visitor to Ireland over many decades and supported efforts to resolve the conflict in the North from his earliest years in Congress. As a young senator from Delaware, he was a founding member of the Friends of Ireland, along with Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill, in the early 1980s. He was also a sponsor of the effort in the Senate to establish the International Fund for Ireland, which was designed to underpin the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985. Biden maintained a life-long interest in human rights issues in the North, promoted the peace negotiations and was a staunch defender of the GFA and North–South co-operation since the historic deal was ratified in 1998.
Biden’s accession to the White House was recognised immediately in Dublin as crucial to the government’s chances of securing a Brexit outcome that was more favourable, or at least less threatening, than the prospect of a ‘hard deal’ as negotiations between the UK and EU reached the end game. Senior government officials described the Biden factor as a ‘double lock’ for Ireland in its efforts to ensure there would be no hard border and that trade with the UK and NI would continue with the minimum of bureaucratic and economic disruption.
After four years of negotiations, in late December 2020, the EU and UK confirmed an agreement on trade and security that maintained the NI protocol, keeping the North in the EU single market and customs union. The ‘least bad’ version of Brexit, as it was described by Micheál Martin in the Irish Examiner, allowed for the continued flow of goods, including agri-food products, from Ireland into the UK without tariffs or quotas. The introduction of customs controls would potentially mean additional costs and delays in the transport of goods from the island into the UK and across the land bridge to the EU. Those working in Irish fishing industry faced a significant loss of income when the deal included a 25 per cent cut to the €650 million in fish that EU-registered boats caught in British waters each year. The Withdrawal Agreement, signed on Christmas Eve, ensured that there would be no hard border, customs or other obstacle to building an all-island economy. The protocol allowed the North to trade freely with both the EU as part of the single market and with the UK, although customs checks on the Irish Sea would still be required to ensure that certain animal and food products complied with EU regulations before passing through ports in Larne, Belfast and Warrenpoint. The reality was dawning that the strategy of unionism, and particularly of the DUP, to achieve a hard Brexit, and the reintroduction of a guarded land border on the island, had backfired spectacularly. The trade deal was signed just days before unionists were to mark the centenary of the foundation of the state of NI in 1921 and nationalists the 100 years of enforced partition.
Alex Kane predicted in the Irish Times on 30 December 2020 that the 100 year ‘celebration’ of the union would be ignored by nationalists across the island, and that it would be:
difficult for unionism: a difficulty heaped upon it by Boris Johnson, the man cheered at a DUP conference when he pledged to save the North from semi-colonial status, then was later propped up by the DUP when he became prime minister. Yet it is Johnson who has shifted the North from its ‘place apart’ status into the much more precarious position of becoming the constitutional equivalent of a granny flat.
The North is now, arguably, in a weaker constitutional position than at any time since 1921, pushed there by the actions of the very man in whom the DUP invested so much trust. The DUP’s problem – which is a problem for all of unionism – has been noticed by nationalists and republicans in the North, as well as by the Irish Government. That explains why the SDLP, Sinn Féin and prominent voices within civic nationalism and academia in the North have refused to participate in the Centenary Forum to mark the formation of Northern Ireland.
Kane claimed that their absence was rooted in a conviction among nationalists that the UK was ‘hurtling towards inevitable dissolution, starting with Scotland’, coupled with a belief that:
the Northern Irish wing of the union is doomed precisely because the Northern Ireland protocol has placed the North outside the constitutional ambit of Great Britain.
Civic nationalism in the North, along with Sinn Féin and the SDLP, is focusing a lot of attention on unity right now. And while the Irish Government doesn’t have the issue at the top of its agenda, I think it would be remarkably complacent of unionism to assume that work isn’t being done in the background. My assumption, for what it’s worth, is that the Irish Government is now proceeding on the basis that a combination of circumstances will make the demand for a poll irresistible … The five years mentioned by Martin, along with Mary Lou McDonald’s recent claim of Irish unity by 2030, should represent breathing space for unionists: time to think about a common approach and strategy and prepare a coherent, united pro-union case for when the Border poll comes.
His view was echoed in a spate of articles and across various media, North and South, and in the UK. Many speculated on the future of the union now that the transition period had ended and Britain was finally liberated from the shackles of the EU and as the centenary year dawned in the North.