Biden in Ireland: A Thorn in the Side of the "Special Relationship?"

Photo: Getty, Wikimedia Commons

In today’s geopolitical landscape, you could almost use American involvement in other countries’ affairs as your moral anti-compass: i.e. whatever Washington and its intelligence services are up to is invariably motivated by self-interest and almost invariably nefarious. Coups of democratically elected, left-leaning governments, the illegal invasion of sovereign countries leaving millions dead, and the most recently “alleged” bombing of an allied European state’s infrastructure, might tempt anyone to conclude that when America’s in town, it’s up to no good. Small countries pray that they don’t discover huge reserves of oil or semi-conductor materials, lest they be brought “freedom and democracy” in the form of drone strikes. You could be fairly sure that the objectives of a guerrilla army, with its ideological origins in Marxism, struggling against a colonial oppressor, wouldn’t have too much sympathy in Washington’s corridors of power.

But Northern Ireland is the exception that proves the rule.  And Irish Republican leaders have always found favor in Washington, since well before Bill Clinton granted Gerry Adams a visa against the wishes of the British government, leading to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. 

When Biden visits Belfast on Tuesday to mark the 25^th Anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which effectively brought an end to the Troubles - one of the few successes of the Clinton/Blair administrations - he will be hoping to tie up some loose ends. He will be hosted by Queen’s University (chancellor, Hilary Clinton) instead of the Stormont Parliament, which has been suspended for over fourteen months, brought down by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) under the power-sharing arrangement out-laid in the GFA. The main obstacle to power-sharing at this juncture is the DUP, just as the DUP was the main obstacle to the Good Friday Agreement itself.  

The DUP is dissatisfied with the Northern Ireland Protocol - which has been an outcome of the Brexit negotiations - essentially giving Northern Ireland special frictionless trade. This dividend is unacceptable to the DUP, the only major political party in Northern Ireland to campaign for Brexit, and the only party, 25 years ago, not to support the Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland must suffer the same dire economic consequences as the rest of the UK, so goes the logic of the Ulster unionist zealot, or it means it’s less British, and therefore more Irish, and any ceding of ground in that direction is seen as political failure. 

This might seem insane to the casual observer, but to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Europe’s wackiest political party, it’s depressingly unsurprising. This is the party that was formed as the political wing of a religious cult called Free Presbyterianism, formed by a fire and brimstone preacher called Ian Paisley, for whom ordinary evangelical Presbyterianism wasn’t anti-Catholic enough. Paisley is the stuff of legend, his exploits immortalized all over YouTube, including the infamous video of him standing up and calling the Pope the “Anti-Christ” in the European parliament. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, this screwball was made First Minister of the new Northern Ireland Assembly. Martin McGuiness, a former IRA commander, was made Deputy First Minister.

I’m not sure what Biden is going to say to the DUP, but it is worth bearing in mind that he has always played up the Celtic side and downplayed the English side of his dual heritage, claiming that it was his mother’s Irish Catholicism from which he derived his religious, cultural, and political influence. And he’s not really alone on Capitol Hill in this regard. Despite the often quoted “special relationship”, America secretly hates Britain. Well, not exactly Britain, but England. And when I say America, I mean Irish America.

Whatever could I mean? Well, consider two separate court cases concerning the armed conflict involving Britain and Ireland. One in London, one in New York.

In response to the Guildford Pub bombings, carried out by the IRA in 1974, Paul Hill, along with three others, was picked up by police, who obtained a confession from him through torture. Hill had the misfortune of being a 20-year-old in London during a period of relatively recent history when pubs bore the legend “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish,” an Irish accent could get you spat on on public transport, and Irish jokes were the staple of the Saturday night family entertainment gameshow host. Judgement on the four innocents was passed as follows:

The verdict was guilty. Mr. Justice Donaldson, bewigged and dressed in a scarlet robe, summoned up all the authority of his office to denounce the defendants’ crimes and lament the fact that Britain had abolished capital punishment. If hanging were an option, he told the three men, “you would have been executed.”

- The New York Times, Feb 25, 1990

Contrast this with the 1982 Federal court case where a jury in Brooklyn acquitted five IRA men caught red handed buying weapons from undercover CIA operatives:

Pandemonium erupted among 100 supporters of the defendants when the verdict was read at mid afternoon. The supporters, many of whom had been at the trial daily, cheered, clapped, waved flags and chanted slogans in a demonstration that spilled from Judge Joseph McLaughlin’s sixth-floor courtroom into the corridors of the United States Courthouse on Cadman Plaza East.

The New York Times, Nov 6, 1982

You see the difference?

I point this out not as an apologia for heinous acts committed by the IRA, of which there were many, and the Guildford Pub bombings amongst them, but rather as illustrative examples for the benefit of Jeffrey Donaldson, current leader of the DUP, who is currently holding the Northern Irish people to hostage: guess whose side America is on?

You see, many Irish Americans are more clued up about Irish (and therefore British) history than English people, and even Northern Irish protestants, who largely follow an English history curriculum at school. They know about Cromwell sacking whole towns like Drogheda and Toome, putting every man woman and child on spits. They know about the penal laws: masses celebrated in fields by priests under pain of death; the beloved Irish language whispered in secret for fear of imprisonment. They know about the Irish Famine, especially the fact that it wasn’t so much a famine as a genocide. There was plenty of food, it was just all exported to England. Peasants who toiled all day for potatoes, the only crop that they were permitted to subsist on by their overlords, were, at the recommendation of The Economist magazine amongst other evil bastards, allowed to starve, forcing millions to emigrate. The population of Ireland never recovered. To this day, there are millions fewer than there were in 1847 when half-dead men, women and children boarded boats in Cork bound for New York, and “Coffin Ships” in Galway bound for Boston.

The English and Northern Irish Protestants might not learn about this in school, but the Irish American diaspora are a treasured repository of the folk memories of centuries of oppression. These live on in cultural practices like Irish grannies making sure everyone is warm enough and has enough to eat, forcing food on visitors every five minutes to the point of farce. The English version of The Troubles is “IRA bad.” Irish Americans know different. Irish Americans know what the BBC and the British education system make sure the population are left in the dark about the civil rights movement, British Army collusion with loyalist death squads and the torture and murder of Catholic civilians, the creation of Northern Ireland itself which was done against the will of the Irish people with the three most catholic counties of Ulster- Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal - given to the Republic in order to ensure a Protestant majority where the first head of state declared it to be “a Protestant state for a Protestant people”.

There are now a lot of very educated, very clever, very influential Irish Americans in the corridors of power all over the country. The descendants of those who landed in Boston, half-dead, have honored the memories of their ancestors with a zeal that only the children of the new world can. Their rise through Ivy League Universities to Washington D.C. has been meteoric. The Kennedy clan are as close to royalty as exists in the States. After Paul Hill of the Guildford Four had his wrongful conviction overturned, he married one of them.

Powerful Irish Americans bit their lips while Thatcher played footsie with Reagan, but as soon as the Tories were kicked out, Clinton got the Good Friday Agreement signed. And they really like it. It’s one of those sacrosanct international agreements for Americans. They would be very displeased if some upstart religious zealots were to mess with it.

25 years ago, I was a student at Queen’s University.  I got fired from my part-time job in a deli for missing a shift so I could go home and vote for the first time as an adult.  I voted ‘Yes’ in the Good Friday Agreement referendum. I grew up in a part of Northern Ireland just outside Belfast, known as “the murder triangle,” where a loyalist Protestant death squad led by the notorious Billy Wright was rampant.  When my friends and I cast our votes for peace, we all had experienced at least one dream of masked loyalist terrorists storming our houses and killing us with machine guns.  We were war-weary, more interested in raving all weekend to techno music than political extremism.  25 years later, I don’t think a generation who have grown up not knowing the realities of the sordid little conflict known as “The Troubles” has any stomach for going back to that.

Sometimes hope and history rhyme, and karmic justice plays out in unusual ways, like now, centuries on, as the Irish of the new world get to put a bit of manners on the callous elites of the former British Empire and the Scottish settlers who once did what European settlers are doing now in Palestine. I don’t know what Biden is going to say to Jefferey Donaldson of the DUP, but I hope it goes something like this: “Centuries ago you Scottish protestant colonists forced my people from their land. My mother told me all about it. Northern Ireland potentially being the only winners in Brexit might ruin your little delusion about being British, but that’s a pathology you’re going to have to deal with. Listen to your accents: you’re Irish! No-one thinks you’re British but you. You’ve been the fly in the ointment of Irish politics for years. Now you get to be the heroes. By shutting your mouth and doing what you’re told.” 

And if it goes something like that, a good deed will sparkle amid the misery that America has spread around the world.