How Joe Biden’s ‘special relationship’ with Ireland affects Britain

The US president is proud of his Irish roots and considers the Good Friday Agreement a high priority, says Sean O’Grady

President Joe Biden. The US is ‘concerned by the violence in Northern Ireland and we join the British, Irish, and Northern Irish leaders in their calls for calm’ (AP)

There is a long history of US presidents trying to find some distant Irish ancestry to burnish their credentials, capture the Irish vote and indulge in some back-slapping with self-consciously heavyweight senators of proud Irish extraction.

Some, such as John Fitzgerald Kennedy, did not have to glance very far back (only as far as his grandfather). Others such as Barack Obama had to make more of stretch. “President O’Bama” had no problem posing with a pint of Guinness on St Patrick’s Day (Obama managed to discover a maternal great-great-great grandfather from Moneygall, on the Tipperary-Offaly border).

Joe Biden is famously proud of his Irish roots and is the first American president to really weaponise them in international relations. The clip of him rushing down a corridor declining a request for a quote for the BBC with a smile and the quip “I’m Irish” was jokey but revealing. Some months ago, he made it apparent that the United States stood by the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, the Irish peace process and, indeed, the latest bulwark of that historic achievement, the Northern Ireland Protocol in the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement. It is unusual for a US president to respond to rioting in another country, strictly speaking an internal affair, but president Biden felt no inhibitions in intervening when he saw the images emanating from the Shankill.