As Joe Biden visits Northern Ireland, can the US again help seal the deal?

What Tony Blair calls ‘the recent Brexit-related turmoil in Northern Ireland’ means that the country’s parties need to seek outside help again

One of the stars that aligned when Tony Blair felt the hand of history on his shoulder 25 years ago was the changing politics of the Irish lobby in the US. For years, American money had been funnelled to the IRA through an organisation called Noraid.

When I worked for the BBC in the early 1990s, I interviewed Irish Americans at a St Patrick’s Day fundraiser in New York who thought they were supporting freedom fighters against English colonial oppressors. They did not know that most people in Northern Ireland wanted to be part of the UK.

The critical change was made by John Hume, the nationalist who sought a united Ireland by peaceful means, who persuaded Ted Kennedy and other leading Irish American politicians that US money for terrorist bombs was a bad idea. Thus Bill Clinton, who like any Democratic president needed the votes of Irish Americans, was freed to play a constructive role with his ally Tony Blair in the Good Friday negotiations (although it also helped that as a second-term president he would not be running for re-election).

Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, points out that US influence was also important after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was signed. Members of Congress such as Peter King, a Republican from New York, had continued to be “the bane of our life”, Powell says. “But after 9/11 they came to see the dark side of terrorism” and helped to push Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein leaders, to put IRA weapons beyond use.

Even so, the power-sharing government, led by David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party and Seamus Mallon of Hume’s SDLP, did not survive long. The centre could not hold. It took several more years before cross-party government could be restored, at the end of Blair’s time as prime minister. This time power was shared between the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein.

That arrangement kind of worked between 2007 and 2022, that is, for 15 of the past 25 years, although the government was suspended from time to time as one crisis succeeded another. But the balance of the extremes could not hold either, after it was destabilised by the EU referendum vote. The DUP supported Brexit, but refuses to support any of the attempts to resolve the consequences of it.

What Blair calls “the recent Brexit-related turmoil in Northern Ireland” means that the parties need to seek outside help again. Negotiators tend to say, “No one really understands our dispute like we do,” according to Blair. “That is correct, but sometimes not understanding the dispute like they do holds the key to resolving it.”

He praises Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, for doing her bit, showing unexpected flexibility in reopening the Brexit treaty to allow the Northern Ireland protocol to be rewritten. Blair wouldn’t say so himself, but Rishi Sunak has been astonishingly Blairite in his successful renegotiation of Boris Johnson’s botched deal.

Sunak’s youthful optimism and his apparent naivety make him come across as an enthusiastic Blue Peter presenter – just like the shockingly young-looking Blair in those photos of a quarter of a century ago.

Yet, just like Blair, he has a steely core and a quick negotiator’s mind, and thus secured a deal that everyone had said was impossible. Only, just like Blair, he couldn’t get the DUP on board at the first time of asking.

Another much younger face in some of those Good Friday photos is that of the 35-year-old Jeffrey Donaldson, walking out of the negotiations on the morning the deal was done. Donaldson was then Trimble’s heir-presumptive as leader of the UUP, but later defected to the DUP, which had refused to take part in the talks at all. Now he is leader of the DUP, with an ambiguous position on Sunak’s Windsor Framework, and on the all-important question of whether his party will go back into power-sharing government.

I suspect that Sir Jeffrey, as he now is, is more aware than some of his DUP colleagues of the vulnerability of the party’s position. In 2007, the DUP was needed to make the balance of the extremes work, but there is a new centre in Northern Ireland, marked out by the non-sectarian Alliance Party, which won 17 seats in the assembly last year, to 27 for Sinn Fein and 25 for the DUP.

The rules of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement would have to be rewritten to allow the Alliance Party a role in power-sharing governments that reflected its support, but the DUP cannot assume that its 21 per cent of the vote will give it a veto forever. So it is possible that Sir Jeffrey will show the leadership urged on him by Blair and others to persuade enough of his party to return to government.

Now it is President Biden’s turn to do his bit. On the surface, a Roman Catholic US president who venerates his family’s roots in the Republic of Ireland is not ideally placed to put pressure on the DUP. Even the more general sense of an international community that is willing Sunak’s deal to succeed is likely, if anything, to be counterproductive against the inward-looking “us against the world” attitude of the DUP.

But what President Biden does bring is American money, and the promise of more US investment in Northern Ireland. Perhaps the DUP, which negotiated £1.5bn for public services in Northern Ireland as the price of its support for Theresa May’s wounded government, will be influenced by that. At least it is better than Noraid funding republican terrorism.