WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden has called for political compromise in Northern Ireland during a brief visit to promote the benefits of enduring peace and investment in the region.
Biden spent just over half a day in Northern Ireland, where he met British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, before travelling south to the Irish Republic for two and a half days of speeches and meetings with officials and distant relatives.
“It took long, hard years of work to get to this place,” Biden said in a speech at the new Ulster University campus in Belfast on Wednesday, remarking how the city had been transformed since he first travelled there as a young senator.
“Today’s Belfast is the beating heart of Northern Ireland and is poised to drive unprecedented economic opportunity,” he said. “There are scores of major American corporations wanting to come here, wanting to invest.”
Biden said power sharing remained critical to the future of Northern Ireland and an effective devolved government would “draw even greater opportunity in this region”.
“I hope the assembly and the executive will soon be restored. That’s a judgement for you to make, not me, but I hope it happens,” he told an audience that included the leaders of Northern Ireland’s five main political parties, 25 years on from a peace agreement brokered by the US government.
That deal, called the Good Friday Agreement, ended 30 years of sectarian conflict and instituted shared governance between the overwhelmingly Protestant unionists, who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Catholic nationalists, or republicans, who want it to become part of the Republic of Ireland. –Agencies
