Imagine if Rishi Sunak turned up in the US and announced that he was there to help them solve one of their manifest problems. He would have plenty to choose from: the latest playground craze, ‘dodge the bullets from the disgruntled incel’, or the grinding and totally ignored poverty in the Deep South exposed in Paul Theroux’s book of the same name. However, nobody would have the foggiest who Sunak was, and in any case, they would tell him to bugger off. Quite right too as what happens in the US is none of our business.
Why then do we welcome a succession of US Presidents to our shores—and Northern Ireland is still our shores, despite the best efforts of the EU—and allow them to have any say in how we run things there or how we liaise with the Republic of Ireland over it? Joe Biden is the most recent and, in common with Barack O’Bama, Donald McTrump and all his predecessors, claims Irish heritage as sufficient justification to poke his nose into our affairs.
We were making a perfectly good mess of the situation in Northern Ireland ourselves until the Americans started helping out. We had the long-standing Anglo-Irish agreement which we managed to sign with Ireland without outside interference. But aided and abetted by US lap-dog Tony Blair, the Good Friday Agreement was dreamed up with the Americans very much to the fore and set before the people on both sides of the Irish border who voted for it overwhelmingly.
It is not entirely clear why American involvement was required and, especially, why a visit by arch-philanderer Bill Clinton was required at the time. But they have sure taken it upon themselves to keep an eye on the situation, and subject the British Prime Minister of the day to the regular humiliation of having to host a visit to the province and express our gratitude.
I have feet on both sides of the Irish border with dual UK-Irish citizenship, and it is not popular on either side to ‘dis’ the Good Friday Agreement. The people of all Ireland were asked to vote on whether or not they agreed with the statement: ‘Do you support the agreement reached at the multi-party talks on Northern Ireland and set out in Command Paper 3883?’ I wonder how many read the details and checked the signatories?
The Irish republican violence, at least in the UK, was largely over by the time the Good Friday Agreement was signed. It was increasingly clear that they had had enough of the violence, funding was drying up, support was low, and John Major agreed to negotiations with them. While it may be true that the IRA were rewarded for violence there is also the view that British Intelligence was largely paralysing them.
It seems that the Good Friday Agreement may simply have been a codification of what was already happening. These details and the details of what is contained within the agreement are less important than the fact that, of all the copious signatories, the IRA was not one of them. Of course Sinn Fein, which consistently maintained it had no control over the IRA, signed but it was always clear that, far from being in the driving seat they were the puppets of the IRA and remain so long after the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
The killings have largely stopped and, as alluded to above, had stopped before the agreement was signed. But the violence, rioting and destruction did not stop as I found out several years after the signing of the agreement on a visit to Northern Ireland. The difference the Good Friday Agreement made was that the compliant mainstream media agreed to stop reporting it. Republican killings have never entirely gone away and, it appears, there is a recent upsurge in Irish republican violence which may be related to the odious Windsor Framework post-Brexit trade arrangement between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Many in Britain and Northern Ireland don’t like it because it partly treats the province as if it were still part of Europe and gives the EU some say over what happens there. The IRA (‘Real’, ‘Continuity’, ‘I can’t believe it’s not the IRA’ or whatever) are keen to remind us they are still there. They were ready to crank things up to eleven if any semblance of a regulated border between the north and the south was reintroduced.
But back to Sleepy Joe Biden. Not content with nodding his approval at the purported progress that had been made, he described the Windsor Framework as ‘essential’ and even offered to bribe the people of Northern Ireland with $6 billion of investment if they promised to behave themselves. That would be on top of the $200 thousand annually that NORAID used to invest in Northern Ireland, largely with impunity, which went to the murdering terrorists in the IRA. Imagine if a British Prime Minister went to the US and urged them to allow Canada to have some say over what happened within their borders far less have a load of basket case countries have any influence on that.
Old Joe, however, is always good for a laugh, ‘a right one for the craic’. I have no idea if he understands the subtleties of the situation in Northern Ireland or the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA. Who knows, he may not even have known where he was. But anyone who thinks the Black and Tans were the armed wing of the All Blacks should refrain from advising us on how to conduct our affairs with Ireland.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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