What will be the gulf between the poetry of attachment and the prose of exercising power and diplomacy when it comes to Joe Biden and Ireland? Much has been made of the American president’s invocation of his Irish heritage and Washington duly waved the green flag this week.
It follows on from the words of Biden during his Irish visit in 2016 when he declared “Ireland will be written on my soul”. He spoke of the “Irish values” that shaped him: “passion and principle, faith and fortitude”. He also praised the “hard choices” made by politicians in Northern Ireland and suggested those Irish illegally in America “deserve to be able to take the steps to gain their citizenship”.
Biden will perhaps have to make tough choices on immigration, but while he has been repeatedly vocal in stressing the imperativeness of protecting the Belfast Agreement, he is unlikely to frame a foreign policy that pushes the Irish unity agenda. China, climate change and Russia loom much larger, as do what Biden and others have termed the “forever wars” of the Middle East.
Niall O’Dowd, founder of the Irish Voice newspaper, has suggested that the fallout from Brexit combined with Biden’s interest in Ireland “makes it a good time for Irish-America and Irish nationalism generally to engage in a discussion about unification”. But the recent flurry of advertising in America by Friends of Sinn Féin around a Border poll and the need for the Irish Government “to promote and plan” for unity is unlikely to push Biden outside of the current Irish Government’s comfort zone when it comes to that issue.
Competing agendas
What is going on now is the latest chapter in a century-long story of American administrations and Irish-American audiences facing competing agendas and messages from Ireland. Éamon de Valera spent 18 months in the US during the war of independence and raised the profile of the Irish question but failed to achieve recognition of the declared Irish Republic from the White House.
As the anti-Treaty IRA faced certain defeat during the Irish civil war in 1923, he wrote to Joseph McGarrity, the Tyrone-born businessman based in Philadelphia and one of de Valera’s key Irish-American backers, insisting “one big effort from our friends everywhere and I think we would finally smash the Free State”. This was blatant propaganda, tailored for the Irish-American audience, even as he was acknowledging at home the need for anti-Treaty republicans to find a way to deal with defeat. At the same time, Timothy Smiddy was the official Dáil envoy in the US to push the legitimacy of the new Free State.
Joe Biden is likely to be receptive to the Taoiseach's stance that Sinn Féin's unity campaign and corresponding advertising in the US are destabilising
Over 50 years later, Irish politicians were dispatched to the US to try and halt IRA fundraising especially through the activities of Noraid, believing well-meaning Irish-Americans were being duped; those who, maintained Conor Cruise O’Brien, “contribute the dollars out of vague sentiment and lack of knowledge of the realities of the situation”.
Many of them refused to distinguish between the IRA of 1920 and the Provisional IRA of the 1970s. A statement on St Patrick’s Day in 1977 from leading Irish-American politicians, including Ted Kennedy, called on Irish-Americans to refuse to give money to Noraid.
Rhetorical earnestness
In subsequent years, Northern Ireland became part of the US foreign policy agenda and this cemented Biden’s interest in Ireland; he was a leading light in the “Friends of Ireland” group of the 1980s and strongly supportive of the peace process. He is likely to be receptive to the Taoiseach’s current stance, which is that Sinn Féin’s unity campaign and corresponding advertising in the US are destabilising.
The ongoing post-Belfast Agreement US engagement in Northern Ireland is likely to remain in the realm of envoys and rhetorical earnestness; for it to be more than that might make it appear another and unwanted “forever war”.
Irish Americans were a prominent part of the last White House administration and will be in the current one, but this 'greening' will probably remain largely poetic
Biden is also likely to be the last American president to wear his Irishness on his sleeve as, with the passage of time, the meaning of the Irish dimension of American identity has become more elusive. It appears to be mostly about drawing inspiration from the idea of ancestry, or a convenient narrative to serve a contemporary political purpose, as was the case in 2016 when Biden’s comments on his Irish soul paralleled his attack on republican candidate Donald Trump’s fierce anti-immigration rhetoric. As historian Joe Lee noted in 2006 in New York, “one must distinguish sharply between the ancestral association and the active identification”.
Irish Americans were a prominent part of the last White House administration and will be in the current one, but this “greening” will probably remain largely poetic. The next interesting chapter in the Irish-American political story is likely to involve a Sinn Féin taoiseach seeking a sympathetic hearing for the Irish unity case but, as with a century ago, that might remain a step too far for the White House.