‘I’m here to listen’: Joe Biden sits down for tea with Rishi Sunak in Belfast

Joe Biden played up his English roots today as he tried to counter claims he is ‘anti-British’ during a visit to Belfast.

The US president used a speech at Ulster University, marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, to deflect criticism over his ‘partisan’ pro-Irish stance.

In a rambling anecdote, he described how a former US ambassador to the UK had discovered that one of his ancestors wrote the rules of mutiny for the British navy in the 1800s. 

Mr Biden – who has frequently trumpeted his Irish heritage’ – said that other parts of his family were from Nottingham, quipping that he ‘doesn’t know what the hell is going on here’. 

The comments came after Mr Biden and Rishi Sunak held 45 minutes of talks over tea at a hotel this morning. He praised the ‘leadership’ of Mr Sunak and the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen in striking the Windsor Framework for post-Brexit rules in the province, suggesting it could unlock more US investment and urging a return to powersharing.

However, hopes that the visit could help break the deadlock at Stormont have dwindled – with the DUP slamming the ‘extremely partisan’ president for ‘hating Britain’ after he trumpeted his Irish roots.

Mr Biden only ‘greeted’ the leaders of the main Northern Ireland political parties, before giving a speech and immediately heading over the border to the Republic, where he will spend the next three days.

And despite fledgling signs of a thaw in relations after the Windsor Framework eased the row with the EU over post-Brexit rules in the province, US officials made clear the leaders would not even talk about reviving a trade package.

Mr Sunak said the countries were ‘very close partners and allies’ and they had a ‘very good discussion’ about economic opportunities in Northern Ireland.

‘That comes on the back of a meeting I had with him last month in the US, I’m seeing him again next month at the G7 and then I’m going to Washington in June; we’re very close partners and allies, we co-operate on a range of things, whether that’s supporting Ukraine or economic security,’ he said.

‘I think actually the relationship is in great shape, and the President and I have lots that we’re working on together.’

Mr Biden opened his speech with a seemingly off-the-cuff musing about his personal heritage.

He recalled how the former ambassador used to ‘always kid me, Biden’s English, you talk about the Irish, Biden’s English’.

‘He brought back a book with a photograph on the front… of a somewhat stout British captain in his quarters with a British bulldog sitting next to him.

‘And his name was Captain George Biden.’

The ambassador apparently had the Lord Admiralty check the records and the ancestor in the mid-1800s ‘had written the rules of mutiny for the British navy’.

Mr Biden said he then found out that the lineage of his middle name, Robinette, was also from England rather than France.  

‘They must have been Huginots because they came to Britain in the 1700s,’ he said, joking: ‘I don’t know what the hell’s going on here.’

Mr Biden said that the ‘dividends of peace are all around us’.

‘This very campus is situated at an intersection where conflict and bloodshed once held a terrible sway,’ he said.

‘The idea to have a glass building here when I was here in ’91 was highly unlikely.

‘Where barbed wire once sliced up the city, today we find a cathedral of learning built of glass and let the light shine in and out.

‘This has a profound impact for someone who has come back to see it.

‘Its an incredible testament to the power and the possibilities of peace.’

Mr Biden said he envoy Joe Kennedy would lead a trade delegation of US companies to the region later in the year.

He acknowledged that Brexit had created ‘complex challenges’ for Northern Ireland.

‘I encouraged the leaders of the UK and the EU to address the issues in a way that served Northern Ireland’s best interest,’ he said.

‘I deeply appreciate the personal leadership of Prime Minister Sunak and European Commissioner Von der Leyen to reach an agreement.

‘The Windsor Framework addresses the practical realities of Brexit and it is an essential step to ensuring the hard-earned peace and progress of the Good Friday agreement that they are preserved and strengthened.

‘Negotiators listened to business leaders across the UK and Ireland who shared what they needed to succeed, and I believe the stability and predictability offered by this framework will encourage greater investment in Northern Ireland, significant investment in Northern Ireland.’

Mr Biden said the response of Northern Ireland’s political leaders to the shooting of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell in Omagh showed ‘the enemies of peace will not prevail’.

‘Northern Ireland will not go back, pray God.

‘The attack was a hard reminder there will always be those who seek to destroy, rather than rebuild.

‘But the lesson of the Good Friday Agreement is this: at times when things seem fragile or easily broken, that is when hope and hard work are needed the most.’

At the meeting at the Grand Central Hotel this morning, reporters shouted questions including if Mr Biden had a message for Northern Irish parties and why he was not discussing a trade deal.

But the president motioned that he could not hear, instead commenting on the ‘heck of a view’.

Before the meeting Amanda Sloat, senior director for Europe at the US National Security Council, told a briefing for journalists the focus will be Northern Ireland and the war in Ukraine.

‘I don’t anticipate that the two leaders are going to be talking about a free trade agreement on this trip … I think their conversation is going to focus primarily on the situation in Northern Ireland given that that’s where they’re meeting, as well as the chance to touch base on Ukraine and some other issues,’ she said.

Ms Sloat flatly denied that Mr Biden was ‘anti-British’, or on what amounted to a holiday to Ireland.

‘I think the track record of the president shows that he’s not anti British,’ she said.

‘The UK remains one of our strongest and closest allies,’ she said.

‘And it’s difficult, frankly, to think of an issue in the world that we are not closely cooperating with the British on and it’s why the president wanted to have the opportunity to engage with Prime Minister Sunak this morning to start his his day here in in Belfast.’

She said Mr Biden and Mr Sunak had the opportunity to touch briefly on economic issues when they met in San Diego, a conversation which she said will be ‘furthered and deepened’ when they meet in Washington in June.

‘We’re continually looking for ways to engage with the UK on a whole range of economic issues,’ she added.

Downing Street is believed to be focusing on smaller agreements with the US, such as one that has been mooted on minerals.  

The leaders of Northern Ireland’s main political parties had the opportunity to talk to Mr Biden separately before he delivered the at Ulster University’s new £350million Belfast campus.

But there was no formal group meeting with the leaders.

‘The main message of the president to all parties, to all people of Northern Ireland, is to reaffirm support for the Good Friday Agreement, and obviously pillar one and the devolved institutions here in Northern Ireland are a fundamental part of the Good Friday Agreement, and so I think the presidents message – as he said on St Patrick’s Day and I expect he will reaffirm today – is the United States’ strong support for that, the belief that the people of Northern Ireland deserve to have a democratically elected power sharing representative governance,’ Ms Sloat said. 

Mr Biden is also not going to Stormont, with the power-sharing Assembly established in the peace deal currently suspended amid a boycott by the DUP.

The unionist party’s Brexit spokesman Sammy Wilson said this morning that Mr Biden had to take a share of responsibility for the ‘political instability’ in Northern Ireland.

‘He is seen as extremely partisan,’ Mr Wilson told Talk TV, adding that Mr Biden had shown himself ‘anti-British’ in the debates over Brexit.

‘I suppose this is more about Joe Biden his reelection attempts and appealing to the Irish vote in America,’ Mr Wilson said. 

Mr Sunak suffered an awkward moment as he greeted Air Force One at RAF Aldergrove last night, with the president appearing to push him to one side in order to shake hands with someone else. 

The US President – accompanied by his Northern Ireland envoy Joe Kennedy – will carry out several other engagements across the week to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which largely brought an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1998. He will meet the Prime Minister again on Wednesday for a bilateral meeting.

Mr Sunak will not attend Mr Biden’s keynote speech.

Speaking to reporters before his departure, Mr Biden said that his top priority was to ‘make sure the Irish accords and the Windsor Agreement stay in place, keep the peace’. 

His son Hunter Biden and sister Valerie Biden Owen are accompanying him for the trip.

There have been fears that a gaffe by the president during his visit could further alienate unionists.

As vice president, Mr Biden caused massive offense to Northern Ireland’s unionist community when, during a St Patrick’s Day event, he joked: ‘If you’re wearing orange, you’re not welcome here.’

Northern Ireland’s primarily Protestant unionist community associate themselves with the color in celebration of William of Orange’s victory over Catholic forces at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

As a senator in 1985, he spoke out against making it easier to extradite Irish Republican Army militants from the U.S. to Britain, a sentiment popular with Irish-Americans but not in Britain.

He has talked often about his mother’s hatred for England, which was so intense that she once refused to use a bed that Queen Elizabeth II had slept in.

In his memoir, ‘Promises to Keep,’ he recalls with a degree of embarrassment at his English surname Biden.

And he describes how his Irish-American aunt Gertie Finnegan once told him: ‘Your father is not a bad man. He’s just English.’

In 2020, as president-elect, he took a cheeky dig at the UK’s national broadcaster when a BBC reporter shouted a question at him. ‘The BBC?’ he said, moving on with a smile. ‘I’m Irish.’

Mr Biden will cross the border to attend engagements in Co Louth this afternoon.

The President has traced his ancestral roots to the area and he will tour Carlingford Castle in the county before spending the night in Dublin. He is then expected to visit Irish President Michael D Higgins on Thursday.

It has been announced that Dublin’s Phoenix Park will be closed for 24 hours from 5pm on Wednesday to facilitate the visit. Mr Higgins’ official residence is within the park’s grounds.

The White House said Mr Biden will take part in a tree-planting ceremony and ringing of the Peace Bell at the President’s official residence, Aras an Uachtarain. Following that ceremony, he will meet again with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, whom Mr Biden recently hosted for St Patrick’s Day.

Mr Biden will address the Irish parliament and attend a banquet dinner at Dublin Castle tomorrow evening.

The President’s trip will conclude with a visit to Co Mayo, where he has also connected with distant cousins, on Friday. 

He will tour the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Knock and visit the North Mayo Heritage and Genealogical Centre’s family history research unit. He will then make a public speech at St Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina.

Monday marked 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of violence in Northern Ireland and left 3,600 people dead. 

The President tweeted he would use the Belfast leg of his trip to underscore his nation’s ‘commitment to preserving peace and encouraging prosperity’ in the region.

But he was cautioned against exerting too much pressure on unionists by former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, one of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

He told Radio 4 Today: ‘One thing I learned about the unionists is if you try and pressurise them to do something that they’re fundamentally in disagreement with, it’s usually futile pressure, even if it comes from the US, so you’ve got to use that influence carefully.’

The UK is observing the milestone anniversary with a reunion of key players in the peace process alongside Biden’s visit.

Deep divisions remain over the conflict’s legacy, and authorities raised the terrorism threat level in Northern Ireland to ‘severe’ in March as they warned of IRA dissidents opposed to the peace process. 

Youths threw petrol bombs and set a police vehicle on fire during a dissident march in Londonderry on Monday.

Police said they had intelligence that a major attack had been planned so when masked teenagers threw petrol bombs at a vehicle, they simply withdrew rather than being sucked into what they thought might be an ambush. 

The following day they said  they had recovered four pipe bombs from a cemetery near the city.

‘The discovery of these devices was a further sinister and worrying development,’ said Assistant Chief Constable Bobby Singleton.

The journey of Joe Biden’s Irish ancestors – from Counties Mayo and Louth to Scranton: How president’s great-great grandfathers left an Ireland ravaged by famine for a new life in the U.S. 180 years ago

Ernie Caffrey has a gift waiting for President Joe Biden when he visits his ancestral hometown of Ballina, Co. Mayo: A brick from the home where the Blewitts lived before they left famine-ravaged Ireland for the U.S.

Caffrey’s fine art gallery stands on the spot in Garden Street where Edward Blewitt lived with his wife and eight children — in what is now known as Biden’s ancestral home.

All that remains is part of a wall and an old hearth in the backyard of the gallery.

‘I was up a ladder and down the other side to chip out these bricks,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘It took me hours.’

But it is a physical connection between an American president and the land of his forefathers, said Caffrey. 

The story of how Biden and his Irish ancestors made it to a better life in America is the story of generations of Irish who left the island during the years of the great hunger, sailing often from Liverpool to New York.

Two branches of Biden’s mother’s family  — the Finnegans from the eastern county of Louth and the Blewitts from the western county of Mayo — made a similar journey at a similar time.

In all, 10 of his 16 great-great grandparents were from the Emerald Isle, making him ‘among the most Irish’ of all U.S. presidents, according to the Irish Family History Centre. 

Ballina was one of the places worst hit by the potato famine that cut down an entire generation of Irish people. An estimated million people died.

When the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle visited the town in 1849, he wrote that the population was ‘gone to workhouse, to England, to the grave.’

Edward Blewitt, a prosperous engineer and businessman, plumped for the U.S. His son, Patrick, Biden’s great-great grandfather, traveled first as a 20-year-old cabinboy to scope out prospects.

When he returned two years later they were ready to set out in style. 

While most families went one by one, scrimping and saving to afford the fare, Blewitt could afford to take the whole family on the SS Excelsior in 1851, his fortunes bolstered by the sale of 27,000 bricks to the local cathedral. 

After the crossing, the family settled first in Carbondale, Pennsylvania. 

But within a decade they were living in Scranton, where Edward Blewitt helped lay out the streets.

It was a familiar destination for people from Mayo at that time. And in 1990 Ballina was twinned with the town, a move that predated Biden’s links being discovered.

If the west of Ireland was the area worst affected by the famine, then the Cooley peninsula was one of the worst hit parts of the east. It is here that the tumbledown remains of the Finnegan home still stand. The name features on gravestones in nearby Kilwirra cemetery.

Biden visited the graveyard during a 2016 visit. It stands close to the coastline that would have been the Finnegans’ last view of Ireland as they left on the ‘famine ships’, and at its center is a ruined church where they would once have worshiped.

Owen Finnegan, Biden’s great-great grandfather, left Ireland in 1849, sailing on the Brothers from the nearby port of Newry. His profession was listed as locksmith, although other records say he was a shoemaker.

The rest of the family, including nine-year-old James — the president’s great grandfather — followed a year later on the Marchioness of Bute. 

They settled first in Ovid, New York. James was partially sighted, according to research by Jean Smolenyak, which meant he avoided service in the Civil War and, rather than becoming a shoemaker like his father, he instead took up the fiddle. 

By the time his youngest son Ambrose was born in 1884 the family was in Olyphant, near Scranton. And that is where the lines merged, with Ambrose marrying Geraldine Blewitt in 1909.

Their daughter Catherine was Biden’s mother. 

The extended families mean both Co. Mayo and Co. Louth are littered with relatives. 

‘There’s so many Finnegans over here it’s unbelievable,’ said Donal Marks, 81, a distant cousin.

He described how the Finnegans are nicknamed locally to separate each line. He’s from the ‘Fick’ line (he doesn’t remember how it was named). There are the Steves and then the Owens.

‘That’s the one that matters,’ he said around the kitchen table of the house he had built when he returned from a career in England. That is the line that resides in the White House.

He and his wife Bernie were among the guests when Biden stopped by the old family pub, Lily Finnegan’s, during his 2016 visit. 

‘He was very much at home,’ said Bernie. ‘He was quite happy to go around and talk to everyone. I’ve never seen such a relaxed person. 

‘His brother was having a drink and his daughter was pulling pints. It was like they had always been here.’

Biden arrived with a sheaf of papers and was busily showing everyone how they were related. 

‘He had it all written down, the whole tree,’ said Bernie, ‘and he was showing everyone.’