Biden can no longer afford to indulge Irish nationalism

For the British government, the Biden visit to Belfast posed one major exam question: would the pageantry of a pan-nationalist juggernaut rolling into town, led by the most tribally Irish-American President of all time, make it appreciably harder for the DUP to accept the Windsor Framework and so to re-establish the Stormont Executive as the cornerstone of the Good Friday Agreement? For as it stands, Rishi Sunak’s mission to stabilise the Union in all its constituent parts is not yet complete.

Every moment of the US President’s brief time in the province had to be evaluated according to that exacting yardstick. Tin-eared locational and linguistic symbolism risked raising the hackles of unionist ‘Middle Ulster’, otherwise known as the proverbial ‘Prod in the garden centre’. 

The visit also had the risk of fuelling communal excitability at a time when the dissident republican threat is growing again and with another potentially divisive election next month.