Biden’s Irish visit still leaves questions to be answered

He is having “the time of his life”, the White House said about US president Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland this week.

The Biden administration was delighted at how the trip played out. The crowds that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had promised the president while in Washington on St Patrick’s Day turned out to welcome him.

It was as Varadkar suggested it would be a trip like no other.

However, the White House had to face questions from some in the US about the purpose and substance of the four-day trip while charges and allegations about the president being anti-British were raised on several occasions.

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Ed O’Keefe is senior White House correspondent for CBS News in the United States and was travelling with the president in Ireland this week.

He said there had not been as much coverage of the visit in the United States as might have been expected.

“That is partly because the real meat of this trip seems to have come on Wednesday morning in Belfast. So that part was covered. And then this [the following days in the Republic] is mostly is seen as a lot of pageantry.”

O’Keefe raised publicly with the White House earlier this week what he described as a perception that parts of the visit involved “tree planting, bell ringing and a taxpayer-funded family reunion”.

O’Keefe told The Irish Times: “There are many in America who will understand what he’s doing this week and have no issue with it. That maybe because they are fans of his or maybe because they’re also Irish American, and they can appreciate that somebody wants to celebrate it.”

“There will be others who wonder why such expense and work was done to bring him here. But as he said yesterday, it is something he thinks should be done and that it is important to reiterate America’s strong partnership with this country.”

The White House said it would dispute this characterisation of the visit. It said the president wanted to show strong support for the Good Friday Agreement and that he had met the British prime minister and various political leaders in Ireland.

If Belfast was to be the real substance of the visit, the White House was very pleased with how things worked out.

“The president had a great day in Northern Ireland, and everyone is feeling really good about that stop”, the senior director for Europe at the US national security council Amanda Sloat said.

Biden appeared deliberately to stress the English and Huguenot side of his heritage and to highlight the role played by Ulster Scots in building the United States.

While he urged party leaders in Northern Ireland to return to Stormont, there was no obvious arm twisting, just a promise of significant US corporate investment if political progress and stability was secured.

Sloat maintained that Biden’s speech at Ulster University – his only public engagement in Belfast – had gone down well.

“We’ve gotten incredibly positive feedback from all communities and political sides there.”

However, while the White House wanted to focus on the positives of the visit to Ireland, more contentious issues continued to pop up.

Elements of the UK media wanted to pursue the claims that the president was anti-British and even some Americans raised the question as to whether Biden by highlighting his Irish heritage was tacitly backing a united Ireland.

Why was the president out shaking hands as soon as he crossed the border but did not meet ordinary people in Belfast?

While the visit to Ireland received extensive coverage in the US, it was not the biggest story of the week.

There were 200 media personnel given credentials to cover Biden’s speech in Belfast and 180 for his address in Ballina.

But for the US media the big story was back in Washington where the Pentagon was trying to deal with a potentially very damaging leak of classified information about the war in Ukraine and other issues.

The allegations that Biden had snubbed the UK and was anti British continued to be raised throughout the visit.

In Belfast the White House was asked about former DUP leader Arlene Foster’s claims that the president “hates the UK”.

Sloat dismissed her comments as “simply untrue”. However, it led to the inevitable dramatic headlines in some places – which was probably the intention all along – that “White House denies Biden hates UK”.

The White House insisted there was nothing to read into the decision of British prime minister Rishi Sunak not to attend Biden’s Ulster University speech.

Sunak, the White House argued, would be visiting Washington in June and the two would be meeting at the G7 meeting next month.

But the questions kept coming. Why was the president out shaking hands as soon as he crossed the Border but did not meet ordinary people in Belfast?

Biden basked in the warmth of the welcome he received from his fellow politicians in Leinster House.

Virtual across-the-board adulation is certainly not something he receives on Capitol Hill.

At the end of his speech there was a curious passage in which the president acknowledged his age – in the context of being experienced.

However, Biden’s age – he was 80 last November – is a sensitive issue with the time approaching when he will need to declare whether he will seek a second term.

The president said he was “at the end of his career rather than the beginning”.

But how significant was that statement or was it just an off-the-cuff remark?

O’Keefe says: “I don’t think we can measure that quite yet. But I think that will get noticed, and it feeds the storyline or the concern or the acknowledgment of his supporters that they have to address the age issue. Because a lot of what drives the concern about him running for another term is the idea that he may be too old to do it. And they worry that he’s not up to it either physically or mentally. So he’s either got to own it. And he’s resisted owning it. Or they’re going to have to find some way to deal with it.”