Roger Watson
The vision of Joe Biden towering over our diminutive Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in Belfast was a symbolic reminder of how subservient we are to the United States of America. I half expected Sleepy Joe to turn to Sunak, pat him on the head and, perhaps, sniff his hair. These periodic events whereby the incumbent US President, whoever he is, claims Irish ancestry as an excuse to visit and proclaim their love for the Emerald Isle are nothing more than a series of ritual humiliations. The US is telling us we could not sort out the problems that were Ulster and the IRA, we needed their help.
The American interest in Ireland, described recently as a ‘fantasy’. is unfathomable. Most Americans could not point to Ireland on a map. I recall an academic colleague in the US, now the president of a university, turning to an Irish colleague and asking him how big Ireland was and was it bigger than the United States. The American ignorance of anything beyond their shores is profound. But what is worse is their delusion that they have fixed anything in Ireland.
About ten years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed I made one of many visits to Belfast. Speaking to the taxi driver on the way to the city from Aldergrove airport I commented on how much better things were since the agreement had been signed. He just laughed and proceeded to take detours through several areas pointing to burned out cars, wrecked shops and areas where full scale riots had taken place within the past few days. His conclusion was that all that had changed was the mainstream media were no longer reporting it. It turned out that my ignorance had been profound.
It is hard to understand what the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 achieved. We already had the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. Yes, the IRA turned over a few arms dumps and, despite my taxi driver’s revelations, the killings have largely stopped. But the Good Friday Agreement was not an agreement between the IRA and the UK, it was signed only by Ireland and the UK; two countries that were not at war. Moreover, between two countries that had a pre-existing agreement. The Good Friday Agreement was no more than showboating by Tony Blair, keen to show the US what a good boy he was, and by the US government of the time. The IRA wanted its day in the sun, had probably had enough of the struggle and the time was simply right for a change in strategy. It is undeniable that the IRA got what it wanted through violence. It seems that the violence may be escalating again by whichever variant of the IRA label the groups claiming responsibility identify themselves.
I visited Northern Ireland during the troubles. It was not pleasant to see divided communities, pass military checkpoints and to see the occasional evidence of the troubles such as burned out cars and bombed buildings. It was, in places, quite desolate and you had to remind yourself that this was British territory. However, I have also taken a train between New York and Washington DC which passes through the mean streets in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Baltimore. No cars, few people, boarded up houses and a sense of utter lawlessness. Give me Belfast at the height of the troubles any time.
We need a British government led by a Prime Minister who has the guts to tell a US President that he has enough problems to fix in his own country and to stop interfering in Northern Ireland. I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Roger Watson is a retired academic nurse who lives in the UK.
He is currently engaged in a range of professional consultancies in the UK, Europe and China. He writes regularly for several outlets including The Daily Sceptic, The European Conservative, Country Squire Magazine and The New Conservative.
