What can violent extremists do to wreck Joe Biden’s first visit to Northern Ireland? The answer is precious little. The president’s visit has been denied the electoral fairy dust of a functioning executive as he blows in to hail twenty-five years of the Good Friday Agreement. While that might disappoint some local politicians keen to bathe in some harmless warm platitudes, it will be less of a security headache for those charged with keeping him safe.
So what of the known arrangements and the risks? Biden will land at Belfast International Airport this evening and be taken, one assumes by air, to a venue in the city for some glad-handing. He’ll then spend the night — quite possibly at Hillsborough Castle, the King’s official residence in Northern Ireland — before a speech the following day at a new campus for Ulster University. Then it’s across the border by the afternoon to play spot the ancestor in Counties Louth and Mayo.
In terms of risks, it’s safe to say Biden’s welfare would be more threatened by the steps of Air Force One. The US Secret Service, which has been in town for weeks already, is liaising with a police service with probably the longest counter-terrorism heritage in western Europe. Some 300 additional officers from Great Britain are in place as part of normal mutual aid plans to help secure ports and venues already hardened by a decades-long domestic terror threat. This is a toned-down, buttoned-down event.
In Derry, kids who should have been digesting their Easter eggs threw a few petrol bombs at a lone police Land Rover
It is hard to see how the existing terrorist groups could undermine such formidable security or why. While we can never underestimate the lethal ambitions and grandiosity of dissident republicans, the intelligence threats revealed earlier this week by the PSNI relate to local police officers, far more easily and rationally targeted — in their minds — than “Irish Joe.” The threat level in Northern Ireland was recently raised to “severe” — meaning a terror attack is highly likely.
But this hike in the security level is not because of this presidential visit: it follows the attempted murder of a senior police detective. Executing defenseless off-duty police officers in front of their children in a desperate attempt for relevance is more the style of existing dissident terror groups than a physical attack on the leader of the free world. Their capability was demonstrated this weekend when they held separate events to mark the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin that heralded a new Republic, whose legitimacy irredentist extremists continue to deny. A few back streets in Belfast rang, rather uncertainly, to tubby masked men and skinny youths whose marching skills would have shamed Dad’s Army. In Derry, kids who should have been digesting their Easter eggs threw a few petrol bombs at a lone police Land Rover. None of the gleeful youths interviewed by the BBC seemed to grasp any ideological inspiration for their behavior, other than to “hit cops.” Graveside orations by Saoradh, the New IRA’s political mouthpiece, included the laying of a wreath by the man charged with the murder of journalist Lyra McKee in Derry in 2019. The cruelty and offense caused by these antics (and the sullen defiance of a world that has largely moved on without them) will not be enough to derail Biden’s visit.
The people leading these blighted tail-end Charlies may have wanted — and some security sources say even planned for — a “spectacular” show to overshadow the celebration of what they see as the Good Friday Agreement’s normalization of “colonial” rule by traitors in Sinn Féin. What they were actually able to do was license a few teenagers to trash their own neighborhood.
Is it possible that loyalist paramilitaries, not enamored with what they perceive as Biden’s partiality when it comes to Nationalist sentiment, might also try to disrupt the party? They were able to derail a visit to an East Belfast peace event by Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney last year with a bomb hoax. But it is unlikely that they would want to be distracted from their main task: torturing communities they run as criminal drugs cartels.
Biden can do some good while he is in town. The White House spokesman who ran through his itinerary spoke of his support for Northern Ireland’s “vast economic potential.” It is through economic prosperity, as well as addressing the remaining death cultists who groom children into wrecking their lives that this gorgeous, friendly place will thrive. A massive program of inward investment by the US would put boosters on a reconciliation process that has previously relied too much on giving semi-retired paramilitary gangsters sinecures to stop killing. The security challenges and depressing news footage must not overshadow the quiet normality that is flourishing and yearned for by people who have suffered enough.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
