Biden plans to focus on the economy in Belfast speech marking Good Friday Agreement anniversary

Belfast, Northern Ireland CNN  — 

When President Joe Biden speaks here Wednesday to mark a quarter-century of the Good Friday Agreement, it won’t be from the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly – currently suspended over a Brexit trade dispute – but from a new university campus downtown.

His choice of venue is a symbolic one. While decades of violence between Nationalists and Unionists has been mostly left to another era, the peace is fragile and the politics are broken – making Biden’s speech to students as much about the future of this region as its bloody past.

Departing Washington on Tuesday, Biden described his goal in Northern Ireland bluntly: ensuring the US-brokered accord remains in place.

“Keep the peace, that’s the main thing,” he said before boarding Air Force One. “Keep your fingers crossed.”

Biden’s frank outlook for his one-night visit to Northern Ireland was a reflection of the tensions that remain 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. The agreement called for a power-sharing government between those who want to remain part of the United Kingdom and those who favor a united Ireland.

While Biden was invited to speak from Stormont, the stately parliament building overlooking Belfast, he turned down the offer while the power-sharing arrangement remains mired in dysfunction. The regional government has operated only sporadically since it was formed and hasn’t been in place for more than a year as the main unionist party resists new Brexit-related trade rules.

Both Biden and the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had once hoped those differences might be resolved by the time of Biden’s visit this week. But they weren’t, leaving one of the primary accomplishments of the Good Friday Agreement unfulfilled at just the moment the accord is being celebrated.

Biden’s aides worked around the disappointment by scheduling his speech at the new campus of Ulster University in Belfast, which cost millions of pounds to construct and can accommodate thousands of students – most of whom were born after the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

For them, the violence from The Troubles isn’t even a distant memory, since they weren’t around to experience it first-hand. Instead, it is economic opportunity that appears top of mind, particularly as Britain’s exit from the European Union complicates trade relations in the region.

Biden plans to focus heavily on the economy in his speech, and has appointed a special envoy to Northern Ireland, former US Rep. Joe Kennedy III, to focus mainly on cultivating foreign investment in the territory. Under a new agreement between the UK and the EU, Northern Ireland will essentially remain part of the EU common market, potentially making it more attractive for businesses.

Biden will hail the “tremendous progress” since the Good Friday Agreement while also underscoring “the readiness of the United States to preserve those gains and support Northern Ireland’s vast economic potential to the benefit of all communities,” according to John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Ahead of the speech, Biden will sit for brief talks with Sunak, though won’t participate in any major public events with him while he’s here. Biden is also not attending next month’s coronation of King Charles III in London, leading some to identify a generally negative attitude toward the United Kingdom. (The White House denies this, and points out no president has ever attended a British monarch’s coronation.)

He’s also expected to meet separately with the leaders of the five parties that make up Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, during which he’s likely to stress the importance of resuming the arrangement as part of the Good Friday Agreement’s legacy.

It remains to be seen how successful he will be, however, and some loyalists have quietly questioned how evenhanded the proudly Irish-American president can be when it comes to matters relating to his beloved ancestral homeland.

Biden’s speech is the only public event on his schedule in Belfast before he departs for Dublin in the Republic of Ireland later Wednesday afternoon. The second leg of his trip – with stops in two ancestral hometowns and a visit to the Knock Shrine – promises to be more personal, and less politically fraught, than his brief stop in Belfast.