How Joe Biden can be a true friend to the Irish

On this day in 1974, a body was recovered in quiet fields near the Country Tyrone village of Clogher, hard against Northern Ireland’s frontier. It was that of Cormac McCabe, the headmaster of a nearby secondary school, who was also a part-time officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment, locally raised ‘home battalions’ of the British Army.

McCabe had been kidnapped the day before, having crossed the border to have lunch in Monaghan town with his wife and disabled daughter. Exposed and defenceless, he was the softest of targets for the Provisional IRA terrorists who abducted him, shot him in the head and then dumped him in a bog field.

Joe Biden won’t have heard of McCabe when today, forty-seven years exactly after a fellow Irishman was found murdered, he becomes the forty sixth president of the United States. There is more than mathematical symmetry at work here. Biden, who celebrates his heritage, might do well to consider what this compatriot stood for and died for if he is to become a true a friend to Northern Ireland’s struggle to find a better tomorrow.

The signs are hopeful. Last night, standing at the Lincoln reflecting pool in the US Capitol, he declared: 

‘It’s hard sometimes to remember. But that’s how we heal. It’s important to do that as a nation. That’s why we’re here today. Between sundown and dusk, let us shine the lights in the darkness along the sacred pool of reflection and remember all whom we lost.’

Biden was referring to the victims of Covid, but his words have a resonance in Northern Ireland where remembering the past is fraught with difficulty. Here, too, Republicans are all-too-often engaged in creating a ‘cult of forgetting’ where victims like McCarthy, every bit as Irish as the patriots they espouse, are turned into perpetrators, eternally responsible for their own deaths as ‘legitimate targets’ in a ‘war.’

Unlike Biden, Captain McCabe was an Irishman born on the island but he was also unashamedly British. He was buried with full military honours in a coffin bearing the Union flag he served under like tens of thousands of other Irishmen and women since before partition and beyond. Put bluntly, being the wrong sort of Irishman for a gang of local sociopaths, mobilised by ethno-nationalist hatred, sealed McCabe’s fate.

Much has been made of Biden’s clumsy humour a few years ago, captured on video, when he greeted then Irish prime minister Enda Kenny for a breakfast meeting on St Patrick’s day at his house with the words, ‘If you’re wearing orange you’re not welcome in here.’ 

Orange is a colour associated with Northern Ireland’s largely Protestant pro-Union population. This has been seen (and in some cases yearned for) as a sign that the new administration will be more partial towards Irish nationalism to the exclusion of Ireland’s other main tradition. But after the campaign in poetry comes the first term in prose. To the extent that Biden will be involved in Northern Ireland at all, I’m reassured it will be on the basis of astute appointments within his administration. These appointees will, I hope, understand and emphasise the need for non-partisan support for the Provinces' faltering institutions and the economic support necessary to rescue people out of the clutches of violent extremism.

The Belfast Agreement – overwhelmingly endorsed on both sides of the border – cemented the constitutional status quo in Northern Ireland until such times as the British secretary of state believed that there was a realistic possibility of a majority for change. ‘Defending the agreement’ is too often a rallying cry for those who want the treaty to mean only a process designed to hasten the end of Northern Ireland’s place in the UK. It’s often forgotten that the much lauded principle of consent in the Good Friday Agreement applies equally to those who wish to remain British but who are elbowed out of the picture by activists who will be queueing up to bend president Biden’s ear. They must – and I suspect they will – be given a polite brush off.

Biden is a student of history. The best thing this new president can do for Northern Ireland is to encourage its people to make the final hard yards to be reconciled to each other. That is not a task that can be outsourced for ever. It cannot be achieved in Washington, Dublin, Brussels or London. It can be helped by others, of course – and helped enormously if the next leader of the free world understands the complexity of the place that made and unmade forgotten victims like Cormac McCabe. It can be hastened if he uses his enormous prestige and influence to help Northern Ireland’s divided people to reach out to one another. As Abraham Lincoln said,’ You cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.’