Wooing Irish leaders to closer ties with NATO and support for Ukraine is on the agenda of US President Joe Biden's Ireland trip, says a nationalist activist.
Biden flew to Belfast on Tuesday to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that mostly ended three decades of sectarian violence between republicans and unionists.
He will fly back on Friday after touring the Republic of Ireland, the country he claims as his ancestral homeland.
Biden's trip was overshadowed by the ongoing row over Northern Ireland's post-Brexit limbo between the UK and the European Union (EU) single market, along with threats of a bombing campaign by Irish Republican Army (IRA) splinter group the New IRA.
However, Belfast-based activist Phil Kelly told Sputnik that media speculation that the city was set to erupt in violence during Biden's visit was "vastly overstated."
"The reality is you could have arrived here at any time over the course of the 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement, and it would have been an inopportune moment to come and celebrate the successes because they've been few and far between," he said.
He said Washington would continue to play a role in the Northern Irish peace process, but questioned how much Biden personally does when he "seems to struggle to know what day of the week it is or what country he's currently visiting."
But he said one only had to look at annual St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the US, where Irish politicians can be seen "fawning around the Biden administration and bowing at the altar of US capitalism."
Among Irish Republicans there is a "new generation of political leaders being groomed by internships within Washington, DC, which doesn't, in my eyes, bode well for the future," Kelly said. "These are the guarantors that the sewage pipe of US dollars will flow on headed into the future, which is in no one's best interest."
But he said unionists must come to terms with the "huge," well-organized and funded republican lobby in the US — which Biden courts with his claims to Irish ancestry.
"It's part of the political establishment that's not going to go away," Kelly said, dismissing the notion that "you're suddenly going to get a US administration saying, 'let's listen to the concerns of intransigent unionism, which went to Washington, DC, and insulted the US administration.'"
Biden's visit was also met by protests from opponents of ever-closer ties between the officially-neutral Republic of Ireland and US-led military bloc NATO — especially in light of its support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
A tweet advertising a protest against US president Joe Biden's visit to Ireland in April 2023
The Belfast-based activist pointed out that Dublin continues to allow the US Air Force to use Shannon Airport in western Ireland as a "staging post" for military flights.
"What you have now is a political establishment with Ireland, which is going with the begging bowl to Washington, DC, and also to the European Union, that will trade its sovereignty and its respect as a nation and its independence to be part of that kind of capitalist neo-liberal tent," Kelly said.
Amid the Ukraine conflict, "there's now questions within Ireland about maybe it's time to move away from neutrality as a nation — not that we have any real meaningful neutrality," he noted. "Irish neutrality is neutrality almost in name only now, because of its involvement in supporting NATO powers in their proxy war in Ukraine."
Regardless of one's stance on the "morality" of Russia's de-Nazification operation in Ukraine, it has accelerated the "end of the US empire, of domination of the unipolar world," Kelly said, adding: "What we're seeing is the emergence of the multipolar world. That's something that should be celebrated."
But he worried that Ireland was becoming "even more entwined" with the EU and US imperial interests.
"That doesn't serve the interests of Ireland as an independent sovereign nation," Kelly said. "It undermines it, and it's something that anyone who believes in sovereignty and independence should be should be struggling against."
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