The former British prime minister Tony Blair has said the Good Friday agreement “should be reviewed over time” but said any review had to come from compromise and that “the distrust is still there”.
Joe Biden will arrive in Northern Ireland at 9.30pm on Tuesday as he begins a visit marking the 25th anniversary of the pact, though Blair sounded a note of caution on the influence he believed the US president could have on restoring power sharing in Northern Ireland.
On his arrival in Belfast Biden will be greeted off Air Force One by the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak.
A bilateral meeting with Sunak will follow on Wednesday morning before a speech by the US president in Belfast before a three-day visit to the Republic of Ireland to celebrate the US’s historic links with the country.
Biden is expected to meet Stormont’s main political parties as part of a visit he said would underscore his country’s “commitment to preserving peace and encouraging prosperity” in Northern Ireland.
Downing Street welcomed the suggestion that Biden’s personal touch may be used to try to convince political leaders in the province to resume business in the Northern Ireland assembly.
“We of course welcome all attempts to get Stormont back up and running,” said a spokesperson for Sunak.
They downplayed suggestions the engagement by Biden with the UK would be relatively low-key, following claims that the US president’s meeting with Sunak had been scaled back to a “coffee” at the request of the White House.
“I wouldn’t characterise it as that,” Sunak’s spokesperson said, adding the UK and US were close allies, and that the two leaders have “incredibly positive working relationships”.
Blair, whose government brokered the agreement, said the influence of US presidents was very important to the peace deal but said “you’ve got to insert them at the right moment in the right place”.
“The Americans can play a real role, but it’s something that you need to do carefully. Because there’s a difference between influencing and pressurising and the one tends to be positive, the other can be negative,” he said.
He said unionists in Northern Ireland were able to resist pressure even from the highest quarters. “If you try and pressurise them to do something that they’re fundamentally in disagreement with, it’s usually futile pressure, even if it comes from the US, so you’ve got to use that influence carefully.”
Blair said there was always provision in the agreement for it to be updated and reviewed to reflect the current political situation, but said any review “will only work if it brings the communities together”. “That distrust is still there. You can’t ignore that it goes deep, and I’m afraid it will be only time and stability that takes care of that.”
Blair said he recalled the negotiations as a “rollercoaster” but said it should always be remembered it came as a product of both communities in Northern Ireland, as well as a deep partnership between the British and Irish governments, which he said had been “neglected” during the Brexit years.
“It only really came together literally in the moments before we announced it,” Blair told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, adding: “There was this overwhelming sense of desire to succeed, but had we failed, that would have been a very humiliating and public failure.”
Blair said that despite the impasse at Stormont, the agreement had “pretty much kept the peace” for 25 years.
“You’d wake up every morning to acts of terrorism, death, misery, it was a very, very, very difficult time, it cast a shadow over the whole of the country. It’s impossible now 25 years on to understand exactly what it was like … Belfast today is a thriving European city. I think the economy of Northern Ireland has doubled in size in the last 25 years, so there’s a lot of positives.”
In a veiled warning to Sunak and Conservative MPs, Blair said it was “important to remember that the British-Irish dimension of this is important as well and I think in recent years that has somewhat been neglected.
“If you’ve got difficulties around the border, which is what we’ve had, then activating that British-Irish relationship in the intergovernmental council is important. That is difficult to do at the moment for all the reasons we know but I think it’s always as well to recognise that there were three strands to this agreement and not simply one.”
