Cricket lovers all over the planet are preparing for a thrilling conflict as India takes on Ireland in a T20 Global match today. The match vows to be an exhilarating experience, and fans are enthusiastically anticipating the activity.
Date and Time: The T20 match among India and Ireland is planned for now, August 23, 2023. The match will start at 7:00 PM IST (1:30 PM GMT) and is supposed to run for roughly three hours.
Scene: The setting for this T20 confrontation is the famous Chinnaswamy Arena in Bangalore, India. Known for its charging climate and excited swarm, the arena is set to have a nail-gnawing challenge.
Cricket aficionados across the globe can get the surprisingly realistic through different telecom stations and web based streaming stages. This is the way to watch the India versus Ireland T20 match:
Broadcasting Channels: In India, fans can check out Star Sports Organization, which holds the restrictive telecom freedoms for the match. Cricket enthusiasts in Ireland can get the activity on Sky Sports.
Web based Streaming: For watchers who lean toward internet real time, Hotstar in India and Sky Go in Ireland will give live gushing of the match. These stages offer both free and premium membership administrations for watchers to look over.
As expectation works for this thrilling experience, cricket specialists and players have been sharing their considerations on the match. Indian skipper Virat Kohli communicated his fervor, expressing, “Playing before the home group at Chinnaswamy is dependably extraordinary. We are anticipating an incredible game and desire to set up a decent show for our fans.”
Then again, Ireland’s chief, Andrew Balbirnie, recognized the test of confronting India in their own lawn however stayed hopeful, expressing, “We know it will be an extreme match, yet we have arranged well, and we are here to contend.”
The India versus Ireland T20 match isn’t simply a cricketing scene yet additionally a chance for fans to observe a portion of the world’s best gifts in real life. With the two groups holding back nothing, fans can anticipate an arresting challenge.
Thus, write in your schedules and set your alerts for this absolutely exhilarating T20 conflict among India and Ireland. Whether you’re watching from the arena or the solace of your home, this match vows to be a paramount one.
More than two-thirds of people in Northern Ireland believe big changes are required to the power-sharing institutions created by the Good Friday agreement, research commissioned by a parliamentary committee has found.
The same proportion of the population, 70%, think the peace accord of 1998 has failed to deliver stable governance with the Stormont assembly not sitting for nine of the 25 years that have elapsed since the Belfast agreement was struck.
The research was conducted by YouGov and Ohio State University for the House of Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee.
That level of scepticism about the deal’s success in delivering stability remained consistent across age, religion and political affiliation.
The committee chair, Simon Hoare, said the poll provided an “important snapshot” of current thinking in the region.
The devolved government sitting in Stormont was created under strand one of the Belfast Good Friday agreement, which was considered an ingenious way of getting previously warring sides, republicans and loyalists to run the country together.
Under the power-sharing system, elected politicians are required to self-designate as unionists, nationals or “other” to ensure laws could only be passed that worked for all communities.
A quarter of a century on, and three-quarters of the respondents in the survey consider the requirement that key decisions have to have support from both nationalist and unionist sides gives the DUP and Sinn Féin an effective veto, with growing parties such as Alliance locked out.
Stormont was collapsed for three years after a Sinn Féin walkout in 2017 and has been suspended for more than a year after the DUP pulled the plug in a protest over Brexit.
Support for reform is widespread but Bertie Ahern, one of the architects of the peace deal, has said it could only happen once the DUP was back in Stormont. The party, led by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, said it would not be “browbeaten” into a return and few are expecting it to resume power-sharing until September.
Donaldson faced a cacophony of calls to return to Stormont in Belfast last week with leading figures involved in the peace deal, including Bill Clinton, urging politicians to face down “ugly” moments and “get the show on the road”.
“I ask you not to be discouraged, this is human affairs, there are very few permanent victories or defeats in human affairs. All these old ugly problems are always rearing their heads. You just have to suck it up and beat it back and deal with it,” Clinton told a conference at Queen’s University.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
“When you’re here, you wonder why anyone would ever want to leave,” Biden marveled soon after his arrival at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant. A capacity crowd had waited for hours to see him in the rustic pub. “Coming here feels like coming home.”
When presidents travel abroad, they are traditionally tight, focused affairs calibrated with a specific goal in mind: To advance the White House’s interests and shape the place they will soon leave behind. But for three days in Ireland, as Biden roamed the countryside by motorcade with his sister Valerie and son Hunter in tow, the president seemed content to exist within it.
He met dignitaries and townspeople. He toasted his Irish ancestors, the Irish people, Irish Americans and even the “quite a few,” he said, “who wish they were lucky enough to be Irish.”
He took a selfie with nationalist politician and alleged former Irish Republican Army member Gerry Adams, as well as with an Irish reporter and nearly anyone else who wanted one. He kissed babies and had a close encounter with a sliotar.
He butchered the name of New Zealand’s famed rugby team — badly. At one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to make friends with the Irish president’s dog. In a surprise to nobody, he quoted at least three different Irish poets but may have quoted his Grandpa Finnegan even more.
And all that came before Friday evening, when Biden traveled west across the country to County Mayo, where he recalled “the history and hope and the heartbreak” of his ancestors in front of an estimated 20,000 gathered at a 19th-century cathedral on the banks of the River Moy.
“Family is the beginning, the middle and the end,” Biden said. “That’s the Irish of it: the beginning, middle and the end.”
Just hours earlier, Biden had visited the Knock Shrine, a pilgrimage site for Catholics made all the more significant by a chance meeting with the priest who administered last rites to his late son, Beau. The encounter reportedly brought Biden to tears.
Biden had come to Ireland to reaffirm its close relationship with the U.S. — and to reaffirm his own personal relationship with a place he credits for shaping him. It was here that the criticisms he faces at home seemed to fade away: His age didn’t make him old, it provided him wisdom. His gaffes didn’t make him shaky, they gave him charm.
Biden has made no secret of his deep fascination with his ancestral origins. And since visiting Ireland as vice president to trace his lineage, he’d eagerly sought a reason to come back. The White House found its justification in the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement that largely ended sectarian violence in Northern Ireland — a U.S. brokered deal that’s served as an integral element of the island’s tight relationship with America.
Yet Biden spent only a handful of hours in Northern Ireland before jetting off to his ancestral homeland. Combined with the dearth of policy announcements or apparent progress on political priorities, the move raised questions over whether the trip was, as one reporter put it, “a taxpayer-funded family reunion.”
The White House rejected the characterization, pointing to his speeches and meetings with Irish and U.K. leaders. Biden, though, appeared otherwise determined not to let thorny political demands intrude too much on his mutual lovefest with the people of Ireland.
The president has answered only a single question unrelated to his visit, on the search for the Pentagon document leaker. The most substantive answer he gave all week to any query came in response to the child who had asked about the key to success — prompting Biden to launch into a winding and often-told anecdote about the late conservative Sen. Jesse Helms and the importance of not judging people’s motives.
“That’s a long answer to a real quick question,” he conceded, well after the child had lost interest.
At times, it was tough to tell where Biden as president ended and Biden as tourist began. His tour through the country was sentimental and joyful. During a visit to Carlingford Castle, he peered across the water through gathering fog, chatting quietly with a local guide enlisted to bring him through the last Irish landmark Biden’s great-great-grandfather saw before embarking for America over 170 years ago.
“It feels wonderful,” Biden said of his emotions upon visiting the site, as a bagpipe and drum ensemble prepared to strike up an original piece entitled: “A Biden Return.”
In Dundalk, a short ride from the castle through the County Louth where his Finnegan ancestors once lived, Biden bantered with workers at a local market, debating which food and souvenirs to buy. (He left, the town paper later reported, with a bounty: Lemon meringue, chocolate eclairs, bread and butter pudding, pear and almond cake, and a mug with an image of a dog on it.)
And on Thursday, as he became the fourth U.S. president to address a joint session of Ireland’s Parliament, Biden paused to recognize the familial significance of what he would term “one of the great honors of my career.”
“Well mom,” he said, looking skyward, “you said it would happen.”
In between speeches and state dinners, the scenes at times bordered on chaos. Throngs of well-wishers lined Biden’s routes, some stationing themselves mere inches off the road as the motorcade whipped by. Others gathered on highway overpasses in the driving rain, waving Irish and American flags.
As Biden stopped in local towns and businesses, the tight spaces and swelling crowds caused visible alarm among his Secret Service detail. “A security nightmare,” one agent muttered at one point.
But Biden, basking in the middle of it all, seemed unconcerned.
“I wish our mom, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, were here today. She’d be so damn proud,” he said in the Windsor Bar, surrounded by a mix of relatives, Irish officials and local residents. “Louth held such a special place in her heart, it really did.”
As the trip wore on and the outside world fell away, Biden appeared to feel increasingly at home — a sentiment he expressed so frequently that some reporters and aides joked he might actually stay.
“I don’t know why the hell my ancestors left here. It’s beautiful,” he said on Wednesday.
“I only wish I could stay longer,” he told Irish lawmakers on Thursday.
“I’m not going home,” he said, admiring the Irish president’s residence.
Biden, however reluctantly, would eventually have to head home, set as he was to depart the Irish coast late Friday for his family’s adopted shores of Delaware. But well before then, he made permanent his intention to return.
“Your feet will bring you to where your heart is,” Biden wrote in the guestbook at the Irish president’s residence, in reference to a line he attributed to William Butler Yeats that he said his grandfather often quoted.
It was a slightly more poetic way of reiterating a pledge that he’d already made at the Windsor Bar, before striding back into the cold, where the crowds stood eager and waiting: “The bad news for all of you is, we’ll be back,” Biden said. “There’s no way to keep us out.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“When I stepped off Air Force One at Shannon a few days ago, and saw Ireland, beautiful and green, and felt again the warmth of her people, something deep inside began to stir,” waxed Ronald Reagan in 1984. “Who knows but that scientists will one day explain the complex genetic process by which generations seem to transfer, across time and even oceans, their fondest memories.”
Reagan — whose paternal great-grandfather was Irish Catholic, though he himself was not — was hardly the most Irish-identified of U.S. presidents, though many seem to forget the rest of their DNA map when deplaning on the Emerald Isle.
None other than the nation’s first African American president, Barack Obama, reminisced about his roots in the Kearney family of Moneygall while hoisting a Guinness in the local pub back in 2011.
Bill Clinton also claimed Irish ancestry, though without specific documentation. Nonetheless, his role in securing peace in Northern Ireland made him a true kinsman to those in Belfast and Dublin and beyond. His 1998 visit, designed to cement the peace process, is widely considered the most triumphant moment of his presidency.
Clinton was also following in the footsteps of his own great role model, John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, who journeyed to Limerick at the height of his global celebrity.
“This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection,” Kennedy cooed, to the swooning delight of nuns and publicans alike.
Now comes Joe Biden, whose roots in a working-class Irish Catholic family are the core of his political identity, his badge and shield. Not for nothing is he prone to long discourses on the wit and wisdom of his Grandpa Finnegan.
“Ambrose Finnegan,” he called out toward the ceiling when, as vice president, he hosted then-British Prime Minister David Cameron. His granddad had taught him not to trust WASP politicians.
But he seemed to remember himself and quickly added, “Things have changed.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“Where barbed wire one sliced up the city, today we find a cathedral of learning built of glass that lets the [light shine] in and out,” Biden said. The agreement “just has a profound impact for someone who has come back to see it. It’s an incredible testament to the power and the possibilities of peace.”
Northern Ireland has been unable to form a government for nearly a year under rules that require its main pro-British party — the Democratic Unionist Party — to share power with Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein. The DUP is also holding out against a proposal aimed at settling post-Brexit trade concerns between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
But Biden made only glancing mention of the standoff, emphasizing the importance of democratic institutions and urging all parties in Northern Ireland to work together.
“For politics, no matter what divides us, if we look hard enough, there’s always areas that’s going to bring us together,” Biden said.
Northern Ireland has prospered overall since the agreement, Biden noted, even as critics say that it’s failing. Its gross domestic product has doubled, an initial number Biden said he expects to triple if growth stays on track as American businesses continue investing in the region. The president also nodded, as he often does, to Irish arts and culture, which has produced world-renowned poetry, movies and television shows in recent years.
Much of that growth has been driven by young people, Biden added, who will push Northern Ireland forward in widening fields like cyber and clean energy. The president also announced that later this year, Joe Kennedy III, the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs, will lead a trade delegation of American companies to Northern Ireland.
“It’s up to us to keep this going,” he said, pledging to “sustain the peace, unleash this incredible economic opportunity, which is just beginning … Your history is our history. But even more important, your future is America’s future.”
Biden has studiously avoided any thorny political territory during his stint in Northern Ireland, saying only that he was “going to listen” to party leaders during a private meeting ahead of his speech.
The president earlier on Wednesday also ignored questions about the potential for a trade deal sought by the U.K., and officials said they did not expect him to address the issue during a meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Still, those political tensions have trailed Biden throughout what has largely been billed as a personal trip to reconnect with his ancestral roots.
Amanda Sloat, the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe, faced several questions on Wednesday about whether Biden’s pride in his Irish background signaled a dislike for the U.K.
“It’s simply untrue,” she said. “President Biden obviously is a very proud Irish American, he is proud of those Irish roots, but he is also a strong supporter of our bilateral relationship with the U.K.”
Sloat added that the Biden administration was working “in lockstep” with the U.K. on a variety of global challenges.
Perhaps aware of the scrutiny of his allegiances, Biden during his speech at Ulster University made uncharacteristically little mention of his Irish heritage. Instead, he kicked off the speech with a different anecdote about his family history, reminding the crowd that “Biden is English too.”
Following the speech, the president traveled to the Irish Republic for the first time since he traced his lineage through the countryside as vice president in 2016.
Myah Ward contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
BELFAST — He came, he saw … and he got the hell out as fast as he could.
But Joe Biden’s brief visit to Northern Ireland across Tuesday night and Wednesday — 18 hours total, about half of them in bed — featured none of the gaffes that have previously blotted his diplomatic copybook. (That would change, however, after he headed south to the Republic of Ireland a few hours later.)
Indeed, the U.S. president successfully navigated Northern Ireland’s famously choppy political waters, avoided throwing a spotlight on the failure of its unity government — and even revealed an often-hidden and more hopeful reality: Off-camera, these supposedly warring politicians actually get on well.
Wednesday’s gathering at Ulster University in Belfast brought Northern Ireland’s opposing political leaders — including the key figure blocking the revival of power-sharing, Democratic Unionist chief Jeffrey Donaldson — side by side at last, along with a selfie-shooting Biden.
The president carefully avoided confronting Donaldson directly about his party’s yearlong blockade of the Northern Ireland Assembly, while dangling the prospect of billions of dollars of U.S. business investment if powersharing is restored.
And instead of extolling his famous Irish Catholic roots, Biden’s speech noted the English and Protestant elements of his family tree, and the disproportionate contribution of Ulster Scots immigrants to the foundation of the United States.
“The family ties, the pride, those Ulster Scots immigrants who helped found and build my country, they run very deep,” Biden told the audience.
“Men born in Ulster were among those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the United States, pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for freedom’s cause … Your history is our history.”
If Biden had punches to throw in the Democratic Unionists’ direction, he pulled them.
Speaking to POLITICO, a visibly relieved Donaldson said afterward that he’d appreciated the president’s “measured and balanced remarks” — and distanced himself from his unionist colleagues’ pointed criticisms of Biden as a poodle to Irish nationalism and even the outlawed IRA.
He also rebuffed a claim by his predecessor as DUP leader, Arlene Foster, that Biden “hates the United Kingdom,” stating: “The United Kingdom and the United States have a strong alliance and we want to build on that.”
Donaldson added that he had been reassured by the president during a brief backstage conversation “that he respects the integrity of Northern Ireland, that he respects our ability to restore the [power-sharing] institutions on the basis that we respect what the Belfast Agreement said — that Northern Ireland remains an integral part of the United Kingdom, and there should be no barrier to trade within the United Kingdom.”
The backdrop to the speech had been one of surprising unity, with unionists and Irish nationalists chatting amicably in the audience against background music of soft jazz.
Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy — the Irish republican party’s finance minister in the five-party government that collapsed in October because of DUP obstruction — laughed heartily alongside former Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt as the two discussed the ins and outs of power-sharing.
“The parties do work well together when they get the opportunity,” Murphy told POLITICO afterward.
He noted that Biden’s speech diplomatically avoided assigning blame for the Stormont impasse and focused on making a better Northern Ireland for today’s Ulster University students, who are too young to remember the three decades of bloodshed that ended following paramilitary cease-fires in the mid-1990s.
But Murphy added: “Biden’s pitch is about the future. The DUP don’t get that. If they think they somehow got off the hook here because they didn’t get a slap from an American president. Well, the rest of this society’s moving on with or without them.”
US President Joe Biden delivers a speech at the Windsor Bar in Dundalk, Ireland | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Most of those present agreed that, even though some leaders had wanted Biden to visit the Stormont parliament building overlooking Belfast, the president’s decision not to do so meant their failure to form a new government hadn’t become the central image of the visit.
“Of course it’s a missed opportunity. We don’t have an assembly and an executive,” said Naomi Long, leader of the center-ground Alliance Party and justice minister in the failed government.
“But to have gone to Stormont today when it isn’t operating would have been farcical,” she said.
The assembly’s caretaker speaker, Alex Maskey, also from Sinn Féin, agreed that in hindsight, Biden was probably right to have declined his own invitation to visit what is essentially Ground Zero of Northern Ireland’s political dysfunction.
“It ran the risk of underlining the problem,” Maskey said. “It’s just as well he didn’t go there because you’d be spending the next two or three days trying to repair negative media.”
While Biden strikingly spent less than a day in Belfast before crossing the border to spend the rest of the week touring the Republic of Ireland, he left behind his new envoy to Northern Ireland, Joe Kennedy III, who will spend the next 10 days building business and political contacts across the U.K. region.
Kennedy, making his first trip here, chatted and joked with DUP politicians, particularly Emma Little-Pengelly, a close Donaldson ally and former special adviser to previous party leaders Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson.
They discussed tourist highlights of Northern Ireland’s glorious Giant’s Causeway coast and the best ice cream parlors in its resort towns. (Kennedy made a note of Little-Pengelly’s favorite: Morelli’s of Portstewart.)
Kennedy insisted Biden hadn’t needed to spend too much time in Belfast talking to local leaders this week — because he’d just had all of them, including Donaldson, as guests to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day.
His own mission, Kennedy added, “is not about the United States government coming in to tell the people of Northern Ireland what they need to do.”
“They’ve got a vision of what that future can be,” he said. “We can support them.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Joe Biden managed to tread carefully around historic and current political sensitivities during the first part of his trip to the island of Ireland this week, marking 25 years since the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement sought to secure lasting peace for Northern Ireland.
But not long after crossing from that U.K. region into the Republic of Ireland on Wednesday, the U.S. president made a major gaffe: He confused New Zealand’s “All Blacks” rugby team with the notorious “Black and Tans” British military unit that fought the Irish Republican Army a century ago.
At the end of a rambling speech in a pub Wednesday night, Biden — flanked by Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin and star rugby player Rob Kearney, a distant cousin — tried to pay a compliment to one of Kearney’s greatest sporting accomplishments. That would be when Ireland’s rugby team defeated New Zealand for the first time in 111 years, in November 2016 in Chicago. New Zealand’s squad is famously called the All Blacks, in reference to their uniforms.
Trouble is, Biden let slip a reference that could well reflect his affinity with Irish rebel history and its folk songs.
“He’s a hell of a rugby player, and he beat the hell out of the Black and Tans,” Biden said to audience laughter.
The Black and Tans were an auxiliary unit of Britain’s security forces that fought IRA rebels in their 1919-21 war of independence from Britain. Their name reflected the improvised and inconsistent colors of their uniforms.
The unrelentingly pro-Biden coverage on state broadcaster RTÉ, which televised his speech live, didn’t acknowledge the mistake. The commentator’s sign-off? “Well, that’s Joe Biden: a little bit sentimental, a little bit schmaltzy, but a thoroughly decent guy and a great friend to Ireland. The trip is off to a great start.”
But the gaffe and “Rob Kearney” blew up on social media in Ireland. Some listed the retired rugby fullback’s career accomplishments including, most famously, his single-handed defeat of the British forces a century ago.
“The greatest gift Ireland wanted from Joe Biden was a signature gaffe. And … didn’t he just go and give us one for the century,” tweeted comedian Oliver Callan.
Attempting to hose down the row on Thursday, Biden aide Amanda Sloat, the National Security Council senior director for Europe, said: “I think for everyone in Ireland who was a rugby fan it was incredibly clear that the president was talking about the All Blacks and Ireland’s defeat of the New Zealand team in 2016.”
She added: “It was clear what the president was referring to. It was certainly clear to his cousin sitting next to him who had played in that match.”
Lost in the shuffle was Biden’s other Kearney gaffe: He still hasn’t figured out how to say his name.
When introducing Kearney at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, Biden called him Keer-ney. The Irish pronounce the name Kar-ney. Biden stuck with Keer-ney on Wednesday.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
LONDON — Joe Biden is not someone known for his subtlety.
His gaffe-prone nature — which saw him last week confuse the New Zealand rugby team with British forces from the Irish War of Independence — leaves little in the way of nuance.
But he is also a sentimental man from a long gone era of Washington, who specializes in a type of homespun, aw-shucks affability that would be seen as naff in a younger president.
His lack of subtlety was on show in Belfast last week as he issued a thinly veiled ultimatum to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — return to Northern Ireland’s power sharing arrangements or risk losing billions of dollars in U.S. business investment.
The DUP — a unionist party that does not take kindly to lectures from American presidents — is refusing to sit in Stormont, the Northern Ireland Assembly, due to its anger with the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol, which has created trade friction between the region and the rest of the U.K.
The DUP is also refusing to support the U.K.-EU Windsor Framework, which aims to fix the economic problems created by the protocol, despite hopes it would see the party reconvene the Northern Irish Assembly.
The president on Wednesday urged Northern Irish leaders to “unleash this incredible economic opportunity, which is just beginning.”
However, American business groups paint a far more complex and nuanced view of future foreign investment into Northern Ireland than offered up by Biden.
Biden told a Belfast crowd on Wednesday there were “scores of major American corporations wanting to come here” to invest, but that a suspended Stormont was acting as a block on that activity.
One U.S. business figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Biden’s flighty rhetoric was “exaggerated” and that many businesses would be looking beyond the state of the regional assembly to make their investment decisions.
The president spoke as if Ulster would be rewarded with floods of American greenbacks if the DUP reverses its intransigence, predicting that Northern Ireland’s gross domestic product (GDP) would soon be triple its 1998 level. Its GDP is currently around double the size of when the Good Friday Agreement was struck in 1998.
Emanuel Adam, executive director of BritishAmerican Business, said this sounded like a “magic figure” unless Biden “knows something we don’t know about.”
DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr. told POLITICO that U.S. politicians for “too long” have “promised some economic El Dorado or bonanza if you only do what we say politically … but that bonanza has never arrived and people are not naive enough here to believe it ever will.”
“A presidential visit is always welcome, but the glitter on top is not an economic driver,” he said.
Joe Biden addresses a crowd of thousands on April 14, 2023 in Ballina, Ireland | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Facing both ways
The British government is hoping the Windsor Framework will ease economic tensions in Northern Ireland and create politically stable conditions for inward foreign direct investment.
The framework removes many checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and has begun to slowly create a more collaborative relationship between London and Brussels on a number of fronts — two elements which have been warmly welcomed across the Atlantic.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market, to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, and the U.K.’s internal market.
“That’s like the world’s most exciting economic zone,” Sunak said in February.
Jake Colvin, head of Washington’s National Foreign Trade Council business group, said U.S. firms wanted to see “confidence that the frictions over the protocol have indeed been resolved.”
“Businesses will look to mechanisms like the Windsor Framework to provide stability,” he said.
Marjorie Chorlins, senior vice president for Europe at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the Windsor Framework was “very important” for U.S. businesses and that “certainty about the relationship between the U.K. and the EU is critical.”
She said a reconvened Stormont would mean more legislative stability on issues like skills and healthcare, but added that there were a whole range of other broader U.K. wide economic factors that will play a major part in investment decisions.
This is particularly salient in a week where official figures showed the U.K.’s GDP flatlining and predictions that Britain will be the worst economic performer in the G20 this year.
“We want to see a return to robust growth and prosperity for the U.K. broadly and are eager to work with government at all levels,” Chorlins said.
“Political and economic instability in the U.K. has been a challenge for businesses of all sizes.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market | Pool photo by Paul Faith/Getty Images
Her words underline just how much global reputational damage last year’s carousel of prime ministers caused for the U.K., with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey recently warning of a “hangover effect” from Liz Truss’ premiership and the broader Westminster psychodrama of 2022.
America’s Northern Ireland envoy Joe Kennedy, grandson of Robert Kennedy, accompanied the president last week and has been charged with drumming up U.S. corporate interest in Northern Ireland.
Kennedy said Northern Ireland is already “the number-one foreign investment location for proximity and market access.”
Northern Ireland has been home to £1.5 billion of American investment in the past decade and had the second-most FDI projects per capita out of all U.K. regions in 2021.
Claire Hanna, Westminster MP for the nationalist SDLP, believes reconvening Stormont would “signal a seriousness that there isn’t going to be anymore mucking around.”
“It’s also about the signal that the restoration of Stormont sends — that these are the accepted trading arrangements,” she said.
Hanna says the DUP’s willingness to “demonize the two biggest trading blocs in the world — the U.S. and EU” — was damaging to the country’s future economic prospects.
‘The money goes south’
At a more practical level, Biden’s ultimatum appears to carry zero weight with DUP representatives.
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson made it clear last week that he was unmoved by Biden’s economic proclamations and gave no guarantee his party would sit in the regional assembly in the foreseeable future.
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson told POLITICO.
“But fundamental to the success of our economy is our ability to trade within our biggest market, which is of course the United Kingdom.”
A DUP official said U.S. governments had been promising extra American billions in exchange “for selling out to Sinn Féin and Dublin” since the 1990s and “when America talks about corporate investment, we get the crumbs and that investment really all ends up in the Republic [of Ireland].”
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson said | Behal/Irish Government via Getty Images
“The Americans talk big, but the money goes south,” the DUP official said.
This underscores the stark reality that challenges Northern Ireland any time it pitches for U.S. investment — the competing proposition offered by its southern neighbor with its internationally low 12.5 percent rate on corporate profits.
Emanuel Adam with BritishAmerican Business said there was a noticeable feeling in Washington that firms want to do business in Dublin.
“When [Irish Prime Minister] Leo Varadkar and his team were here recently, I could tell how confident the Irish are these days,” he said. “There are not as many questions for them as there are around the U.K.”
Biden’s economic ultimatum looks toothless from the DUP’s perspective and its resonance may be as short-lived as his trip to Belfast itself.
This story has been updatedto correct an historical reference.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Europe as a whole faces a host of rising political and security threats, alongside the constant demands of a grinding war in Ukraine with no clear end in sight and with newfound complications owing to leaks of strategic documents.
And as Biden departs for his first overseas trip since February, the challenges at home are multiplying: Deepening divides over the rise in gun violence, a court ruling aimed at further restricting abortion access, and lingering questions about his own political future.
The White House has scrambled to respond, spending recent days doing diplomatic damage control over the document leak, gaming out its legal response on abortion and seeking new ways to pressure the GOP on guns. Those efforts have taken increasing priority across various parts of the administration, officials said, adding that Biden will remain briefed as he travels abroad.
But those gathering storm clouds risk overshadowing a trip that Biden has looked forward to more than all others since winning the White House — and one that aides envisioned as an opportunity for the Irish Catholic president to play up his personal bond with Ireland and celebrate political progress there.
Biden on Wednesday will mark the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement that mostly ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. He then will travel to the Irish Republic for the first time since he traced his lineage through the countryside as vice president in 2016.
“This is something you can sense he’s hoping will go well,” said Robert Savage, an Irish history scholar at Boston College. “He loves Ireland, and he wants to bask in the limelight of an American success story.”
But that gauzy depiction may be at odds with what awaits Biden on the ground. When he lands Tuesday night in Belfast, he’ll arrive in a region that hasn’t had a working legislature for the past year, and whose leaders are deadlocked over Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit future. The U.K.’s exit from the European Union has complicated Ireland’s trade with Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K. That’s caused larger political dysfunction and fears of the collapse of the Good Friday accord and a return to bloody conflict.
The U.K. and EU have sought to resolve the issue with a proposed settlement called the Windsor Framework. But Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party, the Democratic Unionists, have opposed the framework in defiance of the U.K. It’s protesting the proposal by refusing to form a government in Northern Ireland under power-sharing rules that require it to jointly run the legislature with the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin.
The terror threat is now considered “severe,” after the British government upgraded its assessment in late March. And there appears no imminent end to the political standoff that has already dented Northern Ireland’s finances and social services.
“No one wants to return to the period of the Troubles,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former senior State Department official. “But it’s not completely settled, there are still huge challenges, and you don’t want to play with fire here. And in some ways, that’s what Brexit has done.”
Biden has endorsed the Windsor Framework as an even-handed compromise. In a further show of support, he’s slated to meet Wednesday with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who clinched the deal in February but has struggled to sell it to Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party.
Yet even in a region where many fondly regard Biden as the most Irish U.S. president since John F. Kennedy, aides and experts say Biden is likely to avoid wading too deeply into the details of the ongoing dispute. Even as it coaxed the U.K. toward a post-Brexit compromise that kept the Good Friday Agreement intact, the White House held off on confirming that Biden would visit Northern Ireland until it was clear an agreement had been reached.
In a speech scheduled for Wednesday, Biden is expected to broadly hail the Windsor Framework while delicately skirting the underlying stalemate that’s paralyzed its government. In a further sign of the administration’s desire to limit the chance of any diplomatic blunders, Biden will steer clear of Northern Ireland’s parliament building and spend less than a day in Belfast before skipping south across the border. Even his meeting with Sunak has been scaled back, from the typical bilateral session to just a morning coffee.
“Biden’s role is to provide encouragement to all the parties in Northern Ireland to move forward,” said Daniel Mulhall, a longtime diplomat and Ireland’s former ambassador to the U.S. “I have no doubt that his speeches, when he appears in Belfast and Dublin and around the country, will be well attuned to the sensitivities.”
The trip could have served as a reprieve of sorts from domestic matters, ahead of Biden’s anticipated announcement that he will seek reelection. Instead, a pileup of high-profile issues is likely to follow him overseas.
Biden has yet to weigh in on the unprecedented arrest of Donald Trump, his former and possibly future chief rival for the presidency. His administration faces another adverse court ruling over abortion access, which Biden has vowed to protect despite his own complicated feelings on the issue. And the day before his departure came news of another mass shooting — this time in Kentucky, hours north of the Tennessee state capital where Republicans just finished expelling two Black lawmakers over their participation in gun violence protests.
Those developments could make it impossible for Biden to keep the focus on the imagery and sentimentality of his surroundings.
Biden is expected to make stops in Ireland’s County Louth and County Mayo, where he has distant relatives and had previously traced his family tree. He’s also slated to meet with Ireland’s president as part of a stay in Dublin highlighted by a speech to the country’s parliament.
A descendant of Irish immigrants mostly on his mother’s side, Biden frequently invokes his heritage as shaping his beliefs and setting him on his career path — accompanied as well by a sizable chip on his shoulder he’s acknowledged is tied to his upbringing in “an Irish Catholic neighborhood where it wasn’t viewed as being such a great thing.”
“Their values have been passed down, generation to generation,” Biden said of his ancestors during a St. Patrick’s Day event alongside Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar last month. “Growing up Irish American gave me the pride that spoke to both sides of the Atlantic, heart and soul that drew from the old and new.”
Though Biden has long been invested in Ireland’s politics — and the image of him as a departed but not forgotten son — he is relatively new to direct diplomacy with the country. Biden was not a central player in the talks leading up to the 1998 Good Friday agreement and has made only one prior trip to Belfast, in 1991.
He was an early member of the Friends of Ireland caucus that was founded in Congress more than 40 years ago to support peace efforts in Northern Ireland. His most prominent involvement came in the 1980s, when Biden helped lead opposition to a Reagan administration effort to make it easier for Britain to extradite members of the Irish Republican Army from the U.S.
Savage, who has written extensively about Irish political dynamics, said there’s no expectation Biden’s personal affection for Ireland will tilt America’s studied neutrality when it comes to the fraught U.K.-Ireland relationship. But in a nation that traditionally holds special admiration for American presidents, Biden represents a particularly welcome return to normal in the wake of the more turbulent, Brexit-sympathetic years of the Trump era.
“Biden’s seen as a stalwart, somebody that’s stuck by Ireland over the difficult years,” Savage said. “There’s a feeling that sanity has returned in Washington.”
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#Bidens #return #Ireland #ancestral #homeland #storybook #trip
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
FRANKFURT ― The markets are jittery and inflation still needs taming. Coming together, those two things put the European Central Bank in a real bind.
Fight one fire and it could cause the other to flare. The ECB can keep raising interest rates to try to get inflation under control, but that risks fueling financial market tensions. Conversely, it can give banks some breathing space by slowing its rate-hiking, but that carries the danger of prolonging the region’s economic malaise.
Frankfurt’s official line is that it can do both with no serious consequences. Many economists in the eurozone don’t buy that.
In private, it’s a dilemma that splits the ECB’s decision-makers, and even in public differences of opinion are bubbling to the surface. Here’s what’s at stake:
Why is the ECB raising rates?
The idea is that increasing interest rates subdues inflation because it makes consumers and businesses less likely to borrow ― so that results in reduced spending.
As inflation has started to pick up since last summer, the ECB has raised interest rates at a record pace. They’ve gone from -0.5 to 3 percent as the annual rate of price rises has surged to a eurozone record 10.6 percent inOctober.
The Bank tries to keep inflation at 2 percent so it’s currently way off target.
How this contributed to the crisis
The unpleasant side effect is that with rising borrowing costs (because of higher interest rates), the value of bonds that banks hold usually fall. This gives investors a bad case of the jitters. After the collapse in March of lenders like Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse ― though their problems seemed unconnected ― it was this that prompted concerns they might not be the only institutions with troubles, and fueled contagion fears around the globe.
But Lagarde plowed on regardless
The ECB remained unfazed in the face of emerging banking troubles: It delivered a previously signaled 0.5 percentage-point rate increase in March, less than a week after SVB failed and at a time when Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse was teetering.
Following that decision, ECB President Christine Lagarde stressed that she sees no trade-off between ensuring price stability and financial stability.
In fact, she said the Bank could continue to lift rates while addressing banking troubles with other tools.
The case against
Many economists disagree with Lagarde that the battle for price stability can be pursued without risking financial stability.
The ECB delivered 0.5 percentage-point rate increase in March, less than a week after SVB failed | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Claiming so “should be a career-ending statement,” said Stefan Gerlach, chief economist at EFG Bank in Zurich and a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Ireland. “This is the idea of the ‘separation principle’ of 2008 revisited. That wasn’t a good idea then, and isn’t now either,” he added.
What’s the separation principle?
In 2008, at the start of the financial crisis, as well as in 2011, when the sovereign debt crisis hit, the ECB adhered to the idea that interest rates could be used to ensure price stability at the same time as other measures, such as generous liquidity injections, could ease market tension.
But this just added to the problems and had to be unwound quickly.
This time around, the Portuguese member on the ECB Governing Council, whose country suffered particularly under the consequences of the sovereign debt crisis, is less blasé than Lagarde.
“Our history tells us that we had to backtrack a couple of times already during processes of tightening given threats to financial stability. We cannot risk that this time,” Mario Centeno told POLITICO in an interview.
The case for Lagarde
After the initial fears that troubles could spread across the eurozone, investor nerves have calmed and bank shares started to recover. At the same time, new data showed that underlying inflation pressures kept rising, suggesting that Lagarde and her colleagues were right to stick to their guns ― at least for now.
If that’s the case, March’s interest rate rise ― what Commerzbank economist Jörg Krämer described as “necessary” investment in the central bank’s credibility ― will have paid off.
Market turmoil actually helps
The nervous markets could help the ECB to reach its inflation target without having to raise interest rates as aggressively as previously thought.
Banks tend to slap an additional risk premium on their lending rates which raises the cost of borrowing money for consumers and business. So banks end up doing part of the tightening job for the central bank.
ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos suggested as much in an interview released last month, though he cautioned that it was too early to assess how much impact exactly it may have.
What’s the endgame?
The challenge for the ECB is to strike the right balance. If it doesn’t it risks either the repeat of 2008-style financial troubles or a return to the stagflationary period (low growth on top of high inflation) that roiled the Continent in the 1970s.
If it raises rates too aggressively, bank failures followed by a recession risks forcing the ECB into an interest rate U-turn for the third time, creating massive credibility risks. Conversely, if they don’t hike enough, the central bank may lose a grip on inflation, which is its main mandate.
The only way Lagarde can win is to deliver both price stability and financial stability. In that sense, there is no trade-off ― one without the other just won’t be enough.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
