Another Kennedy Heads to Ireland

Nearly six decades after President Kennedy made a four-day trip to Ireland — his ancestral home — his grandnephew, Joseph Kennedy III, will head back to the island as a special envoy to Northern Ireland for economic affairs appointed by yet another Irish-American, President Biden. A statement from Secretary Blinken explained that Mr. Kennedy would focus on “advancing economic development and investment opportunities” as well as building on the “peace dividends of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.”The administration also promised to “engage with political leaders on efforts to restore the Northern Ireland Executive and to resolve differences on the Northern Ireland Protocol,” the post-Brexit agreement governing the relationship of the six northern counties to Europe, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.The post has been empty since President Trump’s pick, Mick Mulvaney, resigned it in 2021. The first special envoy to Northern Ireland, George Mitchell, helped broker the Good Friday agreement of 1998. That pact put an end to decades of violence between republicans, who wanted the north to join independent Ireland, and unionists, who sought to remain attached to the Crown. While the “Troubles,” as those waves of violence are called, are a thing of the past, Mr. Kennedy will touch down at a Northern Ireland mired in a troubled political present. Brexit sundered the tie between Northern Ireland and Europe, an arrangement that Prime Minister Johnson renegotiated in the protocol. The victory of Sinn Féin, a longtime vehicle of republican aspiration, in spring elections for the Stormont, Northern Ireland’s parliament, precipitated the Democratic Union Party to bolt. This rupture has left governance at a standstill. The DUP has named its price for its reentry into politics: a negotiated protocol that further untethers Northern Ireland from the continent and its southern neighbor. Both Mr. Johnson and his short-lived successor, Prime Minister Truss, indicated interest in replacing the protocol, a byzantine set of regulations that govern the movement of people and goods between the United Kingdom and the Irish island. The EU has threatened that any unilateral alteration would be a violation of international law.Mr. Biden has sided with the Europeans, serving as a booster of the protocol. His press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, warned that “efforts to undo the Northern Ireland protocol would not create a conducive environment” for the negotiation of a trade pact between America and the U.K. Mr. Biden plans to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday agreement at Belfast in April, and the White House expressed the “need to maintain momentum toward reaching a negotiated agreement,” presumably in advance of that occasion. President Kennedy’s visit to Ireland in June 1963, just months before his slaying by an assassin’s bullet, was widely seen as a triumph for a man whose eight great-grandparents all emigrated to Boston during the Potato Famine. He visited Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, and his family’s old seat at Wexford.The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy courtier, wrote that he never saw the president “more completely himself” than during his visit to Ireland, which Schelsinger termed a “blissful interlude of homecoming.”In a letter written by Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy, to the Irish president, Eamon de Valera, in 1964, the former first lady noted that “Ireland can be proud that they gave the United States its greatest President.”

Another Kennedy Heads to Ireland

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