Easter is always a busy period for police in Northern Ireland,with parades held by republicans to mark the Easter Rising rebellion against British rule in 1916.
Biden,a proud Irish-American Catholic,will be met by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he arrives in Belfast on Tuesday to celebrate the Good Friday Agreement,which was signed on April 10,1998 and established a power-sharing government involving the region’s unionist and nationalist communities.
The era had largely pitted the historically dominant Protestants – loyal to Britain – against a largely Catholic republican minority between the late 1960s and the late 1990s in sectarian bloodshed,which killed more than 3500 people. Sporadic violence by small groups has kept the threat level mostly at “severe” since the system was introduced in 2010.
Distrust among political factions has also persisted for years after the accord and the province has been without a government since its second-largest party,the Democratic Unionist Party,collapsed the Stormont executive over its opposition to the trade arrangements that resulted from the original Brexit deal between the UK and the EU.
The high-profile visits will happen after UK intelligence agency MI5 last week increased the security threat to “severe”,which has coincided with more than 90 notified unionist parades and other unscheduled events,according to police.
In February,in the most serious incident in years,the dissident republican group known as “the New IRA” shot and seriously injured Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell at point-blank range.