LONDON – British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will invite US President Joe Biden to Northern Ireland in April to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which largely brought an end to three decades of political violence.

Mr Sunak said on Sunday that he would issue Mr Biden a formal invitation to the celebrations, which are due to take place in mid-April.

“I’ll be keen to invite him to come,” he told reporters on his plane as he flew to the United States for meetings with Mr Biden and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

“It’s not confirmed yet. But it will be something that obviously I’ll be talking to him about,” said Mr Sunak.

“We’ve got this very important milestone to commemorate and celebrate – the 25th anniversary.”

The Good Friday Agreement was a peace deal that largely ended the “Troubles”, three decades of violence that had convulsed Northern Ireland since the late 1960s.

It was signed on April 10, 1998, and was partially brokered by the US government of then President Bill Clinton.

The anniversary had been overshadowed in recent months after Northern Ireland’s largest unionist party boycotted the power-sharing assembly that made up part of the peace deal, in protest against post-Brexit trade rules that treated the province differently from the rest of the United Kingdom.

Mr Sunak recently struck a new deal with the European Union to ease the checks and paperwork needed to move goods from Britain to Northern Ireland, but the Democratic Unionist Party is yet to say whether it will support the plan.

“What I’m concentrating on now is talking to everyone in Northern Ireland, so we can find a positive way to move forward and get power-sharing up and running – that’s my priority,” Mr Sunak said. REUTERS