Over here -- the Yanks are coming...

 Says el gruniad

US delegation arrives in Europe for talks on Northern Ireland and Brexit

Neal [Chair of Ways and Means Ctte of Senate and leader of the delegation] has already made his displeasure known over the government’s plan to draft legislation to remove parts of the Northern Ireland protocol from the Brexit treaty despite warnings it could risk a full trade war with the EU.

[The] US... is acting as co-guarantor of the 1998 Good Friday agreement....“My purpose is manifold but we really want to reaffirm America’s unwavering commitment to the Good Friday agreement and to remind everybody that on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, it has worked splendidly,” he said.

But he told the Guardian his mission was to defuse tensions and help broker a UK-EU deal....He said it was important to pull back from the brink of unilateral action to breach the Brexit treaty.

This seems to imply that he sees the UK threat to take unilateral action as the only threat to the Good Friday Agreement, the standard EU line, of course

Shadow Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Kyle, said the US visit should be a welcome interjection given the Democratic Unionist party threats not to return to power-sharing until the new laws on the protocol were enacted....“The UK government is unable to provide the stability or platform for which political differences can be settled, so therefore it falls to another country.”

Again, changing the Protocol as a way of settling political differences and restoring stability is just rejected.Only EU policy will bring stability? The US delegation will persuade the DUP and otgher anti-Protocol groups to stop being so silly?

Their arrival coincides with a warning by Ireland’s deputy prime minister Leo Varadkar that the British position on Brexit was causing such divisions in Northern Ireland it would backfire and “weaken” the union.

This has been the EU line all along, of course. It was German policy once to deliberately 'weaken the Union' to punish the UK, although they denied it.

The delegation will also visit Ventry in Kerry, the birthplace of Neal’s maternal family, the Garveys, to meet with an agriculture delegation travelling to the Eastern States Exposition in September.

Let us hope that family feeling/fashionable imagined identity doesn't cloud his judgment. Like Biden,he might turn out to have English ancestors too?