When the president touches down tonight it will come less than 48 hours after police were attacked with petrol bombs in Derry on Easter Monday during a dissident protest linked to commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916.
Last night the police’s... area commander for Derry City and Strabane, Ch Supt Nigel Goddard, called the attack “incredibly disheartening”. There were no injuries.
In a report carried by the Derry Journal, he said: “Shortly after the parade commenced, petrol bombs and other objects were thrown at one of our vehicles at the junction of Iniscarn Road and Linsfort Drive. This was a senseless and reckless attack on our officers who were in attendance in the area in order to comply with our legal duties.
“As participants at the parade made their way out of the City Cemetery, they removed their paramilitary uniforms under the cover of umbrellas and burnt them.
“Organisers of this parade communicated in advance their desire to have a respectful and dignified event, however, that is not what we witnessed today. There can be no place for this type of criminal activity. It is not wanted nor welcomed by the vast majority of people across the city.”
Biden to arrive in Northern Ireland for four-day visit to island of Ireland
The public aspect of his four day trip to Northern Ireland and Ireland will kick off with a speech at Ulster University at lunchtime on Wednesday “marking the tremendous progress” made since the 1998 Good Friday agreement.
An announcement on potential American investment is also expected.
“He’ll underscore the readiness of the United States’ to preserve those gains and support Northern Ireland’s vast economic potential to the benefit of all communities,” his national security council co-ordinator for strategic communications, John Kirby, last night in Washington.
Manholes were being lifted in Belfast city centre in final security sweeps around the city centre hotel Biden will stay with 300 extra police drafted in to help the operation which one police officer last night said “is the same if he stayed two hours or two weeks”.
Biden will then fly to the Republic of Ireland for the main leg of his four-day visit to celebrate his and America’s ancestral ties with the country.
He is expected to fly to Dublin at about 2.30pm and then be flown in a helicopter to the border town of Carlingford where his great-grandfather James Finnegan was born to meet extended family and visit a 13th-century castle.
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