President Biden addressed Ireland’s Parliament on Thursday delivering a speech that aimed to invoke inspiration and hope in the future.
“Our world stands in an inflection point,” Biden said. “The choices we make today are literally going to determine the future and the history of this world for the next four to five decades.”
He went on to say that Ireland and the United States shared values and were joined together in the struggle between “the rights of many and the desires of the few” that “cast a shadow” on the world.
He added that the struggle was also between “liberty and oppression” and between “democracy and autocracy.”
“It is a competition that’s real,” Biden insisted, adding that for the U.S. and Ireland, ” It’s a struggle we were fit to fight together.”
Biden made the speech amid a four-day trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland. Earlier in the day, he was greeted by Ireland’s Head of State, President Michael Higgins in Dublin before sitting down to a meeting with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.
The Prime Minister said to Biden that he wanted to “thank you and your Administration and your country’s leadership when it comes to Ukraine because I never thought in my lifetime that we’d see a war of this nature happening in Europe again.”
Biden timed his trip around the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Peace Agreement, which ended thirty years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
Biden told Varadkar, “I think there really is an opportunity to make serious progress, not just because of the accord that was signed 25 years ago, but in terms of the way Ireland is moving, the way it is taking its place in the world, working on helping countries around the world that are dealing with starvation, the way you’ve—I know it’s not easy—welcomed Ukrainians here and the leadership you’ve shown.”
