Joe Kennedy, grandson of Robert Kennedy, is to be appointed special envoy for Northern Ireland by Biden

President Joe Biden will appoint Robert Kennedy’s grandson and former Massachusetts Congressman Joe Kennedy as the government’s special envoy for Northern Ireland.

This makes Kennedy, 42, the third member of America’s most famous Irish-American political dynasty to receive a diplomatic position from Biden.

He joins his aunt and Ted Kennedy’s widow and attorney, Victoria, 68, the Ambassador to Austria and cousin, John F. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, 65, Ambassador to Australia, in the diplomatic corps.

According to multiple reports, Joe Kennedy III will take up the position before the New Year. Any diplomatic appointment after January 3, 2023 must be ratified by the US Senate under the new rules. This ratification could take months.

President Biden and former Massachusetts Congressman Joe Kennedy III together on St. Patrick’s Day 2016

Kennedy will take the job at a crucial time as US relations with Britain are frosty over the unresolved Northern Ireland Protocols.

The role of special envoy has been vacant since Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, resigned from his role following the Capitol Riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, a government source said Kennedy’s role will be less political and more focused on economic issues.

This source told WSJ, “He will be very focused on advancing US economic engagement and people-to-people relations.”

The New York Times, meanwhile, reports that Kennedy’s appointment has been in the planning for months and it is hoped the former congressman’s legacy will revitalize US relations in Ireland.

Victoria Kennedy, the Austrian Ambassador-elect to the United States, is the widow of former Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, uncle of Joe Kennedy III

US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK, pictured alongside President Biden in Boston in September 2022

The protocol, which allows free trade across the Irish border, was originally introduced in 2019 to maintain previous post-Brexit peace deals. It was a point of contention between the UK and the European Union.

Special envoys have been sent to Northern Ireland by various governments since 1995. Among those who helped establish the role was Kennedy’s father, Joe Kennedy II.

The first envoy was former Maine Senator George Mitchell, who helped negotiate the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

The reason for delaying the announcement of Kennedy’s appointment was Biden’s hope that Britain and the EU would reach a concrete agreement on the Northern Ireland border with the Republic of Ireland.

Biden is expected to visit the embattled nation this year as part of celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

Biden is the second Catholic president in US history, the first being John F. Kennedy. During his tenure as Senator for Delaware, Biden was known to be close to Ted Kennedy, who was a Massachusetts Senator from 1962 to 2009.

Kennedy is the grandson of RFK, who was killed by Muslim gunman Sirhan Sirhan in the 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency

Kennedy is the grandson of RFK, who was killed by Muslim gunman Sirhan Sirhan in the 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

Between 2013 and 2021, Kennedy represented Massachusetts, resigning his position to challenge incumbent Democratic state Senator Ed Markey for the party’s nomination. After that failure, he had largely disappeared from the public eye, despite a few appearances as a commentator on CNN.

His work has largely been behind the scenes at the Groundwork Project, a group trying to “build sustainable political infrastructure, engage and educate voters, and build power for the underrepresented and disenfranchised,” according to the group’s website.

In his farewell address to Congress, Kennedy mocked the “big lie of our time” that the government lacks the resources and the will to help those in need. He said the real problem is greed, not scarcity.

Kennedy, D-Mass., spoke for five minutes on the House floor and called his four terms in Congress an honor and said he would depart “proud and hopeful.”

He described the US as a “complicated and chaotic country”. He said it “violated our founding promises before the ink was dry,” citing slavery and rights that initially applied largely to “rich, white, and Protestant men.”

But without naming names or political parties, he called this advance “the counterbalance to the great lie of our time: that the American pie is finite.

“In order for my family to survive, yours must suffer.

“That the richest nation on earth is somehow plagued by scarcity – and not by greed.”

He added: “Losing the grip of this lie on our country is the work of our generation.

“For the people who feel unseen, unheard and unpresent. For those most in need of help and protection, justice and opportunity, who have been told by their government that there is simply no more space, money, time or will.

“And that injustice is more of a reality set in stone than a conscious decision by those in power about who is worthy and who is not.”