Barack Obama to visit Belfast while in Northern Ireland for G8 summit | UK news | guardian.co.uk

Barack Obama is welcomed to his ancestral home, Moneygall, during his trip to the Irish Republic in 2011. Photograph: Getty Images

The White House has confirmed that Barack Obama is to visit Belfast as well as the G8 summit taking place in the border county of Fermanagh next month.

During the US president's first trip to the city he is expected to express support for the peace process and the power-sharing political settlement at Stormont.

In a statement from Washington on Friday, a spokesman said: "The president's trip will begin in Belfast, where he will engage with the people of Northern Ireland and highlight the hard work, dialogue, and institutional development they have undertaken together."

Obama's press secretary said the summit would provide world leaders with an opportunity to "address pressing economic, political, and security challenges around the globe and to promote the advancement of trade and greater transparency among G8 members and the developing world".

The trip will be Obama's first to Northern Ireland. Two years ago, he went to the Republic and visited Dublin and his ancestral home of Moneygall in County Offaly. During his main address outside Dublin's Trinity College he was mobbed by thousands of well wishers.

The visit will also be the first by a US president since George Bush went to Belfast in 2008. Bill and Hillary Clinton were frequent visitors to Northern Ireland, making three visits in the 1990s to show their support for the peace process.

On Friday Eamon McCann, one of the civil rights movement's leading figures in Northern Ireland, denounced plans to open up an entire prison block and former army base to detain anti-G8 demonstrators next month.

The veteran Derry socialist campaigner and writer said Northern Ireland was going back in time to a repressive law and order situation such as existed in the days of one-party unionist rule.

McCann was responding to reports that a wing of the top-security Maghagerry jail outside Belfast had been opened to cope with any mass arrests when the G8 meeting begins on 17 June in Fermanagh.

Northern Ireland's justice minister David Ford also announced on Friday that a former British Army barracks in Omagh, known as Lisanelly, would be used as a temporary holding centre for any arrested demonstrators.

Ford, leader of the liberal Alliance Party, said the Lisanelly barracks could hold up to 300 people. It is understood the block at Maghaberry prison, County Antrim, has 108 cells and could accommodate up to 200 prisoners.

Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, David Cameron and the other world leaders, are to hold their two-day global summit at the Lough Erne hotel resort close to Enniskillen.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland announced this month that a four-mile stretch of road from the Fermanagh town to the hotel on Lough Erne would be closed for almost a month as part of a security operation to protect the world's eight most powerful politicians.

An extra 3,600 police officers are to be drafted into the lakeland region for the duration of the summit. There will also by a no-fly and no-sailing regime imposed on the area during that period.

McCann, who was active in Derry during the Battle of the Bogside between civil rights supporters and the unionist-dominated police force in 1969 at the advent of the Troubles, called the security operation a remarkable turn of events.

He said: "We are headed for as repressive a law-and-order situation as there was in the days of one-party unionist rule and the old unreformed RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary]. PSNI chiefs speak on the media full of confidence that their plans to stamp on civil liberties won't draw any condemnation from the DUP-Sinn Fein coalition.

"Three hundred new places in prisons, the women's prison and in youth detention centres are being readied for an influx of protesters. The cops [are] equipped with drones, with no opposition from the policing board, which includes representative of all the main parties.

"Thousands of British police are being shipped in. The British army is on stand-by. Military helicopters will be flitting above Fermanagh ferrying the leaders and their entourages. MI5 is all over the plans.

"One of the reasons all this has gone virtually unchallenged is that support for the police is seen as crucial to the survival of the Belfast agreement. It's almost seen blasphemy. Criticise the justice establishment or the police and you can easily be denounced as an enemy of peace. It's mad."

Thousands of people are expected to go to Enniskillen during the gathering of the governmental heads to highlight issues such as world poverty, the arms trade and the war in Afghanistan.

Some charities have expressed concern about getting access to Enniskillen to highlight their causes.