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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
68 April 2015
A
LTHOUGH his recent profile
in the Sunday Business Post
of potential President Hillary
Clinton was entirely uncriti-
cal, in fact the apogee of Niall
O’Dowd’s insatiable need to ingratiate
himself with the Clintons was on the eve
of St Patrick’s day. It was then the Irish
Voice publisher inducted Hillary Clinton
into his partly self-serving Irish Amer-
ica Hall of Fame, an excruciating event
that exquisitely encapsulates the dif-
ference between Ireland (which recoils
from Halls of Fame) and the US (which
can’t get enough Halls/ Fame/ Halls of
Fame).
“Hillary Clinton played”, averred
the man who always finds a way to put
Irish next to America, “a leading role
in creating the links between the White
House and leaders on the ground that
would become so important during
crunch time when negotiations came”.
However, Trina Vargo, former peace-
protagonist, foreign policy advisor
to the late Senator Ted Kennedy and
scathing O’Dowd antagonist, is scepti-
cal: “That’s as specific as he can get, and
as non-specific as he has to be, because
there’s no there there”.
The official US view of Ireland is
romanticised, so small emblematic
things like tea are afforded more than
their due space in a way they would
never be in, for example, the official take
on Israel. Ireland and tea have Clinton
history. During Hillary Clinton’s 2008
campaign for president, her primary
opponent, Barack Obama, meanly dis-
dained her as having merely “had tea
with” world leaders as first lady. Her
husband bounced to her defence as “a
peacemaker, not a tea maker”.
Clinton nodded to that history as
she was feted by O’Dowd and the usual
assemblage of Irish and Irish-American
power hawks at dinner in Manhattan.
She emphasised the importance of tea –
classically steeped and shared by women
whose embrace of peace accords, she
Clintoff
Also in this section:
NGO glass ceiling 71
Greece 72
Ireland’s foreign policy 75
UK General Election 76
INTERNATIONAL
April 2015 69
said, was vital to their evolution.
She has said: “I remember a meet-
ing that I pulled together in Belfast,
in the town hall there [in fact it seems
to have been in a café on the Ormeau
Road], bringing together for the first
time Catholics and Protestants from
both traditions, having them sitting a
room where they had never been before
with each other because they don’t
go to school together, they don’t live
together and it was only in large meas-
ure because I really asked them to come
that they were there. I wasn’t sure it was
going to be very successful and finally a
Catholic woman on one side of the table
said, ‘You know, every time my husband
leaves for work in the morning I worry
he won’t come home at night’. And then
a Protestant woman on the other side
said, ‘Every time my son tries to go out
at night I worry he won’t come home
again’. And suddenly instead of seeing
each other as caricatures and stere-
otypes they saw each other as human
beings and the slow, hard work of peace-
making could move forward”.
Others, including the Belfast Tele-
graph at the time, say the meeting was
stilted, overrun with secret-service
operatives; and that far from its being
their ‘first time” the protagonists at the
tea were in fact ‘pre-networked’.
A recent discussion of the speeches at
O’Dowd’s dinner on his television show
culminated in Vincent Browne’s conclu-
sion that Hillary was “telling porkies”.
Moving (largely) beyond metaphor,
Clinton stopped well short of depict-
ing herself as instrumental to the Good
Friday Agreement that President Clinton
brokered in 1998, but said her outreach
to women in Belfast during that period
had played a critical role. “You cannot
bring peace to people just by signing
an agreement”, Mrs Clinton told the St
Patrick’s weekend dinner. “In fact, most
peace agreements don’t last. There’s
been some very important work done
in recent years that – where women are
involved, and therefore where the work
of peace permeates down to the kitchen
table, to the backyard, to the neighbor-
hood, around cups of tea – there’s a much
better chance the agreement will hold”.
During the Presidential election
in 2008 uxorious Bill Clinton, who
eschewed tea imagery, had withdrawn
from a 10th anniversary commemo-
ration to be held in Belfast, inflaming
intrigue and tension between Mrs Clin-
ton and her opponent for the Democratic
nomination, fresh-faced Barack Obama,
over her experience in foreign policy
matters. Clinton claimed that, unlike
Barack Obama, she and likely Republi-
can nominee John McCain had “cross[ed]
the commander-in-chief threshold”.
Northern Ireland had become one
arena of an increasingly acrimonious
debate between Mr Obama and Mrs
Clinton about her experience, sparked
when Mrs Clinton ran a campaign adver-
tisement which left tea entirely to one
side to ask tendentiously who would be
better equipped to answer an emergency
call to the White House at 3 a.m. But we
should not inflate our importance: other
arenas included Bosnia, Rwanda and
China.
On the campaign trail, Clinton had
on several occasions said she “helped to
bring peace to Northern Ireland” and
certainly she had visited the area seven
times between 1995 and 2004 – five
times as first lady. Of course, “helped”
is a fairly anodyne claim and in an inter-
view with Nat ional Public Radio she went
a step further, declaiming that the role
she played was “instrumental” in ending
the decades-long conflict there between
Catholics and Protestants.
The Obama campaign accused Mrs
Clinton of exaggerating her specific
role and general experience. A policy
memorandum written by Greg Craig, a
well-placed foreign policy adviser to Mr
Obama complained: “It is a gross over-
statement of the facts for her to claim
even partial credit for bringing peace to
Northern Ireland”. Though Mrs Clinton
globe-trotted as first lady and had some
contact with Irish women’s groups, he
Northern
Ireland
was one
arena of an
acrimonious
debate
between Mr
Obama and
Mrs Clinton
about her
experience
“
Did first lady Hillary
Clinton deliver on
Ireland or just pour
tea? By Michael Smith
Clinton, Women, Tea
hotelier John
Fitzpatrick,
Hillary Clinton,
Gerry Adams,
Niall O’Dowd
on occasion
of Hillary’s
induction
70 April 2015
added, “at no time did she play any role
in the critical negotiations that pro-
duced the peace”.
Visiting the United States around
that time Bertie Ahern, who might be
expected to know but who might also
be unreliable ventured that Mrs Clin-
ton had been “hugely helpful” in the
peace process, but he pulled up short of
crediting her with a central role in the
process.
“She was the first lady of the United
States, not a party leader in Northern
Ireland,” undisgraced Mr Ahern told the
Scranton Times-Tribune. “No one would
expect her to get into the nitty-gritty of
the process”. But, he added: “any fair
observer would find that both Hillary
and Bill Clinton made peace in Ireland
a priority while they were in the White
House and after”.
Congressman Peter King – a New York
Republican – recalls one occasion in
Washington when he was summoned to
meet the president for what he thought
would be a conversation about domestic
politics. Instead, he found the Clintons
shooting the breeze with Gerry Adams
about the decommissioning of weapons,
then one of the main obstacles in imple-
menting the Good Friday Agreement.
Senator George Mitchell Bill Clinton’s
Special Envoy for Northern Ireland
(1995–2001) told the Chicago Tribune
that the first lady’s visits were “very
helpful” and that her work with women
was a “significant factor” in contrib-
uting to the success of the process. On
the other hand David Trimble consid-
ered it “a wee bit silly” for Mrs Clinton
to claim an important role: “I don’t want
to rain on the thing for her,” he said in
an empathetic interview with the Daily
Telegraph, “...but being a cheerleader
for something is slightly different from
being a principal player”. That was the
“the sort of thing people put in their can-
vassing leaflets”.
Steven King, a negotiator Trim-
ble’s Ulster Unionist Party has even
maintained that Mrs Clinton was “a
cheerleader for the Irish republican side
of the argument”.
On the other hand, confirming the
unsurprising partisanship on the issue
Gerry Adams has said Lord Trimble’s
panorama was “not true”. In an inter-
view with the Irish Times a decade
ago, he said Mrs Clinton had “played
an important role in the peace proc-
ess”, an assessment that resonated for
John Hume, then leader of the SDLP who
generously described her role as “piv-
otal”. He expanded: “I can state from
first-hand experience that she played a
positive role for over a decade in help-
ing to bring peace to Northern Ireland”,
and even posted a statement on Hillary
Clinton’s website. “In private she made
countless calls and contacts, speaking to
leaders and opinion makers on all sides,
urging them to keep moving forward”.
Contrariwise, one of Hume’s aides,
Conall McDevitt – insouciantly showing
why the peace process really did need to
have more women involved – opined that
Clinton was active “in a classic woman
politicky sort of way”. Even worse: “The
road to peace was carefully documented,
and she wasn’t on it”, according to Brian
Feeney, a history lecturer and former
leading Belfast SDLP activist.
Much of this can be put down to per-
sonal bias. Trina Vargo, admittedly
an O’Dowd sceptic, looks to the more
definitive record. For example in 1997
Irish Times journalist Conor O’Clery
wrote the first detailed book on the US
role in Northern Ireland. Vargo notes:
“As O’Dowd was one of O’Clery’s pri-
mary sources, one would think that if
the First Lady had played any signifi-
cant role, he would have credited her, as
would anyone else O’Clery interviewed.
But in O’Clery’s book Hillary Clinton is
mentioned five times but there are no
references to her playing any role, she
is referred to merely as accompanying
her husband”.
Even more persuasively Vargo goes
on: “Most tellingly, if her contribu-
tions to the Northern Ireland peace
process were so significant, why didn’t
she mention that herself in her 2003
book ‘Living History’? In the 500-page
autobiography she mentions Northern
Ireland on several occasions but never
suggests she played an instrumental role
in ending the conflict. As Maureen Dowd
[as a woman, and one of Irish extraction,
someone who should understand tea]
wrote in the New York Times in 2008,
“Having a first lady tea in Belfast is not
equivalent to bringing peace to North-
ern Ireland”.
In truth, from the US angle the key
was the State Department fronted of
course by Presidential appointees.
While historically it had been unwilling
to challenge British policy on Northern
Ireland it was in Bill Clinton’s time rep-
resented by National Security Adviser
Tony Lake and his deputy, Nancy Sod-
erberg – a former colleague of Vargo in
Ted Kennedy’s office. These were cer-
tainly people willing to consider a new
approach to Northern Ireland, working
on crucial progress established in dia-
logues between Adams and Hume.
Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith too
was prepared to challenge the State
Department to support a visa for Adams.
Vargo noted some years ago (perhaps at
a time when she was more neutral on the
ubiquitous Niall O’Dowd): “In mid-July
[2004], O’Dowd and the small group
he’d been working with – former Con-
gressman Bruce Morrison, businessman
Bill Flynn and quiet philanthropist
Chuck Feeney – headed to Belfast in
advance of a special Sinn Féin confer-
ence at which Sinn Féin would respond
to the Joint Declaration. O’Dowd told me
of various options Sinn Féin was con-
sidering and he wanted to know how
the US would react to them. After dis-
cussing the options with Soderberg,
she wanted me to tell O’Dowd that Sinn
Fein’s response needed to reflect a phil-
osophical rejection of violence and that
any mention of a limited time-frame for
a cease-fire would not be acceptable. A
week later, O’Dowd rang from Belfast
where he had met with Adams. He was
optimistic that the upcoming Sinn Féin
announcement would not refer to a time
limited cease-fire. There had apparently
been discussion of a three-month cease-
fire but it was made clear that that would
not cut it in the US”.
A couple of weeks later the IRA
announced a permanent cease-fire.
If we seek US heroes of the peace proc-
ess we might seek them in this vignette.
Hillary’s heroism is another country. •
That Clinton
was active
“in a classic
woman
politicky sort
of way”
“
INTERNATIONAL Hillary Clinton
porky
