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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— June - July 2010
Ireland and the
American Furrow
The Smorgasbord of Washington politics
jack horgan-jones
, the rest of America,
remains surreal despite the familiarity afforded
to it by ubiquitous broadcast reproduction.
Here, Americans staked out an arbitrary but
broad plot, and inhabited it with their most
sacred structures, considered and symmetri-
cal around a grassy mall trampled by thousands
of feet and, this year, parched by unseasonally
dry and hot spring weather. The transient popu-
lation is composed of earnest embarkees on the
political ladder - pages, interns, staffers, lob-
byists, advisors, aides, Congressmen, Senators.
They ship in from dappled suburbs where the
main activities are landscape-gardening and
gym-attendance. Dignified middle-aged black
women, hawking the freesheets, meet them as
they pour from the burnt-rubber intimacy of the
metro. “Good morning, good morning, have a
wonderful day! Good morning, good morning,
have a blessed day!”. From there, the troupe
moves on to office buildings like Cannon House,
Beaux-Arts lumps, modestly deferential to more
illustrious monuments. Five floors up and down,
these utilitarian blocks of office space are where
the mundanity of public service digests poetic
moments of American life. In storage cages one
finds dry analyses of National Guard response
times after Katrina, or boxes full of files detail-
ing the health difficulties wrought on emergency
workers when the towers came down. The jun-
iors of the pack field faxes with the genial opener
‘You Commie Bastard’, and phone calls from an
especially American variant of the worldwide
constuent caller.
“What is Hilary Clinton doing, hiring Muslims
to work in the State Department? I don’t think
they should do that at all!”
“Ma’am, the State Department cannot dis-
criminate on religious grounds when recruit-
ing staff.”
“You fucking people...”.
Off the Capitol, Washington exhibits the same
heady brew of cultures as any other American
United States
city. In Chinatown, there’s the pimp with the lit-
tle snake wrapped around his wrist in AT&T, roll-
ing around alone like a mischievous child in a
creche, muttering to himself “Man, I love snakes”.
In the drunken halfway house of Adam’s Morgan,
stuck in a mean prowl between frat-boy hype
and dangerous sleaze, folks flow into errant cul-
tural tributaries. Here, too, one finds a thicket
of snake charmers – it’s not that they’re every-
where – but they are certainly more visible than
most of the cities I’ve been in. One giant menac-
ing creature poses with drunks at .am, while
its owner leers at scantily-dressed girls, making
closing time on Dupont Circle feel more like the
Kho Sahn Road.
It was on this corridor, not so long ago,
that the ‘Irish issue’ was sexy. Peter King, the
Congressman from New York’s Long Island and
the ranking Republican on the house Homeland
Security committee, was once a main player in
the American efforts to drive home peace in
Northern Ireland. A larger-than-life, bustling
Queen’s native, he remembers being ushered
into a men’s room by Gerry Adams to receive
a communiqué for Bill Clinton. Before the real
departure of the Peace Process, he was perceived
as too close to Sinn Féin, so that he was shunned
by both the Irish government and the pro-British
speaker of the house, Tom Foley. However, his
time came when he was taken into the fold by
the Clinton Administration. He argues that res-
olution of the Irish Question was, among other
things, historically serendipitous.
“There was, you could say, a perfect alignment
of the stars. You had people like Tony Blair, Bertie
Ahern, Gerry Adams and President Clinton, who
were able to build up the confidence of people
in the political process, and use the prestige
and power of the United States to make things
happen”.
“There was also no other major crisis around-
Kosovo was a relatively small issue on the world
stage-and the President was able to devote so
much to the issue”.
King is also eager to disrupt the notion of
an all powerful ‘Irish-American lobby’ pulling
strings in the corridors of power.
“The Irish-American lobby is exaggerated.
I feel it was partly an invention of the British
media, who were feeling defensive. There was
only a handful of people in Congress who were
interested in the issue, and most of those were
John-Hume types. I was the only member to
meet Adams”.
Nonetheless, when the Irish diaspora
unloaded here, they dug hard into the soil. They
bloom at events like ‘The Celtic Chefs’. The St.
Regis Hotel, a stone’s throw from the White
House, plays host to this fundraiser for the pres-
tigious Washington-Ireland programme. Kevin
Sullivan, its chairman, describes the programme
as having a “core function of growing the next
generation of leaders for Northern Ireland and
Ireland in a cross-border and cross-community
context”. If there is an Irish-American lobby to
be found, it is at events like these, featuring nine
congressmen acting as sous-chefs, not to men-
tion Pat Buchanan making the pastries. Once
inside, all that is needed for access to this inner
sanctum is a liberal attitude towards sharing a
packet of cigarettes.
Julie Hughes is an associate at Booze-Allen-
Hamilton, whose earliest memory is being sat
down by her Armagh-born father to watch
footage of the hunger strikers. Like King, she
believes that the Irish-American moment may
have exhausted itself.
“Don’t get me wrong, there are pockets where
it is very strong. Montana. Boston. You aren’t
going to get elected there without singing the
right song. But it may become a question of
percentages. We’ve reached a stage where the
number of first or second generation Irish actors
is greatly diminished. Once you hit the third gen-
eration, things get a little bit dispersed. There’s
also no grand call to action”.
The ‘grand call to action’, undoubtedly, was
during the nineties, when the peace process
attracted worldwide attention, and when Sky
News interpreted Gerry Adams and Martin
McGuinness going out for a breath of air as a
breakdown in negotiations. Nothing focused
American attention on Ireland like it, before or
since. Remaining relevant after such peaks was
always going to be difficult.
Sullivan is in broad agreement with this.
During a -year career on Capitol Hill, he
served as senior advisor and speechwriter to
the Secretary of Education Richard Riley from
-. His Irish lineage comes from
Passage West and Sixmilecross.
“I think that many Americans, including Irish
Americans, have come to the conclusion that
Northern Ireland is now settled. It is now almost
a decade since the Good Friday Agreement, and
Northern Ireland has ceased to be a trouble spot
in comparison to other parts of the world like
Iraq and Afghanistan”.
“At the same time, however, there is a very
knowledgeable group who still follow what
is happening in Northern Ireland and recog-
nise a great deal of work needs to be done to
create a shared future for all the people of
Northern Ireland”.
It is more than likely the case that the cre-
ation of this shared future, if the process can
finally alienate itself from bloody failure, will
be all but invisible to America. If you want to
register on the public consciousness here, get
in line behind China, Afghanistan, Iraq, ille-
gal immigration, the tea partyers, mosques
at ground zero, Glenn Beck, manorexia, Rush
Limbaugh, don’t ask don’t tell, Bond Villain-
esque Libertarians, Change and the rest of
that jazz, diets, plane bombers, shoe bombers,
underwear bombers and Times Square bomb-
ers, border fences, autotune, big government,
small government, Snowmageddon, oil spills,
lobbying, presidential citizenship, healthcare,
surges, withdrawals, quantitative easing, unreli-
able Europeans, eating right, Homeland Security,
dying cities, trade deficits, terror gaps, fitness
Nazis, and a whole constellation of players and
actors that make fleeting appearances on some
corner of the American stage. The great irony is
where the United States went in the s to
preach the values of normality, today it is now
becomes acquainted abroad with aharmony that
has become foreign in America. As Emmanuel
Touhey, comment editor at Washington polit-
ical staple The Hill, and a native of Drogheda,
puts it: “that’s as it should be. Normal is the new
normal”. As much as that term can be applied to
either place, it fits better with today’s Ireland
than today’s North America.
Jack Horgan-Jones, a former intern in Village, is now an
intern with Congressman Tom King in Washington.
“Once inside, all
that is needed
for access to this
inner sanctum is
a liberal attitude
towards sharing
a packet of
cigarettes”.
