EXCLUSIVE BY PETER KELLY AT COOPER UNION, MANHATTAN
Former President Bill Clinton declared this week that “Ireland and the pursuit of peace meant the world to me and still does.”
He spoke as President Joe Biden prepares to depart the White House for Dublin, Belfast and his ancestral counties of Louth and Mayo.
The US administration is prioritizing the marking of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement both in the US and Ireland.
The 42nd President spoke on stage with former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams at New York City’s historic Cooper Union building. Together with contributions from former Senator George Mitchell and Irish-American delegations, Bill Clinton shared anecdotes from the negotiations leading to the dramatic signing of the April 10, 1998 accords in Belfast.
“I just want to see the Irish peace flourish. I want to see what was enshrined 25 years ago make a difference today,” he told an audience of hundreds who had secured coveted tickets to the lower Manhattan event on Monday.
In securing the unlikely agreement of parties, President Clinton paid tribute to his former Talks Chairman George Mitchell who “had this uncanny ability to listen, absorb, respond, organize and treat people with respect, whether you agree with them or not, and then figure out how to put it together.
“I told him that he and I were ethnically well suited to do this work me because my maternal grandfather’s homestead is a sort of a shell of a building outside the village of Rosslea in County Fermanagh, right on the border.
“Legend has it that the Catholics and the Protestants, God forbid, intermixed. So I (too) was genetically prepared,” he quipped.
The audience featured representatives of the New York chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and Irish-American legal associations including the Brehon Law Society. They joined former White House advisors, Nancy Soderberg and former Connecticut Congressman Bruce Morrison who were praised throughout the proceedings for their efforts in prompting the Oval Office push for top level intervention in Irish conflict resolution.
President Clinton admitted to his active role in encouraging Northern Ireland’s parties towards partnership from ‘inside the Oval’ in 1998. “Yes, I did stay up all night, the night before the Agreement, waiting to be told who else to call and who else to plead with, including Gerry Adams. That’s all true.” And he added, “But we should thank God that we had a chance to do something like this. And then it’s lasted for 25 years.”
Clinton joins the current White House administration’s push for Northern Ireland’s parties to restore power-sharing government at the Stormont Parliament in Belfast, an institution whose existence he effectively helped to establish. He encouraged the DUP saying, “this Windsor Agreement, I think, is about as good as anybody could get. Sooner or later, you just have to ‘do’.”
The former Arkansas governor spoke of his enduring pride in securing the deal and its global significance and encouraged Irish-Americans to realize the same. “There is nothing like the Northern Ireland agreement in terms of its endurance. You may see its flaws, its imperfections. You have no idea just how hard it is, just how improbable it was. And just how good you should feel about yourselves for what you did.”
To a standing ovation, President Clinton pledged his continued support for the accord, telling delegates, “celebrate the Good Friday Agreement. Thank God that it lasted 25 years. Pray to God that it will last 25 more.”