ANALYSIS BY PETER KELLY
Irish-America undoubtedly was a central player in the securing of both the IRA Ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement. And with both, came peace in the homeland.
The Clinton administration were the game-changers. And for the dynamic Arkansas native, with Northern Irish roots in Fermanagh, taking an inspirational role in the Irish peace process was always going to change history. A cynical, historic expression in the North is that despite the world advancing at a rapid pace, no changes are likely to occur beneath the stubbornly-backward looking ‘dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’. Clinton was the dynamic fuel injection that would give hope for progress, against such local and characteristic dreariness, even in his adopted county.
To borrow the adage that ‘events, dear boy, events’ dictate political fortunes, there was unquestionable planetary alignment with the unlikely but energetic political trio found in Mssrs. Clinton, Blair and Ahern. Made even more dynamic of course with the addition of Maine’s finest, Senator George Mitchell. Truly a ‘fab four’ to be reckoned with.
Yet we must avoid overly unnecessary romanticism as we consider the hobbled progress of the Good Friday Agreement and its often collapsing institutions. It took 8 years to get coalition government established after an era of stop-go politics dominated the initial signing of the accord, only coming together for partnership in the final days before Tony Blair left Prime Ministerial office in 2007. The on the ground operation of Heaney’s ‘hope and history’ was rarely historic or hopeful. And ‘Good Friday Government’ all too frequently rhymed with disaster.
A perfect storm of stonewalling in the current era is evident with the twin political outrages of Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol, offering the DUP an apparent fig-leaf against progress, despite being an all too transparent ruse to everyone else. The Conservative/Tory government in London is the worst UK administration in living memory, lowest in the opinion polls in modern electoral history. And there’s no shifting them for almost 2 years due to the antiquated electoral system and parliamentary arithmetic in London.
The DUP’s cheerleaders in the odious May/Johnson/Truss/Sunak government are content to equally push back against optimism and progress, fatalistically knowing they are destined for the opposition benches nomatter what policy they take on Northern Ireland.
Enter into this despondent scenario the super-charging ray of light of Irish America and its political heavyweights again. The unusual and critical engagement of a new ‘coalition of the willing’ – President Biden’s administration, Congressional Friends of Ireland caucus, former Speaker Pelosi, and now a Kennedy Envoy on Northern Ireland is the reincarnation of Clintonian alpha-politics in lighting a fire under the feet of the Irish peace and political process formerly in the doldrums.
The celebrations of the quarter-century old Agreement are not just the political equivalent of another St Patrick’s Day Irish-fest, but with the arrival of Air Force One in Dublin and Belfast later this month, remind us that despite cause for despondency if left to Ulster unionism and British Conservatism, the Irish peace process is set to become dynamically recharged by Irish America yet again.
And all inspired by the blueprint created by one William Jefferson Clinton some 25 years ago.