America Denis StauntonThe US administration's decision to deny Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams a fundraising visa this week has outraged much of Irish-America and brought forth grim warnings that Washington has squandered its political capital in the North and set the peace process back.
However, at the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan on Thursday few of the 800 Sinn Féin supporters who had paid $500 each to hear Mr Adams speak appeared to be too put out. The news that Mr Adams would not be there prompted nobody to ask for their money back and may even have helped to make the event Sinn Féin's biggest ever US fundraiser.
A few warm-up speakers fumed at the fundraising ban and thundered that Sinn Féin would not be bullied by Washington.
However, when Mr Adams appeared live from Dublin on two giant screens, he began by remarking on the fact that more tables for the dinner had been sold than ever before.
"I'd also like to thank the people in the administration who made this possible," he joked.
Mr Adams went on to address the issue which caused the US administration to ban him from fundraising - Sinn Féin's reluctance to endorse the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
Washington acknowledges that it is too soon for Sinn Féin to join the North's policing board but wanted Mr Adams to make a "positive statement" about the new police force before this week's planned visit.
Mr Adams repeated on Thursday that "nobody will take our decision for us", but the tone of his remarks on policing was overwhelmingly positive.
"Nationalists and republicans want to be policed. We are a law-abiding people," he said, citing British government figures showing that the North had one of the lowest crime rates in the developed world.
"I believe we will get policing right, or we will get policing as right as policing can be . . . I believe Sinn Féin will be part of a policing dispensation," he said.
Earlier on Thursday, a conference on the Clinton presidency at Hofstra University on Long Island was considering an earlier controversy over giving Mr Adams a US visa.
Mr Clinton's national security adviser, Nancy Soderberg, said that the former president took a huge risk in 1994 when he gave Mr Adams a visa to visit the US, opposing "the entire government and our closest ally".
Ms Soderberg pointed out that facilitating peace in the North was in the interest of the US, not least because Washington favoured a "unified, prosperous European Union" without internal armed conflicts.
Irish Voice editor Niall O'Dowd said that this week's visa stand-off demonstrated how crucial Mr Clinton's personal role had been for the peace process.
"If Bush was in the White House in the 1990s, Adams would not have got within an ass's roar of the United States, and there'd be no peace process," he said.
Ms Soderberg said that Mr Bush had been right to take a lower profile on the North during his first term, but it was now time to engage more closely.
The visa row will soon blow over and Washington is likely to lift its fundraising restrictions on Sinn Féin politicians if the Independent Monitoring Commission reports next January that the IRA remains inactive. For its part, Sinn Féin is expected to move towards an endorsement of the PSNI after the British government introduces legislation to bring policing under the authority of elected politicians in the North.
Mr Clinton's great achievement was to work with Irish America to create an environment which helped the republican movement to turn away from violence and embrace a solely democratic strategy.
Washington's most useful role in the future could be in reassuring unionists, particularly within the DUP, that their interests will be protected within the new political settlement in the North. Ms Soderberg believes that the Northern peace process demonstrates the intelligent use of American power and prestige to resolve conflicts. "Each side doesn't believe each other, but they believe what each other says to the US," she said.
Many of the Irish-American politicians and business leaders who played an important role in persuading Sinn Féin to change course are now working hard to give unionists a voice in the US. Unionists need to feel confident that Washington, which has focused so much energy on persuading republicans, is equally alert to the concerns of the majority community in the North.
Mr Bush, whose evangelical Protestant faith and political conservatism leaves him culturally closer to many unionists than to nationalists, may be ideally placed to provide that reassurance as negotiations on the North's future progress.