Even when the political stakes were high and there was no guarantee of ultimate success for the peace process, there was a certain giddiness about the extent of Irish access to the White House. Twenty-five years ago today, President Bill Clinton spoke passionately from the Roosevelt Room, trying to push Northern Ireland’s negotiators over the line; it was, he insisted “this chance of a lifetime for peace”. His words came 20 years after one of his predecessors, Jimmy Carter, had publicly committed the US to supporting powersharing in Northern Ireland, breaking half a century of silence by the White House on Northern Ireland.
Reporting for The Irish Times on St Patrick’s Day 1998, Joe Carroll noted “there is a palpable feeling here that never again will there be such an opportunity and that the bringing together of the main leaders under the White House roof at such a critical time must not be wasted”. It certainly helped, and the Belfast Agreement was signed a few weeks later. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern had noted in the White House during the same festivities that the political leaders could not afford the luxury of holding out in the negotiations “for another line or two”.
As it turned out, holding out for another few lines became an established pattern over the next quarter of a century and it is still going on today. It raises an interesting question as to the extent to which there is any appetite for more external intervention. While some Irish-American lobbyists came to regard their role as almost providing a “strand four” to the peace process, alongside the internal Northern Ireland, North-South and east-west strands, their strand, in the direct political sense, had a shelf life and it has passed.
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The appointment late last year of Joe Kennedy III as the US special envoy to Northern Ireland was pointedly for economic affairs, it being made clear he would not become involved in the Stormont stand-off. While it did underline an ongoing interest in Northern Ireland on the part of Biden, it was more seen as a harbinger of a possible visit to Ireland by the US president to mark the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement.
That visit has now been confirmed, but there is no justification for any gushing giddiness about it. Getting sucked in to the current impasse is a very different kind of politics than was the case for Clinton nudging unionists and nationalists towards a historic breakthrough and, for him, a foreign policy coup. The boundaries of US presidential visits to Ireland have always been clearly established. In advance of his 1963 visit, for example, John F Kennedy told the Irish ambassador in Washington, Thomas J Kiernan, that he was not going to play politics with partition and intervene in Anglo-Irish relations.
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Biden has long been known for the seriousness with which he takes his Irish Catholic roots and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity. He has referred previously to the “Irish values” that have “shaped his soul”, including “love of family” and “resilience”, and he likes to quote his mother’s dictum that everyone “deserves to be treated with dignity and respect”, which he maintains “is a thoroughly Irish sentiment”. There is something dated and twee about such platitudes in his well-honed Irish-American script, just as there was in the bland assertions of President Obama when he visited Ireland in 2011 to address “a little country that inspires the biggest things”.
Rather than the still toxic politics of Northern Ireland, or the fallout from Brexit, which has lost some of its heat, the Irish-American framework is now more about bigger international precarities, especially because of the war in Ukraine, raising delicate questions about Irish foreign policy and neutrality as the government insists on its “militarily neutral” but “ideologically aligned” position. Last year, Biden asserted that Ireland, due to its stance on Ukraine was “a real actor” on the world stage, but that idea also brings to a head the logical consequences of something that preoccupied taoiseach Seán Lemass when Kennedy visited 60 years ago.
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On the first morning of his visit, Kennedy met Lemass for diplomatic discussions at the US embassy residence. For the Irish government this was a highlight, as it involved an acceptance of Ireland back into the “western bloc”, following its military neutrality during the second World War, which had caused considerable fury in Washington. Kennedy also expressed gratitude for the searching of eastern bloc aircraft at Shannon. And it should not be forgotten that the reason for the Irish presence in the White House today is because of the process began by John Hearne, the Irish ambassador to the US in 1952 when he quietly dropped a box of Shamrock into the White House for president Truman to begin the process of making amends for an independent Irish foreign policy.