A chara, – Your columnist Kathy Sheridan paid a stirring tribute to former US president Jimmy Carter on his 100th birthday (“Leo Varadkar could learn something from Jimmy Carter about how to retire”, Opinion & Analysis, October 2nd), citing the Camp David agreement, US relations with China, the SALT II disarmament accords with the USSR, the West Bank crisis and climate change: all major projects of his administration. President Carter is celebrated as the US president who, more than any other, put the cause of human rights at the centre of his presidency.
It is important also to recall that Jimmy Carter radically rebalanced once and for all the one-sided power calculus between Dublin and London on the Northern Ireland conflict through the Carter Initiative on Northern Ireland of August 1977. Carter’s White House for the first time since partition took a position on the crisis independently of London and in response to a careful but determined campaign launched by John Hume and Senator Edward Kennedy, under the political leadership of US House Speaker Tip O’Neill. O’Neill gave John Hume’s project as high a priority as his own traditional New Deal ambitions and negotiated directly with the President at several of their weekly meetings. The Carter White House depended directly on the Speaker for passage of the US budget and its other domestic and foreign policy programmes. O’Neill and Kennedy were joined by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Hugh Carey, governor of the State of New York: together the “Four Horsemen” made up the most powerful US political lobby in that generation. The Irish minister for foreign affairs Garret FitzGerald visited Washington during the tense year-long negotiation and met President Carter and the Four Horsemen; he was indefatigably supportive. He appointed the undersigned to represent the Irish government in the textual negotiation of the president’s statement. At the time I was a counsellor in the Irish Embassy. My opposite number was Robert Hunter, deputy national security adviser at the White House (later US ambassador to Nato), who despite having no Irish nationalist background himself shared an enthusiasm for Yeats and Joyce and for occasional late-night discussions around the bars of Georgetown.
Ranged against the Four Horsemen, and equally active and determined, were the British prime minister James Callaghan who telephoned Carter repeatedly urging him to hew to the traditional US policy of “non-interference” (effectively meaning silent approval of British policy in Northern Ireland) and his son-in-law the former journalist Peter Jay, the British ambassador in Washington. Other implacable opponents were the US State Department, the CIA and the entire US foreign policy establishment on whom London could rely for “non-interference”, or silence, for the previous 50 years.
President Carter’s statement of August 30th, 1977, called for a solution acceptable to both sides in Northern Ireland, ie power-sharing, urged Americans not to support the cause of violence in Northern Ireland and held out the promise of US job-creating investment for a an agreed outcome (this has been, and is being, delivered).
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His “Initiative” set a precedent and became the matrix for a series of more evenly balanced negotiations between Dublin and London, starting with the pressure Ronald Reagan put on Margaret Thatcher to progress the Anglo-Irish Agreement which was largely facilitated by Sean Donlon (“the Americans made me do it”, she told Lord McAlpine,treasurer of the Tory Party, referring to her signature of that Agreement with taoiseach Garret FitzGerald in 1985) and was finally epitomised in the crucial role of President Clinton in pushing for inclusive agreement on Good Friday 1998.
Jimmy Carter, a great President, richly deserves Kathy Sheridan’s encomia and, from the hearts of the people of Ireland, our profound thanks. – Is mise,
MICHAEL LILLIS,
Dublin 6.