A hero for the Irish peace process

I first came to know Senator Kennedy well during the “visa wars” of 1994 when the Clinton White House defied the wrath of the British to grant a US visa to Gerry Adams.

To watch the Massachusetts Senator operate then was to witness a classic exercise in the use of power.

And what he did helped change Irish history and save lives. How he got to that point involved an odyssey through the maze and contradictions of Irish and Irish-American politics.

Kennedy, always a champion of civil rights, was first attracted to the cause of the nationalists in Northern Ireland a quarter of a century earlier, when they were not just the underdog fighting for civil rights but a struggling people cut from the same cloth as his ancestors who emigrated to America during the potato famine.

By sending a telegram of support to the Civil Rights Association that year he became the first Kennedy to get directly involved in the Irish question.

His father Joe Kennedy had been US ambassador to Britain in 1938-1940 but there is no evidence that he concerned himself with “John Bull’s political slum” as the Sunday Times once famously described Northern Ireland.

His brother John F Kennedy did accept an invitation to visit Ireland as president in 1963 but turned down a request from Minister for Foreign Affairs Frank Aiken to persuade the British to drop their opposition to a United Ireland. The Irish ambassador to Washington Dr. J.T. Kiernan reported at the time that President Kennedy was, by his education, “British inclined.”

If Edward Kennedy was similarly inclined he soon changed as the civil rights movement was swept aside and the violence in Northern Ireland worsened. According to his biographer Adam Clymer he was prompted to take a more proactive role by an unidentified woman who met him in a park in London and demanded to know how he could speak out against the Kent State shooting of anti-Vietnam War students and not against what British troops were doing in Northern Ireland.

Kennedy made his first Senate speech on Northern Ireland on 20th October 1971. His accusation that “Ulster is becoming Britain’s Vietnam” and his later charge, after Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, when British soldiers killed 13 Derry civilians, that it was an action comparable to the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, infuriated the British. To the end of his days the Fleet Street tabloid press would consistently and wrongly characterize Kennedy as a fellow traveler of the IRA.

In London at the time I recall asking Lord Hailsham, the then Lord Chancellor, what effect interventions by Irish Americans like Senator Kennedy had on British policy on Ireland. He reported angrily, banging his hand on the table, “Those Roman Catholic bastards, how dare they interfere!”

The British were always concerned about the “interference’ of ethnic groups in the United States, especially Irish or German, on the so-called historic ‘special relationship’ between London and Washington. Kennedy, whose two brothers were killed by assassins’ bullets, was prepared to interfere, but he had no brief for violence and he grew uneasy when his calls for “Brits out” associated him with militant Irish American groups in the United States which gave support to the IRA.

A turning point came when, on a trip to a NATO meeting in Germany, he telephoned John Hume in Derry to ask for a meeting. The SDLP leader had made an impression in Washington with his criticisms of pro-IRA sentiment among Irish Americans and his calls for constitutional reform.

“I need to know what’s really going on in Northern Ireland and I am told you are the perso n I should talk to,” said Kennedy on the phone. Hume, who initially thought it was a hoax call, borrowed the fare from the Derry Credit Union to travel to Bonn where they met over dinner with the Irish ambassador on 21st November 1972.

Hume impressed Kennedy with his advocacy of constitutional change on the basis of consent, and from then on the Massachusetts Senator aligned himself with the SDLP leader on Irish issues and undertook to help promote peaceful change.

Shortly afterwards Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, then Speaker of the House, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York State, and Governor Hugh Carey of New York banded together to appeal to Americans every St Patrick’s Day to renounce any action that promoted violence. The “Four Horsemen” as they were known also called for an Irish dimension to peace efforts and investment in the border economy.

Kennedy successfully lobbied the Carter administration to pledge financial assistance to Northern Ireland in the event of a settlement. Reflecting his close association with Hume, he refused to support the McBride Principles which were popular with many Irish Americans as a way of forcing equal employment20in Northern Ireland, but dismissed by Hume as a disincentive to US investment.

Kennedy also intervened to get Carter to suspend US weapon sales to the RUC, which further infuriated London. Kennedy because a counterweight to the influence in the US of Irish Northern Aid (Noraid) and the Irish National Caucus and as such a powerful ally of the Irish Government.

The split in the Irish American community at that time caused a minor transatlantic crisis when Charles Haughey, on becoming Taoiseach in 1979, sought to move Irish ambassador to Washington Sean Donlon who had become embroiled in a struggle for influence among Irish Americans with the more militant members of Congressman Mario Biaggi’s Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs. Kennedy, Moynihan and O’Neill let Haughey know in transatlantic calls just how much they valued Donlon and what he stood for, and the embarrassed Taoiseach had to let the matter drop.

Kennedy subsequently helped persuade Republican President Ronald Reagan to lean on Margaret Thatcher to sign up to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. By the time Bill Clinton was elected Democratic President in 1992, Kennedy had become the most powerful figure in a Democratic Senate. Clinton knew he would have to rely heavily on the Massachusetts Senator for his legislative agenda, and it followed that he would be reluctant to deviate from the Kennedy line on any issue, including Ireland.

Kennedy was thus able to persuade Clinton to appoint his sister Jean Kennedy Smith as ambassador to Dublin, at a time when Speaker Tom Foley was lobbying hard for Massachusetts politician Brian Donnelly to be given the job. A few months later the issue of a visa for Gerry Adams erupted in Washington.

Clinton had made a qualified promise during his campaign to grant a US visa to Adams, who had been barred by previous administrations from entering the United States because of Sinn Fein’s association with the IRA. The granting of a visa was at first opposed by John Hume, the Irish Government and Ted Kennedy.

However when an group of influential Irish American businessmen and union leaders put together by New York publisher Niall O’Dowd sought a visa in December 1993 to allow the Sinn Fein leader to promote the peace process at a conference in New York on 1st February 1994, things changed.

It was clear to everyone that Kennedy would be crucial to a favorable White House decision. The senator traveled to Dublin to spend New Year with his sister and take soundings.

On the first night she hosted a dinner for him with Tim Pat Coogan, an authority through his books on the IRA who advised him that a visa would go a long way to persuade the hard men that there would be political gains from ending their campaign.

Next day she took him to see the Taoiseach Albert Reynolds who told him, “I think you should go for it because I think he (Adams) wants peace.” Kennedy was taken aback at the change of Irish government policy and did not give any commitm ent.

Shortly afterwards however, at the funeral of Tip O’Neill in Boston, he encountered John Hume who also said it would advance the cause of peace. Kennedy was now convinced. On 15 January, just after Jean Kennedy Smith sent a recommendation to the White House to grant the visa, Kennedy sent a letter to the President signed by himself, John Kerry, Chris Dodd and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, supporting the application on the grounds that it would strengthen Adams’ hand with the militants.

Kennedy recruited several other senior Congress members to sign the letter, including Senate majority leader George Mitchell. He called the President to warn that a refusal would produce a ground swell of ill will from Irish Americans. Kennedy’s intervention provided crucial political cover for Clinton, who was inclined to ta ke the risk of letting a spokesman for a banned organisation into the US, but was facing fierce opposition from Tom Foley, the State Department and the FBI.

The British were furious when he authorised the visa, and Kennedy and Clinton were excoriated in Fleet Street tabloids. One British newspaper headline said the decision caused the “worse crisis since Suez” in transatlantic relations. “See what the Brits are saying about me?” said Clinton when Kennedy called to thank him. The senator replied, “Don’t worry about it, That’s what the Brits have been saying about the Kennedys for years.” The granting of the visa did work however. It did advance the cause of peace.

The IRA declared a ceasefire in August 1994 and the loyalist paramilitary groups shortly followed suit. The ceasefires were the culmination of years of contacts, many secret, involving London, Dublin and Belfast but Gerry Adams told me many years later that he believed the intervention of Irish America, and especially Senator Kennedy, had brought the ceasefire forward by about a year.

The number of people alive today who might otherwise have been killed can never be known but could run to several score. With the passing of time the decision on the visa came to be seen even by the British as tactically correct. Jonathan Powell, who as a Washington-based British diplomat lobbied vigorously against the visa and who up to the last minute thought the British would prevail, wrote in his 2008 book ‘Great Hatred, Little Room’ that in retrospect “Clinton was clearly right in the decision he made.”

The sum of Kennedy’s contribution to Ireland over four decades is much greater than this one dramatic episode. But it was a defining moment in de cision-making at the White House, when the confluence of a powerful senator, a president prepared to take risks, a canny Irish prime minister, and a Northern Ireland politician prepared to cede the stage to a rival, provided a breakthrough in the quest for peace in a small country.

It is a mark of the revisionist appreciation in Britain Government circles of Kennedy and his “daring to interfere” that in March this year he was given an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth for =E 2services to the British-American relationship and to Northern Ireland." Lord Hailsham must be turning in his grave.