A chilly reception awaits Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams in Washington next week, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
Robberies and murders by the IRA during its cessation of violence are nothing new. Just after the ceasefire in 1994, the IRA killed 54-year-old post office worker Frank Kerr in Newry and made off with £130,000. At the time, Sinn Féin was applying for permission to raise funds in the US. The British government was vehemently opposed to this. Tony Lake and Nancy Soderberg, the top officials dealing with Ireland in the White House, agreed with the British. But 10 years ago Sinn Féin had many powerful allies in Washington who were sold on the idea of drawing the Irish republican movement fully into the peace process.
The Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams, had just brought about the end of a quarter-century IRA campaign. Senator Edward Kennedy wrote to the then president, Bill Clinton, saying: "If we expect Sinn Féin to act like a legitimate political party, we must treat it like one." The former US ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith, sent messages of support from Dublin. Senior Democratic senator Chris Dodd personally urged the president - they were playing the 17th hole at an Arlington golf course at the time - to allow fundraising.
"All the advice I'm getting is not to do it, but I might," replied Clinton. That was a signal for Irish Americans to pile on the pressure. Clinton instructed Soderberg to find a way to do it. Working through New York publisher Niall O'Dowd, she and Lake got a commitment from Adams to "seriously discuss" decommissioning as a quid pro quo. The president lifted the ban.
That was then. Things are very different now. In the wake of the Northern Bank robbery and the killing by IRA members of Robert McCartney, Sinn Féin leaders have, for the first time since 1995, not dared apply for permission to raise funds "to avoid it being made into a contentious issue" as their announcements in the Irish-American media say, ie it could be refused. This constitutes a considerable financial setback for a party that in the six months up to May 2004 raised $600,000 in the US, though there is no guarantee that sort of money is still available. Nor are any members of Congress willing to go out on a limb for them this time on the issue.
"Ten years ago we could have got 20 congressmen and half a dozen senators from both parties to sign a letter to the president," says a prominent activist in the US. "Today we'd have trouble getting one."
His point was underlined by the absence, for the first time in 10 years, of any Congress member at the Sinn Féin Ardfheis in Dublin last week. The problem is not just recent events. Enthusiasm for a never-ending peace process has given way to a weary ennui.
"The problem is, it's the same-old, same-old," says a Democratic member of the Congressional Friends of Ireland. "People have moved on. We're at war. Priorities change."
"There's a sense of overall frustration, a lot of headshaking," says Soderberg, now vice-president of the International Crisis Group in New York, who calls the decade-long relationship between Sinn Féin and the White House a "dance of engagement" that helped bring about the ceasefire and the Belfast Agreement.
"The Irish have a knack for making it as hard as possible to make progress," she says. "Their continued inability to make a perfectly acceptable political solution work well is to the detriment of both sides. Party leaders are so steeped in their own narrow history it may take a generation to make the transition to a normal political environment."
Adams will face tough questions in New York and Washington this week - about the failure of the process, the bank robbery and the murder.
"Nobody's personally blaming Adams," says Republican Congressman Peter King, a long-time friend. "He has built up tremendous capital and still has good standing. But there are things that need to be discussed."
O'Dowd agrees that "the fact that they came so close on numerous occasions is incredibly frustrating and now the process appears to be in reverse".
The first reverse was the decision by President Bush not to invite Northern Ireland party leaders to the White House on St Patrick's Day for the first time since 1995. In that year, former president Clinton hosted an East Room party with Dublin Bay prawns and Bushmills whiskey, during which celebrities such as Paul Newman queued to shake Adams's hand, and which concluded with Adams and John Hume crooning Phil Coulter's The Town I Love So Well.
Last year President Bush mingled at a White House reception with Adams, UUP leader David Trimble, SDLP leader Mark Durkan, DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson and Alliance leader David Ford, and told them he wanted them to work out a deal. Officially, the reason for not having the North's party leaders this year is that the negotiations are on ice, but everyone knows it has all to do with the claims by Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern that Sinn Féin leaders knew about the Northern Bank robbery in advance.
The second reverse was the refusal of House Speaker, Dennis Hastert, to invite the North's party leaders to the traditional St Patrick's Day speaker's lunch in the House Dining Room, which is attended by the president and prominent Irish Americans. Adams and other Northern leaders have been regular guests since 1995 when speaker Newt Gingrich was forced, against his better judgment, to follow the White House lead and invite him to partake of the traditional ham and cabbage. On that occasion the Sinn Féin leader sat with King and Republican Tom DeLay, now House Majority Leader, and Clinton came across to shake his hand. Adams was anointed.
This year, Hastert followed the White House lead, not least because he was told President Bush might not show up otherwise. It was a bitter break for the SDLP. The speaker's lunch was started by Thomas "Tip" O'Neill in the 1980s mainly as a way to honour John Hume, whose successor, Durkan, now finds himself out in the cold along with Adams.
It wasn't a difficult decision for the Speaker. Unlike 10 years ago, there is no stomach among Irish-American Congress members to lobby on Adams's behalf. The bank robbery, the murder of McCartney, and the IRA offer to shoot his killers, shocked supporters of Sinn Féin's role.
Attitudes have also changed in 10 years. The 9/11 attacks made political figures more wary of association with anyone connected with terrorism. The arrests in Colombia in August 2001 of republicans Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and Jim Monaghan left a bad taste.
Then there was Adams's official visit to Cuba in December 2001 which went down badly, especially with business backers. Sinn Féin activists in New York - more aware than most people of the benefits that flowed from cultivating corporate Irish America - sent urgent messages to Adams not to go. King told him several times it was a mistake that would undercut Sinn Féin's argument for human rights. US envoy Richard Haass advised against the trip on behalf of the White House, and afterwards a top official said Adams's insistence on going had "dimmed" the administration's view of him.
Sinn Féin's opposition to the war in Iraq also irritated many prominent New York corporate figures infused with pro-American patriotism after 9/11. Then came the acrimonious breakdown in the negotiations last autumn, followed by the bank raid and the claim by the Taoiseach that Sinn Féin leaders knew about it in advance.
"It's conflicting for us," says a member of the Friends of Ireland in Congress. "Both Adams and Ahern have great credibility and now they are saying different things."
The ready acceptance by London and Dublin of PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde's word that the IRA was responsible did not go unchallenged. Democratic Congressman Richard Neal points out that there had been many cases in the past, such as Guilford and Birmingham, where the British got it wrong. But few doubt it was an IRA-connected crime and this has led to comparisons in the US media of Sinn Féin and the IRA with thetelevision crime family, The Sopranos. The offer by the IRA to "whack" McCartney's killers was compared by the Boston Globe to the opening scene in The Godfather where Don Corleone gets his thugs to beat up two men to avenge an aggrieved father. However, the Mafia never organised a political party as its accomplice, it said, and Sinn Féin could not play a leading role until the IRA went out of business.
That is the message Adams will get loud and clear from all sides in the US next week. It is time for the IRA to go out of business, said President Bush's envoy for Northern Ireland, Mitchell Reiss. "There is no place for a paramilitary organisation and criminal activity in a democratic political party, and I will tell Adams that," said Senator Kennedy. King says Adams will be told when he visits Capitol Hill: "It's time for the IRA to cease operations and go out of business."
"The IRA must disband," says O'Dowd, "though the governments cannot impose a solution without Sinn Féin. That was the lesson of the entire peace process - inclusiveness worked."
Washington, in the words of one diplomat, has becomes a chilly house for Sinn Féin, but contacts are a long way from being severed. Support for inclusiveness for all the North's parties in the process has never really wavered. It is seen as essential to the main goal, a final settlement in Northern Ireland. Reiss will have talks with Adams in Washington this week, and the Sinn Féin leader has a full round of engagements on Capitol Hill. Sustaining the peace process was far more important than attendance "at a ceremony at the White House that will take place for about two hours", said Neal.
But for now, what Soderberg called the "dance of engagement" between Adams and the administration, which bedazzled everyone in the early days, has gone from a merry quickstep to a slow shuffle.
As Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Lake dealt directly with Adams. He uses another analogy to describe the peace process, comparing it to a bicycle which, if it stops, will fall over.
"The bicycle is wobbly but it hasn't fallen over," he says, when asked about the current crisis. "The key question that has to be answered by Adams," he says, "is does he want to fulfill the promise of him being a major political figure or will he bow to the IRA and not only destroy his own possibility, but slow the bicycle still further?" The problem for the IRA and Sinn Féin, he says, "is that, as the democratic possibility has enlarged over the last 10 years, to the same degree it has become impossible and impractible to claim the right to act in effect like a sovereign state and a military organisation when that is found inconsistent with democracy and being a democratic political party. One can't be seen to be a player in the democratic process and at the same time assert the right to violent means and even sovereign decision-making."
Adams, says Lake, has a stark choice. "He has to choose between the IRA and a political future."