The last week has seen the culmination of a process of American involvement in the affairs of Northern Ireland that dates back more than a quarter of a century. For much of that period British governments feared, and demonstrated hostility to, such US intervention. Successive Irish governments had to fight a diplomatic battle within the US on two fronts: seeking on the one hand to swing Irish-American opinion at both public and congressional level against the IRA, while at the same time countering sometimes hostile and frequently ill-judged British government propaganda there.
By 1972 the danger to the security of this island emanating from Irish-American grass-roots identification with the IRA as well as from badly-informed congressional opinion had became evident. And it was in that year that John Hume began the process of persuading key US politicians to lead Irish-American public opinion against the IRA and to reject the easy course of following the tide of atavistic Anglophobia that had begun to engulf the organisational structure and the media of Irish-America.
John Hume's successful efforts soon secured the support of Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neill in Congress, and at the end of that year Jack Lynch and Des O'Malley courageously took on the IRA sympathisers at the popular level. This process was skilfully pursued thereafter by our diplomats - initially by Michael Lillis, first as information officer at the Consulate-General in New York and later as a counsellor at the Embassy in Washington, where he established a uniquely close relationship with congressional leaders such as Tip O'Neill.
The result of this constructive activity was the formation on St Patrick's Day 1977 of the influential cross-party Friends of Ireland group in Congress, led by the "Four Horsemen" - Speaker Tip O'Neill, Senators Ted Kennedy and Pat Moynihan and Governor Hugh Carey of New York. Simultaneously Michael Lillis was successfully countering the efforts of Congressman Mario Biaggi and the Irish National Caucus to "capture" Jimmy Carter during his presidential campaign.
I vividly recall my meeting with President Carter on St Patrick's Day 1977, two months after his inauguration, when I faced him with cuttings from the Daily Telegraph and the Irish Press, both of which - from their very different perspectives - had reported that the White House had responded in positive terms to a query about the President's attitude to the IRA.
Challenged by an embarrassed President, his aides could not enlighten him about the source of these reports but inquiries quickly revealed - much to his embarrassment - that a junior member of staff handling public inquiries, who knew nothing about the IRA, had interpreted too enthusiastically her PR instructions to be nice to everyone who approached her.
From then onwards the Carter administration was strongly supportive of Irish government policy - announcing four months later the Carter Initiative, which promised substantial aid to Northern Ireland if political progress were made there. That was a cheque that we cashed eight years later under the Reagan administration.
When, on my suggestion, Jack Lynch appointed Sean Donlon Ambassador to the United States in 1978, he carried this process further still, with the result that under the Reagan administration Irish influence in Washington reached new heights.
This whole process was nearly aborted, however, in 1980 when Charles Haughey as Taoiseach sought to protect his republican flank by agreeing to a Neil Blaney demand that Sean Donlon be moved from Washington because of his success in combating republican influences there and generally in the United States.
After his recall to tell him of this transfer Sean Donlon was returning to Washington via New York - to where he was to be moved as Ambassador to the United Nations - when word of this development was leaked to the Daily Telegraph and thence to the Irish Sunday papers. Within three days the Four Horsemen were publicly denouncing this proposed move as an ungrateful decision by the new Irish government "to align itself with other forces in the US". After a ham-fisted attempt by a government spokesman to justify this transfer decision as "removing a pawn to gain a knight", (Neil Blaney), Charles Haughey was forced to climb down with an announcement that the report of this move - which a Government spokesman had described in such graphic chess terms - was "totally without foundation".
Thus it was that an Ambassador who had visibly lost the confidence of his head of government paradoxically became one of the most influential representatives Ireland has had in the US - a diplomat to whose residence, uniquely, President Reagan more than once went as a dinner guest.
Simultaneously, after Michael O'Kennedy had dismissed as "open to interpretation" the support which Congressman Biaggi's Ad-Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs and Noraid were giving to violence, a combination of John Hume, Frank Cluskey and myself publicly forced Charles Haughey to climb down further by repudiating these bodies. All this effectively stymied a brief but potentially dangerous governmental flirtation with republicanism. At the end of June 1981, after coming into office as Taoiseach at a crucial moment in the Maze hunger strike, I asked President Reagan to intervene with Margaret Thatcher, who early in July had aborted an arrangement agreed by her Minister of State in Belfast which we believed would, without conceding IRA demands, have ended this disastrous stand-off. But Reagan and his aides, new in power, were "law and order" people and were too unsure of the complex issues involved to take on Margaret Thatcher on this issue. My initiative failed: it had in fact been something of an act of desperation in the face of the support that Sinn Fein/IRA was accumulating in these conditions, and of the tragic impact on the hunger strikers' families.
However, it soon became clear that we had not lost the support of the President. In December 1984, when the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement met a serious setback, Reagan agreed to raise this personally with Margaret Thatcher at a meeting in Washington. He told her he hoped to hear from her further on the matter when they met again two months later. Secretary of State Schultz then agreed to have Ireland placed formally on the agenda of that second meeting - the first time for many decades that Ireland had so featured.
Margaret Thatcher got the message. Well before her February meeting in Washington we had received new proposals from her government, and these formed the basis of the agreement signed 10 months later at Hillsborough.
Meanwhile, Sean Donlon - now Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs - had been negotiating US financial support for the agreement, the final arrangements for which were made in Washington during a joint visit by him and the British Cabinet Secretary, Robert Armstrong.
That visit initiated a new and constructive stage in British-Irish diplomatic activity in the United States. During the first decade of the violence in Northern Ireland a good deal of British diplomatic effort in the United States had involved a defensive approach, directed towards protecting Britain's international reputation. Of course, these ham-fisted British propaganda attempts undermined their efforts to persuade Irish-Americans not to support or tolerate the activities of the IRA - efforts which in any event could better have been left to the Irish government. For many years British governments were persistently hostile to any US involvement in Irish affairs - fearing that any such involvement would be marred by a pro-nationalist bias. At one point Anglo-American relations became so strained because of President Clinton's actions in support of the emerging peace process that Prime Minister John Major refused to take phone calls from the President.
However, as Major's government began to appreciate the potentially positive impact of US involvement - especially in helping to strengthen the prestige of a Sinn Fein leadership that was struggling to persuade its grass roots to support the peace process - British attitudes began to change. The sensitive balance that President Clinton maintained during his last visit to Northern Ireland three years ago was particularly effective in dispelling long-established British fears.
Finally, after Labour's victory last year, all British inhibitions about American - and indeed Irish government - involvement in the affairs of Northern Ireland disappeared. Five months ago, during the closing stages of the Belfast negotiation, there was the astonishing phenomenon of the British and Irish Prime Ministers jointly calling the President, asking him in the middle of the night to persuade participants by telephone to compromise with each other.
This visit has crowned this process of increasingly positive American involvement in the Northern Ireland crisis. There have, it is true, been criticisms - in this State rather than in Northern Ireland - of other aspects of US policy elsewhere in the world, in particular of the bombing of the Sudan and Afghanistan. There is little public support here for that kind of unilateral action, and in other circumstances an Irish government might have expressed concern at this action. But in the light of the most positive role President Clinton has played in relation to Northern Ireland, realpolitik has imposed reticence on this issue.