US involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process may have reached its height during the administration of Bill Clinton.
However, it was a crucial decision by Jimmy Carter almost 20 years earlier, in the summer of 1977, to break with long-standing US policy on Northern Ireland that started the ball rolling.
Former Irish diplomat in Washington Ted Smyth said Mr Carter was the first US president to recognise that there was a role for the Irish government in Northern Ireland and that that was “the big breakthrough in relations”.
“We got lots of resolutions from Congress and so forth which were helpful enough. But no president before him, including Kennedy, would intervene in what they said was a British matter and it was not for them or Dublin to be involved.
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“What changed that were two things. One, Jimmy Carter had a predilection for human rights around the world and number two, [SDLP leader] John Hume and [then-US speaker of the House of Representatives] Tip O’Neill framed the Northern Ireland issue in terms of human rights and said he should be involved in this.
“The leverage was that Hume had developed a strong relationship with Democrat senator Ted Kennedy and O’Neill.”
Mr Smyth said it became an article of faith for Mr O’Neill that any time he spoke to Mr Carter the Irish issue was “front and central”.
“Carter [who had been governor of the state of Georgia] needed O’Neill as he was an outsider in Washington who hardly knew how Congress worked. O’Neill was a powerful speaker and could deliver or not deliver, depending on the relationship. It was a very powerful leverage.
“That was the beginning of the Irish peace process in a sense with the US involvement helping to correct the imbalance in the relationship between Ireland and Britain in relation to Northern Ireland and to bring some balance to the situation in a real and concrete way.”
Mr Smyth said that this subsequently led to president Ronald Reagan nudging British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the direction of the Anglo Irish Agreement in 1985 and Mr Clinton appointing George Mitchell as special envoy leading up to the Belfast Agreement in 1998.
“There is a direct correlation between these events.”
Mr Smyth told The Irish Times that up to 1977 the state department in Washington did not want to see the US intervene in relation to Northern Ireland.
“The cold war was raging. Britain was one of the United States’s key allies in Nato against the Soviet Union and they just said: ‘we do not have a dog in the fight in Northern Ireland’.
“Henry Kissinger [the former secretary of state under Nixon] made it very clear on a number of occasions to Irish diplomats that Northern Ireland did not have any realpolitik consequences,” Mr Smyth said.
“Even when Kennedy went to Ireland in 1963 he made it clear that he did not want partition or Northern Ireland to be raised.”
Mr Smyth said the US state department and the British embassy fought tooth and nail to try to stop Mr Carter getting involved in the Northern Ireland issue.
He said in August 1977 he was the press officer of the Irish government in the United States, based that summer at the embassy in Washington, and it was evident that “they were blocking it, and blocking it and blocking it”.
“It [a statement] was meant to have come out in June and then in July.”
The Irish side used its influence with key politicians such as Ted Kennedy to lobby the White House.
“Finally [a statement] was released on 30th August and they tried to suggest it was no big deal and that he was just saying the president was opposed to violence.”
However, it contained language that was never said before by a US president.
“The United States wholeheartedly supports peaceful means for finding a just solution that involves both parts of the community of Northern Ireland and protects human rights and guarantees freedom from discrimination – a solution that the people in Northern Ireland, as well as the governments of Great Britain and Ireland can support,” the Carter statement said.
Mr Smyth said this statement meant the Irish government was being brought in an as equal partner of the UK in the Northern Ireland issue.
“There were two things in that statement: recognising the role of Dublin in seeking a solution and the second was the promise of jobs and investment if there was a solution.
“This was an enormous breakthrough, though it may not have been recognised at the time. Carter was a one-term president but the two ingredients in his position – a role for the Irish government and a promise of jobs and investment –was followed by subsequent administrations.”
“That broke the mould.”
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