Michael Lillis writes: President John F Kennedy was the guest of the Irish government for fully two days and two half-days between June 26th and 29th, 1963. Thirteen years later, by the summer of 1976, it had become obvious to me, influenced by a series of conversations with John Hume and a few others, that one of the greatest errors of the Irish state since its inception was its conscious and deliberate failure to raise the problem of Northern Ireland with President Kennedy before, during or after his overwhelmingly successful four-day official visit to Ireland.
Of course it was well understood that the president did not want to be confronted in any way by this problem because he gave priority to the US-UK military and strategic relationship over his warm regard for the country of his ancestors; he had himself made this starkly clear to his advisers and, through them before his visit to Ireland in 1963, to the Irish Ambassador in Washington, Thomas Kiernan; his focus was almost exclusively on global politics and, as dramatically confirmed during the Cuban missile crisis, on the power relationship between the United States and the world’s other nuclear behemoth, the Soviet Union. His last stop before coming to Dublin on June 26th was in Berlin where, earlier that very day, he had delivered the most stirring defiance of the West to the Soviet threat in his clarion cry, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’: that was what mattered; not the integrity or otherwise of the quarrel between the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone.
Clearly there could have been no conceivable likelihood of Dublin successfully urging the President of the United States to demand or support an end to partition or British withdrawal from Northern Ireland in 1963 (much less to support or condone any campaign of violence to secure that objective) – then or indeed at any time since 1963 – even though it was precisely that target that had animated the unsuccessful anti-Partition campaign, led energetically but most ironically by Conor Cruise O’Brien of the Department of External Affairs in the previous decade. In fact, demands from Dublin to end partition suited the British perfectly, precisely because they were impractical and facilitated the established custom of the British of ignoring the practices of flagrant injustice that had predominated on the ground in Northern Ireland since Partition. But a carefully designed policy of support for joint efforts between ‘our close friends’ in Dublin and London to support amity and reconciliation in Northern Ireland could have been perfectly conceivable, would have been difficult if not impossible for the British to be seen to reject, and could with determination and adroit management have been sold by Irish diplomacy in Washington and in London: conceivably it could have levered the urgent problem of Northern Ireland, with its constituent but unspoken issues of equality and justice, gently onto the shared agenda of the three governments.
Why was such an attempt not even conjured with in passing in Dublin? Partly I suggest because it had been the unstated policy in Dublin to avoid those issues, where they might distract from, or damage other desirable objectives, such as the glittering success of President Kennedy’s visit to Ireland, or the strategic vision and determination of the taoiseach, Seán Lemass, of Ireland joining the European Common Market in tandem with the UK with the minimum of ill-feeling between Dublin and London, and those other priorities prevailed. And because neither the US-born President de Valera, the master diplomat who had boldly recovered the Treaty Ports for Irish sovereignty, resolved the ‘economic war’ between Dublin and London in 1938 and followed this by successfully managing a policy of neutrality during the Second World War in the face of the fury of Winston Churchill in London (not to mention the unforgiving and unconcealed disdain of President Roosevelt and of millions of Americans for de Valera’s policy), nor Sean Lemass the strongly pro -European Common Market if previously ‘slightly constitutional’ taoiseach at the time, nor Frank Aiken, minister for external affairs, the former revolutionary leader, were willing to embarrass in the slightest way the most Irish of US presidents, even for one moment in an off-the-record private conversation, when he was virtually their social prisoner for several days.
It is difficult to avoid the conviction that an element in the political culture of Dublin of the mid-sixties had been a mixture of timidity and lassitude. It should be added that the only policy on Northern Ireland articulated by the Dublin political establishment at the time was a demand to end partition, another way of demanding British withdrawal, which Britain could not under any conceivable circumstances concede or even consider. The leadership in Dublin knew perfectly well that this was an impossible demand and as such there seemed little point in trying to get the US to back it.
I was promoted in 1976 to counsellor (political) and transferred from New York to the Irish embassy in Washington. John Hume had told me confidentially that he was already working with Senator Edward Kennedy: their joint but confidential strategy had for some time been to have the president of the United States somehow become directly involved in moving the British government to confront the unionist veto on any project except unionist hegemony in Northern Ireland. Harold Wilson and his secretary of state, Merlyn Rees, had surrendered to that veto when they had yielded to the Loyalist workers’ strike and abandoned the Sunningdale power-sharing project in 1974. Hume believed that the only power on the planet capable of moving London from that state of frozen paralysis was that of the White House. Not resolutions in the US Congress or in American city halls, which the British could ignore and had done so. Not all the heft of all the active Irish-American organisations united in a single lobby (which did not at any rate exist) could begin to outweigh that unionist veto in Wilson’s London. And least of all would the United States be swayed by a campaign of violence waged against its closest and most strategic political ally, the United Kingdom, and its citizens; in fact, the US would act through its FBI, its CIA and its Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms against any such movement in order to protect the interests and the people of the UK; they would condemn it unreservedly and had done so in trenchant terms.
In sharing his strategy with me, as he may well have done with others such as Sean Donlon, my superior at headquarters in Dublin, who was a long-time friend of John’s, Hume enjoined me to absolute secrecy, including insisting adamantly that I should not share his plans with Dublin. This put me in a difficult position. As time moved on, I began to learn that this was fundamental to John’s seemingly paranoid, but probably shrewd, management of his own central strategy and that it extended to his relationship with his own most senior party colleagues in the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the SDLP. I did at all times share what I had learned from John with my ambassador, Jack Molloy, not out of any hierarchical deference or obligation, but because I had learned to trust his impermeable discretion and his wisdom about the way the government system worked in Dublin. ‘Binn béal ina thost’ (‘a silent mouth is the sweetest’, that is the most effective) was his regular mantra. I adopted a number of self-effacing strategies in reporting to Dublin, such as extensive use of the passive voice and eschewing any language which might suggest that I was playing any role whatsoever in furthering Hume’s strategy. I would for example report that ‘it had been heard on the grapevine’ that the house speaker, Tip O Neill (at that time the second most powerful politician in Washington, and for several purposes the most powerful), was considering supporting an effort along with Senators Kennedy and Moynihan and Governor Carey to influence President Jimmy Carter, when I had been briefed that very day in his own office to that effect by O’Neill himself.
I was renting a small traditional clapboard-fronted house on Q Street in Georgetown, Washington’s most prestigious and ‘social’ neighbourhood. I was most fortunate to find something remotely affordable there. So far as I could establish, only one Irish embassy colleague in the previous generation, the highly popular Michael Fitzgerald, had managed to find a house in Georgetown and have it approved by our system. My ambassador and boss, Jack Molloy, had to strain his room for manoeuvre to the limit in approving my little place. His decision proved most useful.
Shortly after my arrival in Washington I got to know Rosemary O’Neill, daughter of Tip (Thomas P), then majority (that is Democratic Party) leader in the House of Representatives. She was a distinguished diplomat at the State Department. She introduced me to her father, who was elected US Speaker in January 1977. In turn I arranged for John Hume to spend an evening at my home with Speaker O’ Neill, his wife and daughter and Jack Molloy. The two politicians hit it off immediately, both politically and personally: the evening ended, as always, very late, with both of them (and indeed Jack and myself) breaking into song. At this stage O’Neill, as constitutionally the senior politician in Congress, took over the leadership of the emerging ‘Four Horsemen’, the other three being Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Hugh Carey, governor of New York State. The relationship between O’ Neill and Kennedy was occasionally sensitive because they both vied for the position of the principal Irish leader or even – for some purposes such as US social security policy – the principal leader in US politics, and particularly so in the assertive worlds of Boston and Washington politics. I felt that whatever rivalry may have existed was more often sharper between their respective followers on the ground in Boston and in Washington than between the two of them personally. O’Neill was the epitome of a master local political boss in blue-collar North Cambridge while Kennedy was closer to Harvard and to the social world of the wealthy Brahmins who had viscerally despised the post-Famine Irish immigrants. When it came to their co-operation on Hume’s agenda, they were both unreservedly committed to working for a strategic breakthrough, rather than seeking personal profile or credit. They were unquestionably the leading US political drivers of the Hume project, O’Neill with his unchallenged authority in the House of Representatives and on whom President Carter depended almost abjectly for passage of his budget and a host of other legislative issues – and Kennedy with his years of mastery of the Senate. The key fact was that O’Neill met once a week with the president to discuss Carter’s agenda and there is no doubt that one of several key items on his list of major priorities was Hume’s project: and he was willing to trade cooperation on some of Carter’s domestic and foreign policy priorities, on some of which he may have been unenthusiastic, for the president’s support on Hume’s project. Never had any Irish political project in the United States enjoyed such leverage at the epicentre of American power.
O’Neill was a bear of a man, physically huge and very striking-looking with a ruddy complexion and a great sweeping curtain of silver hair. His nineteenth century background in Ireland was a grandfather bricklayer from Cork and his wife, Bridey Fullerton, from the Inishowen peninsula. (We accompanied him to the unforgettably beautiful but bleak site of the Fullerton homestead on his first highly emotional visit there in 1986). O’Neill was the supreme master of congressional politics, irresistibly charming but unshakeably stubborn, with an iron but slightly left-wing commitment to the New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party. In the Irish-American deeply Catholic tradition he was profoundly patriotic, but acknowledged that his children had talked him out of supporting the Vietnam War. He went through a similar evolution from supporting the IRA in his youth to becoming a devoted supporter of Hume’s rejection of violence in Ireland, even in the years before he met Hume.
It was during my junior years in Madrid (1967-72) that I had developed a fatal delight in the pleasure of smoking a Cuban cigar. At the outset I could buy one for a few pence thanks to the special trade regime between Communist Cuba and the right-wing Spanish dictatorship that allowed for this even during Franco’s life (Franco and Castro maintained an astonishingly good working relationship, consciously echoing their shared family backgrounds in Galicia, as Castro explained to me in Havana years later). The real pleasure lay in the aromatic sensation involved and never in inhaling the nicotine content of the tobacco. Once I left Madrid, I quickly discovered that the international price for these magnificent luxuries was beyond the capacity of most aficionados including myself. My mild addiction was fostered by diplomatic status wherever I could avail of that, because the price when tax-free, though still exorbitant, was relatively minuscule when compared with the international retail cost. In my years in New York (1974-76) I was able to have access to a supply through the good offices of a colleague in Ireland’s permanent mission to the United Nations who bought me the occasional box in the UN’s shop in New York. It must be recalled that following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by right-wing Cuban expatriates, which was financed by President Kennedy’s CIA, the president imposed an embargo on trade with Cuba, eliminating Cuban cigars at a stroke from their largest market in the world, the USA. It seems that the president, who also cherished the pleasure of Cuban tobacco, sent a team of aides out across the country the day before the embargo became law to gather thousands of boxes for the White House. I kept a very modest supply of Cuban cigars in my house in Washington and I was astonished at O’Neill’s pure delight when I offered him one after dinner. We chatted in the kitchen later and I showed him where I kept a very small stock in the fridge. I gave him one or two to take home. I did not always lock my front door in Georgetown in those years and on one occasion I found Speaker O’ Neill unexpectedly in my own kitchen. Let us say that the pleasure of the odd Cuban cigar was a common interest.
In fact, we had a far stronger personal friendship focused rather on Northern Ireland and on Hume’s project. O’Neill came frequently to gatherings at the house, usually accompanied by ‘caravanserais’ of politicians, for the most part Democratic members of the house, but invariably with a good scattering of Republicans. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan never failed to show. When O’Neill was coming, Hume always tried to join the throng, coming down from Harvard, and on two memorable occasions he and his brilliant and lovely wife Pat came from Derry, bringing with them the musical tyro Phil Coulter, who kept everyone up demanding more and more songs from him into the small hours. On one of those nights, when there were upwards of a hundred politicians inside and outside my little house, a well-known republican Congressman declared to his friends’ astonishment that he was gay: this was still an unusual event but it was received warmly and with gentle understanding. On another morning-after-the-night-before I found Elliot Richardson, the President’s secretary for energy, a classical Brahminian Bostonian, and otherwise a scholarly man, snoring loudly on the living room couch.
Towards the end of 1976 the chiefs of staff of the Four Horsemen began to meet about once per week, more often than not at my house in Georgetown. I was included in these sessions, which planned strategy and drafted papers. On several occasions John, who was attending a seminar at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard, would join us. From the beginning it was clear that, whatever form the project took, it would have to be minimally acceptable to the British, in other words it was inconceivable that the president of the US would take a position which was fundamentally condemning of, or directly or aggressively hostile to, his closest ally in the world. At the same time, it would have to place the political crisis in Northern Ireland firmly and openly for the first time since 1921 on the agenda of the foreign policy of the United States on an independent basis, hitherto an unimaginable development.
In essence Hume’s project envisaged that the president would commit to supporting a solution to the problem of Northern Ireland which would establish a form of government which would respect human rights and command widespread acceptance throughout both parts of the community (which was far from the reality in 1976/77) and, if that were achieved, the US would act to encourage job-creating investment for the region. Even more important than the precise substance of the proposal would be ending the US subservience to British policy on Northern Ireland which had obtained since 1921 and its replacement by an independent (of the UK) position by Washington.
It is important to recall the centrality of British-US relations to American foreign policy over the previous century. I had tried to summarise this reality in an interview with the filmmaker and author Maurice Fitzpatrick for his seminal book John Hume in America (Irish Academic Press, 2017): ‘By 1870 Britain’s position as the world’s only real superpower was beginning to be overtaken by the US, a disparity of power that continued apace. Rather than resort to war, which nearly happened in 1895 over Venezuela’s borders with British Guiana, Britain deliberately took the position of subservience to the world’s most dynamic State and it has never wavered from that stance. The US provided victory for Britain in two World Wars. In return Britain has been a reliable military ally to the US in most major conflicts ever since, most recently in Iraq, and a stalwart political supporter for the US in every multilateral forum. The US scrupulously avoided “interference” in internal British issues, notably in Anglo-Irish questions, despite agitation by Irish-American leaders in US cities and in Congress and despite repeated efforts of Irish nationalists in visits to America: Parnell, Pearse, de Valera among many others from 1880 to 1975.’
While O’Neill negotiated directly with the president, Senator Kennedy and his chief of staff, Carey Parker, dealt with Carter’s secretary of state (foreign minister) the veteran and powerful diplomat Cyrus Vance who, impelled by his own State Department (viewed by us as ‘more British than the British themselves’), the CIA, the Pentagon and at first by the National Security Adviser in the White House, Zbigniew Brzezinski, defending the British position of non-interference by the United States. At the same time British prime minister, Jim Callaghan, telephoned President Carter several times advising strongly that the US should hew to its traditional posture of strict ‘non-intervention’ (that is total support for British policy on Northern Ireland which effectively amounted to accepting unionist hegemony), while his son-in-law, Peter Jay, the eminent and gifted journalist, but now the British ambassador in Washington, weighed in with Carter and his White House on exactly the same lines. The US foreign policy establishment, notably the State Department and the CIA, were horrified at the idea that President Carter would move one inch away from the position of strict ‘non-interference’.
The first problem that presented itself to the Horsemen and their aides was to address the hostility systematically generated in London to any idea of the Horsemen having the right to express any view whatever about Northern Ireland. This was heralded in lurid headlines in British publications like the Sun, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, which quite absurdly and against a mountain of evidence to the contrary represented Kennedy in particular as well as Irish-Americans in general as emotional supporters of the violence of the Provisional IRA and repeatedly rehearsed the tragedy of Chappaquiddick. More ‘serious’ broadsheets like the London Times and the Daily Telegraph echoed these campaigns in slightly less jingoistic terms.
The Four Horsemen, O’Neill, Kennedy, Moynihan and Carey, all of whom I got to know in those months, were each individually passionately opposed to support from America for the IRA’s campaign of violence and each had made several strong statements to that effect, risking real loss of voting support from vocal supporters of the IRA campaign (sometimes those with the most insistently ‘Irish’ profiles) in their own States and cities. On St. Patrick’s Day 1977 for the first time, they issued a joint statement which was drafted by our group of chiefs of staff and included Hume and myself:
The world has looked with increasing concern in the past eight years on the continuing tragedy that afflicts the people of Northern Ireland. Each of us has tried to use our good offices to help see that the underlying injustices at the heart of Northern Ireland are ended, so that a just and peaceful settlement may be secured. It is evident to us, as it is to concerned people everywhere, that continued violence cannot assist the achievement of such a settlement, but can only exacerbate the wounds that divide the people of Northern Ireland. We therefore join together in this appeal, which we make in a spirit of compassion and concern for the suffering people in the troubled part of Ireland. We appeal to all those organizations engaged in violence to renounce their campaigns of death and destruction and return to the path of life and peace. And we appeal as well to our fellow Americans to embrace this goal of peace, and to renounce any action that promotes the current violence or provides support or encouragement for organizations engaged in violence.
This had a highly significant impact in the English language media across the world and particularly in the US. It also marked the public emergence of the ‘Four Horsemen’ as a powerful political lobby in Washington. It was even acknowledged and welcomed by some of the more serious British media, who inevitably could not in several cases resist condescendingly attributing this ‘change’ in the understanding of the Four Horsemen to patient British briefing or the like. Significantly, however, for the Hume project, it was welcomed by a clear statement from 10 Downing St. The British tabloids meanwhile continued their calumnies about Kennedy and by extension about all Irish-Americans. But an essential start in delivering Hume’s strategy had been made.
Our Minister for Foreign Affairs, Garret FitzGerald, and his remarkable wife, Joan, visited Washington to mark St Patrick’s Day 1977. The taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, had come the previous year as part of the select group of six countries chosen by the US (France, the UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Israel) to play a major role in its celebration of the bicentennial of US independence. In most ‘normal’ previous years the Irish ambassador would on the morning of St Patrick’s Day bring a Waterford Glass bowl filled with authentic sprigs of shamrock to a servants’ entrance to the White House, deliver the bowl by arrangement and depart. A brief press release in Dublin would record the transaction and Waterford Glass would publicise its vase. It could be said that the 1977 visit by our foreign minister to the White House began a process which has continued ever since, although it was raised to a much higher level in 1982 by an agreement between Tip O Neill and President Reagan, which was greatly facilitated by Ambassador Sean Donlon. From then on St. Patrick’s Day in Washington became a veritable political institution in itself.
The meeting at the White House with President Carter on the morning of St Patrick’s Day in 1977 was marred by two factors. A senior member of our minister’s retinue was inebriated and emitted the unmistakeable fumes of whiskey and was insisting on carrying the Waterford Glass bowl into the Oval Office, but a junior colleague, Sean Farrell, had the presence of mind to grab hold of it. This individual, like Paddy Donegan, the Minister for Defence in the previous year, was incapacitated uninterruptedly during the several days of FitzGerald’s visit and should have been excluded from every event in the programme. My friend the deputy national security adviser Robert Hunter, who was present, later told me that Brzezinski had commented to him that the scene reminded him of aspects of his own earlier life in Warsaw. Carter himself raised an eyebrow according to Hunter; he had of course been familiar with the behaviour of his brother Billy and it was well-known that his mother used to make her own whiskey and drink it on the stoop of her farmhouse in Plains, Georgia. President Carter’s wife Rosalynn, rather cruelly and unfairly dubbed ‘the iron magnolia’ by her critics, had famously banned all alcohol from the working areas of the White House, an unaccountable exception being made for Bailey’s Irish Cream.
The second problem arose from the fact that the Horsemen and their aides advised that it was too early to raise the details of the Hume project with Carter, as they felt that further detailed discussion between O’Neill and the president was necessary first. FitzGerald, himself a gifted diplomat of unusual sensitivity, managed this tricky problem and, without referring to any specific text, left Carter with a clear message that a statement from the White House calling in general for reconciliation in Northern Ireland would be enormously beneficial and of historic importance. One of FitzGerald’s talents could occasionally itself cause a problem: his mental processes and his speech were so rapid and his articulation so intricate that it could sometimes be difficult for his interlocutors or his audience to grasp the essence of his message. In this case the White House had to enquire of us through Hunter after the meeting ended, as to what his main points were: this gave FitzGerald the opportunity to ensure that the president got the full burden of his message.
On the other hand, inside the Four Horsemen’s camp it now became possible, with Hume’s agreement, to overcome the confusion caused by his earlier obsession about confidentiality. This was a relief for the Dublin-based team, not least for myself. FitzGerald was totally committed to the Hume-Kennedy project and confirmed this enthusiastically in separate exchanges with Tip O Neill, Ted Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Hugh Carey. On Jack Molloy’s proposal, supported by Sean Donlon, he confirmed to the Four Horsemen that I would be the operational representative of the Irish government in the negotiation of the final text.
I introduced the FitzGeralds at my home to the chiefs of staff who were based in Washington (Carey’s man David Burke could not join us from New York): Kirk O’Donnell for Tip O’Neill was the discreet though masterful leader of the speaker’s agenda for the House of Representatives which provided all its financial resources to the US Government, a powerful player in his own right. Carey Parker, Senator Kennedy’s long-time chief adviser, and widely viewed as the single most talented aide in the US Congress, had drafted all of Kennedy’s enormous legacy on US public health legislation. Tim Russert, Moynihan’s aide with grounded Irish-American working class roots in Buffalo, New York, was in some ways the ‘character’ of the group; his power of mimicry was uncanny and legendary and he practised it fearlessly and hilariously in front of Moynihan (who was its main object) and FitzGerald; he later became for fifteen years host of the most admired politics weekend programme on US TV, NBC’s Meet the Press.
By coincidence Ronan Fanning, the most distinguished historian of Anglo-Irish relations (and conflicts) of his generation, was fulfilling semesters of teaching and research duties as a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University on the American role in the history of Anglo-Irish relations. Nothing could have been more serendipitous. During several months at Georgetown, he was a colleague and friend of Henry Kissinger’s (Kissinger told him that the European foreign minister he most enjoyed arguing with was Garret FitzGerald). The FitzGeralds introduced Ronan to me and I soon realised that he was a scholar and master of realpolitik, especially in the field of Anglo-Irish relations: his masterpiece Fatal Path; British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922 (Faber and Faber, 2013) is the authoritative account of the evolution of the attitudes of British leadership to Irish political events North and South leading to independence and the partition of Ireland. I brought him into our sessions with the congressional chiefs of staff. His contributions on the contemporary and historical attitudes of the British establishment to Irish issues provided extremely valuable insights to our group including myself. Thus began one of the most fruitful and precious friendships of my life.
I also introduced Garret and Joan FitzGerald to Brzezinski’s deputy at the crucial National Security Agency in the White House, Robert Hunter, and his brilliant girlfriend, Shareen, a former member of the pre-revolutionary Iranian foreign service. Robert had inherited some Irish genes from a few centuries earlier but had no Irish nationalist background. He had been hired by the White House from Kennedy’s congressional team as an expert on East-West military and strategic relations (he was later US ambassador to NATO). Though he was first and foremost Carter’s and Brzezinski’s man, his own connection with the Kennedy world was undoubtedly helpful. We shared some private literary enthusiasms, notably for Joyce and Yeats as well as for Shakespeare and John Keats, and we indulged these by declaiming and carousing in sessions in the bars of Georgetown, notably the French bistro ‘Au Pied du Cochon’ where we sometimes closed the premises at a rather late hour.
Joan especially revelled in the slightly rarified social world of Georgetown where neighbours (senators, media personalities, writers and socialites) would happily wander in and out of each other’s houses, particularly at the cocktail hour.
Once drafting had begun for a possible statement by Carter, Bob Hunter found himself at the centre of vigorous tugs of war between Hume’s ambitious project fronted by the Four Horsemen, Hume and the Irish government and the resistance to it mounted by the US foreign policy establishment led by the State Department and the British government. I found myself at the ‘grunt’ level of this engagement and in constant creative combat with Robert.
The Four Horsemen presented the first draft of a statement by the President to the White House (that is Hunter). Hume and I contributed to this version which included elements which we knew would be rejected at this stage by the other side, that is the State Department and the British, for example the constitutional issue. I also had the benefit of inputs from John Hume, with whom I was in constant contact, from our minister, Garret FitzGerald, from my boss in Dublin, Sean Donlon, and from my wise ambassador, Jack Molloy. Ted Smyth, our press officer in New York (my old job), was a great help in the final days before Carter’s statement was issued. Over twenty versions of the text were exchanged back and forth over several months. On our side we held stubbornly to our central objective, that is that the US was taking a position independent of London for the first time on Northern Ireland. At one point, Hodding Carter, the deputy head of the State Department and one of America’s most esteemed diplomats, uttered his side’s version of a cri de coeur to his friend Ted Kennedy: ‘If all the parties were to conclude the US could play a useful role, we would naturally consider what we might do. However, none of the parties concerned has requested the US to take an active part. In the absence of such a request, the US Government is convinced that US intervention would be inappropriate and counter-productive.’
Many years later Jimmy Carter summed up the realpolitik drama at the centre of this tussle:
Well, the State Department was not in favour of what I did, as you may know. But I didn’t consult with them too thoroughly: I had a lot of confidence in Pat Moynihan, and Tip O’Neill was visiting me every day. Hugh Carey was very important to me as a politician, so was Ted Kennedy. So those four people, who had connections directly with Ireland, were good.’ (Speaking to Maurice Fitzpatrick for his film and book John Hume in America, p 65)
Along the way Peter Jay, the British ambassador in Washington, decided to face reality and to make the best of a difficult situation:
The British Government had reached the conclusion that the help and support of those four heavy-hitting Irish-American politicians in discouraging misguided people, or people anyway, from sending arms and money to support terrorism on the island of Ireland was a very important objective, an objective, an objective shared by the government in London and the government in Dublin. If it meant swallowing a bit of antique pride about having comments on the domestic affairs of the so-called UK, well that was a very modest price to pay for a very modest objective.
Speaker O’Neill told me afterwards that he was proud of his own role and of that of his colleagues in delivering the Carter Initiative. He described the negotiation as being as impressive as the famed campaigns of the Government of Israel in Washington. Coming from the Speaker, who operated at the absolute centre of all Washington power struggles, this was a significant acknowledgement.
The president’s full statement was issued on August 30th, 1977 and attracted relatively little notice at the time. The Irish media and Irish politicians, with few exceptions (notably Hume and FitzGerald) failed to see the true strategic and historic originality or value of the initiative: the fact that for the first time since partition the President of the United States took a positive position on Northern Ireland, independently of London. Its unprecedented essence, despite its polite disavowal of any intention to influence the process, was in its unmistakeable call for power-sharing: ‘We support the establishment of a form of government in Northern Ireland which will command widespread acceptance throughout both parts of the community and protects human rights and guarantee freedom from discrimination’. It became the template and original authority for all US subsequent ‘interventions’ on Northern Ireland, most notably President Reagan’s pressure on Margaret Thatcher to conclude the Anglo-Irish Agreement on Northern Ireland of 1985 with the Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, in which Sean Donlon played a central role. It played an important part in agreeing the Downing St. Declaration of 1993, guided intellectually by Sean Ó Huigínn, Ireland’s most influential and creative diplomat, whose profound contribution was resentfully acknowledged in the sobriquet assigned to him by Westminster tittle-tattle: ‘the Prince of Darkness’, which I painfully envied (Sean was subsequently Irish ambassador to the US). It final fruition was in the central and active role played by President Bill Clinton with both governments and the political parties in Northern Ireland in delivering the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 and in which the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Martin Mansergh, Tim Dalton and Dermot Gallagher played key roles for the Irish government, again with John Hume, who was accurately described by Senator George Mitchell, chairman of the talks leading to it, as ‘the founding father’ of that historic settlement in Anglo-Irish relations which finally brought an end to political violence in Northern Ireland. The Carter Initiative (attached) is one of the foundation documents of the Irish peace process and one of its vital assets; it profoundly transformed the basic power calculus of Anglo-Irish relations as epitomised in Margaret Thatcher’s tongue-in-cheek explanation to Lord McAlpine, the treasurer of the Conservative Party, for her motivation in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985: ‘The Americans made me do it.’
The Carter Statement of August 30th, 1977
Throughout our history, Americans have rightly recalled the contributions men and women from many countries have made to the development of the United States. Among the greatest contributions have been those have been those of the British and Irish people, Protestant and Catholic alike. We have close ties of friendship with both parts of Ireland and with Great Britain.
It is natural that Americans are deeply concerned about the continuing violence in Northern Ireland. We know the overwhelming majority of the people there reject the bomb and the bullet. 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 of Northern Ireland, as well as the Governments of Great Britain and Ireland can support. Violence cannot resolve Northern Ireland’s problems; it can only increase them and solves nothing.
We hope that all those engaged in violence will renounce this course and commit themselves to peaceful pursuit of legitimate goals. The path of reconciliation, cooperation and peace is the only course that can end the human suffering and lead to a better future for all the people of Northern Ireland. I ask all Americans to refrain from supporting with financial or other aid organizations whose involvement, direct or indirect, in this violence delays the day when the people of Northern Ireland can live and work together in harmony, free from fear. Federal law enforcement agencies will continue to apprehend and prosecute any who violate US laws in this regard.
US Government policy on the Northern Ireland issue has long been one of impartiality, and that is how it will remain. We support the establishment of a form of government in Northern Ireland which will command widespread acceptance throughout both parts of the community. However, we have no intention of telling the parties how this might be achieved. The only permanent solution will come from the people who live there. There are no solutions that outsiders can impose.
At the same time, the people of Northern Ireland should know that they have our complete support in their quest for a peaceful and just society. It is a tribute to Northern Ireland’s hard-working people that the area has continued to attract investment, despite the violence committed by a small minority. This is to be welcomed, since investment and other programmes to create jobs will assist in ensuring a healthy economy and combating unemployment.
It is still true that a peaceful settlement would contribute immeasurably to stability in Northern Ireland and so enhance the prospects for increased investment. In the event of such a settlement, the US Government would be prepared to join with others to see how additional job-creating investment could be encouraged, to the benefit of all the people of Northern Ireland.
I admire the many friends of Northern Ireland in this country who speak out for peace. Emotions run high on this subject, and the easiest course is not to stand up for reconciliation. I place myself firmly on the side of those who seek peace and reject violence in Northern Ireland.
6/1/2025
Michael Lillis was diplomatic adviser to the taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, in 1981 and one of the negotiators of the Anglo-Irish Agreement between 1983 and 1985. He was the first Irish joint secretary at the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in the ‘Bunker’ at Maryfield, Belfast from 1985 to ’87. Subsequently he was involved in aircraft leasing in Latin America and is co-author with Ronan Fanning of Scandal and Courage: the Lives of Eliza Lynch (1992).
