Bill & Ted's Irish Misadventure

The Clinton administration's meddling has put Ireland on the road to becoming another Bosnia. But it's not too late to change.

Michael McMenamin from the August/September 1996 issue

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John Hume, whose initiative with Adams was another casualty of the Canary Wharf bomb, no longer has the kind of influence over the Irish government's policy toward Northern Ireland that he once did. On the other hand, the reputation and influence of the Ulster Unionist Party leader, David Trimble, is on the rise. He has forged a temporary unity among the two major Unionist parties. His agreement to all-party talks before decommissioning is evidence of his political strength, and it is only from strength that compromises can be made. Moreover, unlike his predecessors, he is every bit as articulate as Gerry Adams in justifying his side's positions. It's still not clear whether he has the stature and generosity of spirit to move beyond his militant Orange background to a new Northern Ireland where Catholics have power in proportion to their electoral strength. As always in this troubled land, the negative signs are still there as well. The May 30 special election provided a number of them. Sinn Fein gathered 15 percent of the vote, a record high for the IRA's political wing. And it did so at the expense of Hume's SDLP. What went unnoticed in the United States however, was that Sinn Fein's Protestant physical force counterparts--the political wings of the Protestant paramilitaries, the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association--polled 6 percent of the vote. That means 21 percent of the vote in Northern Ireland supported the political terrorists on one side or the other. Add to that an increased vote for the militant Rev. Ian Paisley--at the expense of David Trimble--and you have a volatile mixture. Forty percent of the voters now back the extremists on both sides.

The IRA still holds the match, and Gerry Adams has made no public appeal that they put it down. Indeed, in the run-up to the special election, the IRA carried out a "dummy run" bomb attack on a security base in Belfast as if to reinforce the message on a defaced Sinn Fein campaign poster where "Vote Sinn Fein for Peace" had been altered to read "Vote Sinn Fein--or else." Adams used the election results to again demand a seat at the all- party talks without a new IRA cease-fire, a position supported by the Unionist paramilitaries who want to keep their own violent options open. In response, SDLP M.P. Joe Herndon, who knocked Adams out of his seat in the British Parliament in 1992, unexpectedly denounced Sinn Fein as "fascist" and "sectarian." Meanwhile, Clinton maintained his silence.

The best thing the United States can do is to follow the policy enunciated by Ronald Reagan when he addressed the Irish Parliament in 1984. He offered America's "good will and support to Ireland" before adding that the United States "must not and will not interfere in Irish matters." Good advice from a man with far deeper Irish ancestry than the tenuous links recently discovered by Bill Clinton and Al Gore. The United States has no strategic national interest at stake in Northern Ireland. It never did. And it should strictly stay out of any matters involving Northern Ireland unless and until both the Irish and British governments seek U.S. participation. In the meantime, the U.S. government should close any back channel it may still have with Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein, and the IRA. If the political wing of the IRA wants its voice heard, let it come through Dublin and Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring, not Washington, D.C., and Nancy Soderberg.

There is something else the Clinton administration can do: It can admit its mistake. A window of opportunity exists for it to do so. While all-party talks formally started on June 10, serious discussions weren't expected until later in the summer. Neither was a new IRA cease-fire. The administration ought to tell the Irish and the British that, at a time and place of their choosing, the U.S. government will formally announce that its policy of the past two years was based on a mistaken trust in the good faith of the IRA. Henceforth, the United States will support the British and Irish governments in setting stringent conditions for allowing Sinn Fein to participate in the all-party talks, including a) Sinn Fein's unequivocal renunciation of violence for political ends; b) a declaration by the IRA's ruling army council that any new cease-fire is permanent; and c) an agreement by the IRA, along with the Protestant paramilitaries, to give up 10 percent of their weapons before participating in decommissioning talks, to be conducted at the same time as the talks on political issues.

If the United States does that with the full backing of both the Irish and British governments, it may well be enough to persuade the Ulster Protestants to take the real risks that making peace will entail. If the Clinton administration can't bring itself to do this--and, in an election year, it probably cannot admit having made a mistake of this magnitude--then it ought to do the next best thing: nothing.