Bill Clinton’s St. Patrick’s Day diplomacy

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, I have distinct memories of how the seemingly ceremonial events and Irish festivities of the season were utilized by President Clinton to shape and reach a peace agreement ending centuries of warfare and strife on the island of Ireland. 

Beginning in the 1980s, President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) began the tradition of the Speaker’s St. Patrick’s Day Luncheon, which featured the House speaker hosting the president and the Irish prime minister, or taoiseach, at a gala event in the House Rayburn Room — replete with green ties, Irish jokes and Irish musicians and attended by Irish-American senators, members of Congress and the occasional celebrity. The Speaker’s Lunch would be the same day as a White House ceremony where the Irish prime minister presented the U.S. president with an Irish Crystal bowl filled with shamrocks.

The stated purpose of these joyful events was to demonstrate Washington-Dublin solidarity on reaching a peaceful resolution of the struggle raging in Northern Ireland, the six-county statelet then under British rule. The unstated purpose was to diminish any evidence of support by Irish-Americans who believed that proponents of armed resistance to continued British presence had to be part of any negotiated peace.

The struggles in Ireland against British rule had raged for centuries. The 1916 Easter Rebellion brought independence to 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties which became the Irish Republic. Six northern counties remained part of Great Britain and, over the years, saw systematic discrimination against the Catholic population. Peaceful demonstrations for civil rights in the late 1960s were met by violent resistance from loyalist pro-British paramilitaries, which in turn led to the reemergence of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to defend the Catholic community and then to the reintroduction of British troops. 

And so the violence raged for more than two decades, marked by tragedies such as Bloody Sunday, the deaths of IRA hunger strikers in prison and the murder of countless innocent Catholics and Protestants. For political and diplomatic reasons, neither the Irish nor the British governments would give any legitimacy to the IRA or its political arm, Sinn Fein (“Ourselves Alone”) even though Sinn Fein had the support of a solid majority of the North’s Catholic community.

Taking office in 1993, Clinton saw that America was uniquely positioned to be the honest broker to resolve this otherwise interminable struggle. His first action was to grant a visa to Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams in 1994. This took real guts and was fiercely opposed by the British government and by our own State Department.

Then, in March 1995, Clinton upped the ante by inviting Adams to a St. Patrick’s Day reception at the White House, which forced a reluctant House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to invite Adams to the Speaker’s Lunch, causing paroxysms of British outrage. But this intervention broke the political logjam and brought about real negotiations with all parties to the conflict, including the British and Irish governments and all political parties in the North. Clinton even traveled to the hard, war-torn streets of Belfast and Derry to demonstrate American commitment, being the first sitting U.S. president to visit Northern Ireland. (I was proud to join the president on that historic mission.) 

When there were breakdowns in the talks, Clinton would use his good offices to get the process back on track — never more so than during the St. Patrick’s Day events, when he would persuade and cajole the various political leaders, government officials and diplomats, both at public events and in sustained private meetings at the White House. As one Irish official told me at the time: “Sometimes I think Bill Clinton understands the Irish better than we understand ourselves!”

Clinton was aided immeasurably by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, two leaders of courage and daring, and by Gerry Adams, who convinced the IRA to go the political route. This led to the historic Good Friday Agreement in 1998 which was reached after months of intense negotiations and final, all-night engagement between the parties in Belfast and the White House. 

Centuries of armed struggle had ceased. Political institutions which protect the rights and aspirations of all were put in place and have lasted almost a quarter-century despite various threats and crises, including Brexit. 

Hopefully the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement will continue far into the future, and violence will never return to the Island of Ireland. That is the lasting legacy of Bill Clinton’s St. Patrick’s Day diplomacy.

Peter King retired in January as the U.S. representative of New York’s 2nd Congressional District. He served 28 years in Congress, including as chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.