The Decision to Get Involved

Many Irish-Americans displayed their support for Candidate Clinton in 1992 by wearing campaign buttons.

As a Presidential Candidate, Governor Bill Clinton first announced his intention to help promote peace in Northern Ireland at a 1992 Irish-American Democratic Candidates Forum. Clinton promised that, if elected, he would appoint a special envoy to assist the British and Irish governments’ stalled efforts to end the “Troubles”: a complex ethno-nationalist conflict between Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities marked by economic stagnation, human rights abuses, and terrorism.  The “Troubles” modern origins lay in the Catholic civil rights movement of the late 1960s, but its roots are long, deep, and centuries old.

In a widely circulated follow-up letter to prominent Irish-American Congressman Bruce Morrison, Governor Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to appointing a special envoy for Northern Ireland.

A map of the ancient Irish province of Ulster gifted to President Clinton. Modern Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, consists of the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone.

Northern Ireland is the smallest province of the United Kingdom, both in size and population: less than two million people live there. In 1992, approximately 55%  of residents were Protestant and 45% Catholic. “Ulster” is the ancient name for most of the counties making up this region.

At the time of President Clinton’s inauguration in 1993, there were five major political parties in Northern Ireland: the long dominant Protestant-majority Ulster Unionist Party; the militantly Loyalist Democratic Unionist Party led by Rev. Ian Paisley; the non-sectarian centrist Alliance Party; the Catholic-majority Social Democratic & Labor Party cofounded by John Hume; and Sinn Féin, the party associated with the Irish Republican Army.

Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams

While leaders from each party made important contributions to the peace process, one, often polarizing, figure performed an outsized role:  Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin. Born in West Belfast in 1948, Mr. Adams was elected the party’s leader in 1983 after the hunger strike protests by jailed members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, otherwise known as the IRA.  In this capacity, Adams became the controversial face of Irish Republicanism. Although Adams has always vehemently denied that he served in the command structure of the IRA, Sinn Féin under his leadership often defended IRA terrorism as “armed struggle.” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s antipathy to Adams was such that, in 1988, she had his voice banned from all British news broadcasts. The ban was still in force when President Clinton came into office. [More information concerning the  difference between the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA]

Yet bringing Gerry Adams ‘in from the cold’ became extremely important to the Clinton Administration’s strategy for achieving peace in Northern Ireland. To this end, two questions dominated the Clinton Administration’s early efforts to end the "Troubles”: Would it kickstart the peace process to grant Mr. Adams a visa to enter the United States? Could the White House and sympathetic Irish-American leaders persuade Adams to use his position to create the conditions for a ceasefire and multiparty negotiations?

After a year of publicly rejecting Mr. Adams' visa requests, and against the strong objections of both the British government and the U.S. State Department, the President finally decided to let Adams visit the United States. It would be the first of several trips. As President Clinton explained in his autobiography:

“[The visa] would boost Adams’s leverage within Sinn Féin and the IRA, while increasing American influence with him. That was important because unless the IRA renounced violence and Sinn Féin became a part of the peace process, the Irish problem could not be solved.” (580)

When Mr. Adams spoke at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel a few days later, he informed a hall packed with New York City’s Irish-American political leaders that, under the right conditions, Sinn Féin was prepared to support a ceasefire in Northern Ireland.