by Penn Rhodeen
There was also a substantial domestic political dimension: Although America’s pro-British policy had solid support throughout the institutions of American government, it had no significant constituency in the body politic. Simply stated, nobody much in late-twentieth-century America voted British, but there were some 40 million Americans who identified as Irish American and who could be open to voting Irish.
Both Morrison and O’Dowd understood the degree to which any peace process would have to be fundamentally a political one. It would be politicians—not academics, diplomats, or policy professionals, and not even all-knowing pundits—who would be the key to success. So it was in many respects a natural progression of the discussion when O’Dowd asked Morrison the question that would change everything: “What about your classmate Bill Clinton?”
Neither man could know it at the time, but with that question, the prospects for peace in Northern Ireland took a giant step forward.
What about Bill Clinton? He, Morrison, and Hillary Rodham had all been in the Yale Law School class of 1973. Clinton’s reputation had preceded him there: He was a Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas, very bright and politically savvy, who pretty clearly had already set his sights on becoming president. Even as a law student in his twenties, he made a powerful first impression: Morrison said that when he met Clinton, “I knew I had met somebody.”
Morrison hadn’t seen a great deal of Clinton since they left Yale, but he’d followed his career with interest. In addition to becoming governor of Arkansas, Clinton was a leader in the effort to move the Democratic party closer to the center, where he believed presidential elections were won. Clinton passed on the 1988 presidential campaign despite the encouragement of some party leaders who liked his chances; at that year’s Democratic convention, he was seen as a future star and was chosen to give the nominating speech for Michael Dukakis. But precisely what his future prospects were by the end of the convention was, to put it mildly, uncertain: His speech went on for so long that delegates started shouting at him, live on national television, to stop.
When Morrison and O’Dowd had their meeting, Clinton hadn’t yet announced his candidacy for president, but it was clear he was running. Morrison already knew that he would almost certainly support Clinton, but Northern Ireland had nothing to do with it until his visit to the Irish Voice office. O’Dowd already knew Clinton was his man: He wanted a candidate who would make a complete break with the American policy, and to some extent, he’d settled on Clinton by process of elimination. The candidate had to be a Democrat, because George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker were in accord with the traditional policy: British all the way. Clinton was associated with the kind of bold but politically astute policy initiatives reminiscent of John F. Kennedy. Neither of the other leading candidates were seen that way: Former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas was a sober-sided technocratic centrist, and former California governor Jerry Brown was still saddled with his long-standing image as the far-out Governor Moonbeam. So although in early 1991 Clinton still seemed like a longshot, for O’Dowd and other Irish American activists, he was the horse to bet on. O’Dowd and Morrison both knew how seriously Clinton took politics and campaigning, and they knew that a centrist Southerner probably stood the best chance of getting elected.
Morrison liked O’Dowd’s conviction that Clinton could win, but his experience and realism told him it was probably pie in the sky. The odds of Clinton defeating a sitting president were very long indeed: After driving Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait, Bush would enter the election year with approval ratings of 90 percent or more. But despite the odds, Morrison agreed that Clinton was the most promising candidate for a new Northern Ireland policy.
So Morrison and O’Dowd combined their strengths—O’Dowd’s vision, pulpit, and contacts, along with Morrison’s access to Clinton, his own newfound stature in Ireland, and his deep political insight— and made a plan. They would back Clinton and work to get him to commit to a new American approach that would help end the centuries of violent strife in Ireland. They would make sure Clinton was clued in to the political benefits of a policy that millions of Irish Americans would enthusiastically support, and they would marshal strong political and financial support for his campaign among the Irish American community.
There was good reason to believe Clinton would be receptive to all of this: A major goal of his campaign would be to reclaim the so-called Reagan Democrats—and a great many of them were Irish Americans.
When Morrison left O’Dowd’s office on that winter’s day, he was in a very different place than when he went in:
I wanted to relate my newfound fame in the Irish American community to something constructive about what was starting to happen in Northern Ireland. I was thinking in terms of some kind of niche project for myself, not, “Let’s go find ourselves a presidential candidate.” It was Niall who tied the two of them together, making an obvious connection that I had not made. It was Niall thinking very big thoughts about what we could do.
In the ensuing months, as Morrison worked to develop his new legal practice and regain his economic footing, he and O’Dowd began to talk up and gauge support for Clinton as the most promising candidate for Irish Americans who wanted America’s policy toward Northern Ireland changed. Then it would be Morrison’s job to reconnect with his old classmate and learn something about what, if anything, the Arkansas governor knew or thought about the centuries of Irish warfare and the present-day Troubles.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Troubles: 800 Years in the Making
Northern Ireland became a distinct entity when Ireland was partitioned by the British parliament in 1920. At the time it had a roughly two-thirds Protestant majority and a one-third Catholic minority. In 1991, as Bruce Morrison was planning his approach to Bill Clinton, the Protestant majority was politically divided into unionists, who largely asserted their power through politics and control of civil institutions, and loyalists, who were more willing to take to the streets. The Catholics were for the most part divided into nationalists, who wanted a nonviolent unification of Ireland, and republicans, who were generally more willing to support the armed struggle being waged by the IRA.
The three decades of armed conflict that came to be known as the Troubles began in 1968. It didn’t start with violence. In the mid-sixties, Catholics, inspired in large part by the civil rights movement in the United States, began protesting the pervasive discrimination being perpetrated against them by the unionist state in virtually all aspects of life—from voting rights to employment to housing to policing—with marches and other nonviolent demonstrations. Their efforts intensified with the formation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967.
The British government and the ruling unionists in Northern Ireland were unwilling to seriously address the Catholics’ grievances. Northern Ireland Premier Terence O’Neill attempted some conciliatory gestures, but those provoked a backlash from his unionist critics. Brutal police suppression of demonstrations followed. Soon enough, a new version of the Irish Republican Army materialized and in short order it took on a fighting role, which was met by a revival of several loyalist paramilitaries. The awful violence of the Troubles was under way. In 1969, London sent in the British army to try to gain control of the situation, but the violence and killing escalated alarmingly.
The ongoing bloody conflict between the IRA, loyalist paramilitary forces, the RUC—the only armed police force in the UK or Ireland—and the British army made Northern Ireland a place of death and destruction on a scale almost unimaginable to Americans. Sniper fire, calculated assassinations, and bombings could come any place at any time. Over the thirty years of the Troubles, 3,200 people were killed in Northern Ireland—a small place with a population of a little over 1,600,000. An equivalent death toll in the United States would be around 500,000, an unimaginable rate even after 9/11.
The Troubles were the latest iteration of a course of warfare between the Irish and the Bri
tish that began back in 1169, when the Anglo-Normans—Englishmen since 1066—invaded Ireland. The English king, Henry II, soon worried that his occupying knights might seek their own independence from him by making alliances with local chieftains. Henry went to Ireland in 1172 to reassert his own authority, and the Irish, despite their own frequent internal divisions, fought back. The cycle of English colonization, with its demeaning and dehumanizing treatment of the Irish, and Irish uprising and retaliation, would continue for the next three centuries.
It didn’t begin as a religious conflict. In the twelfth century the English and the Irish were Catholic, although some English relished portraying Irish Catholicism as degenerate. It would be another 350 years of on-and-off fighting before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the cathedral door and Protestantism came into being. The idea of a church that wasn’t under the control of the Pope appealed greatly to Henry VIII, that king of many marriages, and he established the Church of England with himself in charge. At last this Henry would be able to get a divorce when he needed one.
The fighting took on the religious dimension by which it is so often described from 1536 when Henry, in an effort to extend English control and to replace the Catholic Church with a Protestant Church of Ireland headed by himself, invaded Ireland. Over the next 300 years, it suited most British leaders to cast the conflict in religious terms, which made it easier to dismiss the Irish as irrational, impossible, and inferior and to justify the persecution and rank discrimination that far in the future would trigger the Troubles.
In 1603, King James VI of Scotland was also crowned James I of England. As King of England, he also became King of Ireland, and his strategy for gaining greater control over that difficult land was to launch the Plantation of Ulster, with Scottish and English settlers brought in to displace the Irish. James’s grand plan was under way by 1610, and it greatly increased the Protestant population in the north of Ireland. The privileged position granted to the newly arrived Scots and English fueled Irish anger and resentment that has lasted for centuries. In its time it contributed mightily to the northern Catholic rebellion of 1641. That rebellion, accompanied by suitably exaggerated tales of Catholic atrocities against colonists that were already terrible enough, set off the conflict that ultimately brought Oliver Cromwell to Ireland in 1649. His arrival would bring the worst oppression of the Irish by the English yet.
Cromwell had taken power in England in the wake of his battlefield victories in the first English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles I early in 1649, Cromwell turned his attention to Ireland, leading an overwhelming invasion force of 20,000 that left a trail of slaughter and blood that seared itself onto the Irish Catholic mind. By the time Cromwell was done, enormous numbers of Catholics had been killed and some had been transported to the West Indies as slaves. Many who managed to survive faced confiscation of their lands and banishment to the barren lands of western Ireland. To this day, Cromwell represents the epitome of British oppression and brutality to the Irish.
In 1690, nearly 300 years before the Troubles, the armies of William III, Dutch husband of the Protestant Queen Mary, and the forces of the ousted James II, the last Catholic king of Great Britain, faced each other across the River Boyne, north of Dublin. James was attempting to retake the throne with the support of French and Irish allies but was soundly defeated. William’s victory ensured that Great Britain would never again have a Catholic sovereign. Every July 12, members of the Orange Order, formed in 1795 and named after William’s roots in the Dutch House of Orange, along with many others in the unionist and loyalist communities, celebrate his victory in the Battle of the Boyne. Parades through Catholic neighborhoods by members of the order, frequently wearing bowler hats, dark suits, and orange sashes, accompanied by fife and drum bands and attracting many other supporters, have been a source of friction and worse between the province’s two populations.
In the years following James’s defeat, British authorities intensified their hold on Ireland, which increasingly left the Irish as no more than tenants or landless laborers in their own land, subjected to ever greater state-imposed or -sanctioned discrimination. But a century later, the winds of change upending Europe and fueling the American Revolution blew into Ireland, principally through United Irishmen led by Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant lawyer who sought to lead a united Irish force—Catholics and Protestants together—to fight for independence from Britain. The uprising claimed tens of thousands of lives and ended in catastrophic failure. Civilian fighters with little or no training, armed with pikes and far too few guns—and those guns were primitive—were no match for seasoned British troops with plenty of the best guns and artillery. Wolfe Tone was sentenced to be hanged, but he cut his own throat and died before the hangman could get to him. His vision and daring would long inspire those willing to fight for an independent Ireland.
The British further solidified their control over Ireland in 1801 with the Act of Union, which created the United Kingdom by joining Ireland to Great Britain, the island nation made up of England, Scotland, and Wales. Episodes of futile Irish rebellion followed in the early part of the century. In the 1820s, Daniel O’Connell emerged as an effective leader of the Irish Catholics, who soon became an organized political force of great size. They made themselves felt through massive marches and demonstrations. While O’Connell himself denounced violence, the huge numbers and sheer physical presence of his supporters sent a powerful and worrisome message to the British.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the destruction of the potato crop—the great staple of the Irish diet—by a fungus led to years of starvation from 1845 to 1852 that utterly transformed Ireland. While there was other food grown in Ireland during the Potato Famine, much of it for export, it wasn’t available to the poor. The short-term result was a million deaths from starvation and disease. Although noteworthy private charity did come from Britain and the United States, the official British response to the catastrophe was largely governed by the principles of “political economy,” which asserted that providing food for the starving would promote dependency, worsen their character, and destabilize society. Although arguments still persist about the complexities of food supply issues, the spectacle of such widespread starvation in the face of extensive food exports fueled an intense anti-British bitterness that can still be felt in Ireland to this day.
The catastrophe has been called the Great Famine or the Great Hunger, but the transfer of so much food to Britain in a time of such widespread starvation in Ireland leads many to believe that calling it the Great Starvation would be more accurate. Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said as much in Man and Superman with this exchange:
Malone: Me father died of starvation in Ireland in the black ‘47. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
Violet: The Famine?
Malone: No, the Starvation. When a country is full o’ food, and exporting it, there can be no famine.
When the disaster was done, Ireland was a profoundly changed land. The million deaths and the emigration of some 2 million more by 1860 constituted overwhelming losses from a population of only 8 million.
In the United States, Catholic Irish America was becoming a powerful political force, as well as a bedrock of support for Irish independence, principally through the militant Fenian Brotherhood, which in 1866 invaded Canada—at that time, still a British colony—to challenge British control of Ireland. An attempted uprising in Ireland in the following year failed, but the die was cast: Ireland would continue fighting to be free of British control, and Catholic Irish American money would help.
In the fifty years before the violent uprisings that would lead to a partitioned Ireland, the Irish nationalists focused on two issues, with the great Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell at the center of both. The first issue was land reform—fairer treatment and a stake in the land for Irish tenants. The second was Home Rule. The goal of Home Rule was to create greater political autonomy for the Irish, which could lead to su
bstantial independence over time. Home Rule provoked strong resistance from the majority of Protestants in the north who wanted to remain an integral part of the United Kingdom, and they consistently opposed the various acts proposed. When the British did pass the third Home Rule Bill in 1912, Protestant leader Edward Carson declared that Ulster—or at least the six counties that were to become Northern Ireland—would remain part of the United Kingdom. By the time the act was to take effect in 1914, battle lines had been drawn between the unionist Ulster Volunteer Force and the republican Irish Volunteers.
The start of World War I in August 1914 caused the British to suspend the Home Rule Act until the end of the war, or for one year, whichever would be longer. But the war didn’t end quickly, as the British had expected, and in 1916 armed Irish uprisings seized center stage.
The battle for Irish independence began with the Easter Rising. A small group of Irish republican radicals, supported by the Irish Citizen Army, a working-class force of meager proportions, planned an action in Dublin during Eastertime. They hoped to surprise the British, who were focused on the war with Germany. Many of the rebels realized that their insurrection was almost certainly doomed to failure, but Padraig Pearse, one of the main leaders, argued that it would be an inspirational “blood cleansing.” The selection of Easter as the time for the rising was no coincidence; Pearse believed that their sacrifice would gain the sympathy of the wider world and inspire a new generation in Ireland.