by Penn Rhodeen
British interception off the Irish coast of a German arms shipment bound for the rebels dealt a serious blow to their plans. But the rising’s leaders decided to proceed anyway, and they did indeed catch the British by surprise. They seized and held the General Post Office and several other public buildings in Dublin and proclaimed the Irish Republic. Despite having no chance of prevailing, they held out for nearly a week before being overwhelmed by British reinforcements. Their leaders, Pearse and James Connolly, a longtime labor leader who had worked for years in the United States, were captured and executed along with fourteen other rebels. The execution of Connolly, who had been shot in the fighting and had to be brought out on a stretcher and tied to a chair to face the firing squad, has resonated through republican generations.
The rebels were routed, but they won the propaganda battle. Their signature document, the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, remains, despite breaches in the observance, an iconic assertion of the fundamental principles of an Irish right to independence and of the right of the Irish people to social justice.
The bold and doomed Irish action in 1916—their blood sacrifice— and the extraordinarily harsh and inept British response to it led the Sinn Féin party under the leadership of Éamon de Valera, the senior surviving leader of 1916, to a resounding victory in the 1918 general election. When the British refused to recognize the electoral verdict, the Irish Republican Army, inspired above all by Michael Collins and relying heavily on Irish American support, fought the Irish War of Independence, a devastatingly effective guerrilla campaign against the mighty British, from 1919 until 1921. The war ended with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, a compromise that established the Irish Free State, subject to the right of six northern counties to remain part of the UK.
Collins favored the treaty compromise with reluctance, but de Valera was vehemently opposed to it. He wanted a completely independent Republic with no partition of the island, although he was prepared to consider special provisions for the six counties. The split led in 1922 to the Irish Civil War. Although Collins, now head of the Provisional Government and Commander-in-Chief of the National Army, soon lost his life in an ambush, pro-treaty forces prevailed and Ireland was partitioned into a twenty-six-county Free State and a six-county Northern Ireland. The partition, followed by nearly fifty years of unrelenting discrimination against the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, set the course to the Troubles.
De Valera, the last of the legendary Irish republican leaders standing after Collins’s death and the Easter Rising executions, ultimately held high office in the twenty-six-county Ireland in all of its iterations. In 1932 he became president of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, and in 1937 he became Taoiseach (the Irish word for chieftain, the title given to the prime minister) of Eire, a republic in all but name. The fully independent Republic of Ireland was inaugurated in 1949 and de Valera served as its president from 1959 until 1973.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Northern Ireland saw occasional violent flare-ups, but for the most part its Catholic population suffered the discrimination to which it was subjected quietly, until the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s began, followed all too soon by the Troubles.
Bruce Morrison would later lament the inevitability of it all, which he felt was deeply rooted in British colonial history: “The British found a way to turn the opportunity for peaceful change offered by the civil rights movement into an armed struggle. They stamped out conflict in the form of marches and ultimately got themselves conflict in the form of bombs and bullets.”
The violence of the Troubles began in earnest in 1969 and led, in 1972, to the British imposition of direct rule from London over the entire province, shortly after the Bloody Sunday killings by British paratroopers in Derry/Londonderry.
The warfare proceeded with unrelenting brutality and high-visibility attacks by the IRA, including the 1979 killing of Lord Mountbatten, Queen Elizabeth’s beloved cousin Dickie, by blowing up his boat off Sligo in northwest Ireland. His grandson Nicholas, Baroness Brabourne, and Paul Maxwell, a local boy working on the boat, also died.
Things took a dramatic turn as the 1980s began. The British had previously ruled that captured IRA fighters would be given Special Category Status in prison, allowing them rights similar to POWs, such as being able to associate freely with other prisoners and not having to do prison work. But in 1976 a new secretary of state for Northern Ireland rescinded that status. When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, she maintained the rescission, declaring, “Crime is crime is crime.” In 1980, prisoners began a series of hunger strikes to demand the restoration of Special Category Status. The strikes would leave ten people dead and engage the attention, and often sympathy, of Irish America and much of the world.
The first hunger striker to die was Bobby Sands, who had been elected to the British Parliament at Westminster while in prison. Niall O’Dowd has written that this was his personal watershed with respect to the conflict. Bruce Morrison later said, “Maggie Thatcher had a particularly nasty and negative approach. She was the person who reneged on the deal to save the hunger strikers, so she is looked upon as right up there with Cromwell in Irish history.” In 1984 the IRA came very close to assassinating Thatcher by bombing her hotel in Brighton during a Conservative Party conference.
As the fighting in Northern Ireland raged on, it was vicious and often careless. Innocent civilians were regularly killed because of mistaken identity, bungled intelligence, badly timed bombs, or simply the terrible luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The ongoing violence created a pervasive atmosphere of fear and deep discouragement, which drained entire populations of hope. For thirty years, people had to wonder when and where the next explosion, ambush, or revenge killing would come. They knew it seldom mattered if the victims were actually involved in the fighting. It was a terrible atmosphere in which to try to make a life and raise children. It wasn’t surprising that many in Ireland, including prominent academics, were certain the conflict would grind on indefinitely and suggested that acceptance might be the most realistic course—provided that the death toll wasn’t too awful.
It was in the midst of all of this misery that the idea of resolving the conflict peacefully—however implausible that seemed—began to take hold. In 1976 two women from Northern Ireland, Mairéad Corrigan and Betty Williams, won the Nobel Peace Prize for their attempts to start a grassroots peace movement. In 1985, the Anglo-Irish Agreement established a role for the Republic in the affairs of the north, while also affirming the principle of consent under which Northern Ireland would leave the UK and join the Republic only upon the approval of the majority of its people. That agreement led to a firestorm of unionist criticism of Margaret Thatcher, who overcompensated with an even harsher anti-republican stance.
In 1986, Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, who was determined to persuade the IRA to pursue its goals through politics instead of military action, led his party to develop an effective political alternative to stand alongside its longtime support for the armed struggle. The strategy became known as “the Armalite [a rifle emblematic of IRA weaponry] in one hand and the ballot box in the other.” While many were suspicious that it was all a ploy to put the unionists and the British off their guard, moderate nationalist leader John Hume took the initiative seriously and in 1988 opened a secret dialogue with Adams, in which the two leaders of the Catholic minority explored ways of moving ahead peacefully.
In early 1992 Albert Reynolds became Taoiseach of Ireland. Before entering politics he had a colorful and successful career as a dance hall impresario and pet food magnate. Although no one expected it, the businessman-turned-politician quickly made it clear that he intended to do everything he could to help resolve the conflict in the north. He immediately sought to establish a positive relationship with British prime minister John Major, who had replaced Margaret Thatcher two years earlier, and enlist him in the search for a resolution. Each man’s overlapping service as his count
ry’s finance minister gave the pair a head start that the canny Reynolds intended exploit to the hilt. With the two prime ministers’ relationship coalescing around a shared willingness to find a solution to the strife, the building blocks for what came to be known as the Irish Peace Process were in place.
Bruce Morrison’s message to candidate Bill Clinton, starting in late 1991, was that there would be a great place for the United States in these promising developments in Northern Ireland if the new president radically changed America’s long-standing policy of regarding the Troubles as an internal British matter, with no place for an independent American role. Morrison also spelled out for his old friend the valuable benefits that could come his way—as a politician chasing votes, as a statesman, and as an idealist trying to do some good in the world—if he took that leap.
CHAPTER FIVE
Getting the Candidate On Board
Bruce Morrison didn’t initiate direct contact with Bill Clinton until they met at a fund-raiser in Westport, Connecticut, in the fall of 1991. They reconnected warmly and, during their conversation, Morrison brought up the issue of Northern Ireland. He also caught a glimpse of the crazy chase Clinton was on: From Westport he’d go straight to the airport and fly to Southern California and the next fundraiser. The competition for his attention was already intense, and Morrison knew that his follow-up would have to be catch-as-catch-can.
In January of 1992, as the primary season was getting under way, Morrison was off on another journey to Northern Ireland as part of a delegation sent by Mercy College, which was working to establish a management training program there. College officials invited Morrison in hopes that his involvement would help secure grants for the project. The trip would bring him into close contact with the Protestant community, something he welcomed. Typically, American politicians traveling to Northern Ireland were playing to the Catholic voters back home and had no reason to spend time with Protestants, but Morrison felt it was important to get to know unionists and loyalists as well, in order to understand who they were and how they saw things. It was clear to him that for the fighting to end, both populations of Northern Ireland would need to reach agreement, and that Americans trying to help would have to know how to connect with everyone.
A unionist politician with whom Morrison connected on that trip was Belfast councilor Chris McGimpsey, whose cousin in the United States had organized the trip. McGimpsey, a member of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the major Protestant party, found Morrison to be surprisingly capable and open-minded:
Bruce Morrison was sharp intellectually. He had a pretty good grasp of the Irish situation even then. I had met a number of Americans in those days, and often they already had their minds made up. He didn’t fall under that category at all. He was factfinding, and he was good at it. He Hoovered up the facts and he asked sharp questions. You could see that he was keen to understand both sides.
For his part, Morrison appreciated McGimpsey’s own open-mindedness and his willingness to be seen with an American known to be on good terms with Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, something “not standard fare,” as Morrison says.
Although Morrison’s encounter with McGimpsey would later prove to be the most important one of the trip, there was another that imprinted itself indelibly on his memory. That happened at a loyalist housing estate called Glencairn—“your typical housing project kind of environment, pretty desolate,” as Morrison describes it—with a leader “whose role was never fully described. He probably wasn’t that old, but he was quite grizzled and had few teeth. He was smoking a cigarette, sitting there talking to us mostly about grievances they had with the British and how the British were catering to the Catholics. But my strongest image is the way the ash on his cigarette kept getting longer and longer . . . and longer. I don’t remember ever seeing it fall.” It would be years before he saw the man again.
Morrison’s contact with both populations in Northern Ireland on that visit gave him a fundamentally new understanding of the conflict: Everyone was awash in grievances, especially against the British, and each group thought Britain was siding with the other. Morrison had already known how the nationalists and the republicans felt about the British, but he was surprised to learn that unionists and loyalists were convinced the British were actually favoring the Catholics. As far as many of them were concerned, the last time the British had really been on their side was in 1690, at the Battle of the Boyne.
When his visit to the north was done, Morrison spent some time in Dublin, where Irish president Mary Robinson invited him to lunch. In Ireland, the president is like the Queen: the head of state, staying above politics and keeping her opinions to herself. Robinson told Morrison that she had not scheduled a formal lunch because, “I thought an informal conversation would be more interesting.” She spoke with a slight tone of apology for the absence of the pomp that many dignitaries expected of her, but she had correctly judged that Morrison couldn’t have cared less about all of that. During the small gathering—Morrison and his wife met with Robinson, her husband, and a staff member—she spoke candidly not as president of Ireland but as the human rights lawyer she was, foreshadowing her willingness and ability, through skillful communication in the language of political symbolism rather than explicit words, to get involved in the Northern Ireland peace effort in a way unprecedented for an Irish president.
The American ambassador to Ireland, Richard A. Moore, also invited Morrison to lunch, but that one didn’t go so well. During the visit, something inspired Morrison to make a snide comment about then vice president Dan Quayle, already the butt of countless jokes. The ambassador’s wife recoiled and the atmosphere chilled dramatically. As Morrison learned later, the ambassador was a close personal friend and former neighbor of George H. W. Bush, the president who had chosen Quayle as his running mate. Morrison was unhappy with himself for having been an ungracious guest. It was a thoughtless faux pas that evoked for him his mother’s constant reminders to watch his tongue. But it was a useful lesson for someone about to become more deeply involved in Ireland, a land where a careless word could lead to mortal danger.
An embassy event that went far better involved the new Morrison Visas. Issuance had started in October of 1991, and the embassy staff arranged for Morrison to personally hand out a number of them to recipients who had made their way through the months-long process that involved an application, a lottery, more paperwork, a personal interview, and finally an appearance to collect the visa. The gratitude of those receiving their visas from him moved Morrison deeply.
Shortly after Morrison returned home, Clinton’s campaign, which had been heavily buffeted by the Gennifer Flowers scandal, scored a crucial success: He finished second in the New Hampshire primary. This was widely regarded as a major victory, an indication that Clinton had weathered the scandal. He started calling himself the Comeback Kid.
Soon after Clinton’s encouraging finish in New Hampshire, Niall O’Dowd got a phone call he’d been waiting for, although he hadn’t known when or from whom it would come. The caller was Christopher Hyland, a classmate of Clinton’s at Georgetown, who said he was in charge of organizing ethnic groups in support of Clinton. It was within such groups, particularly those that were predominately Catholic, that many of the Reagan Democrats Clinton needed to win were to be found. Hyland wanted to know how to get Irish Americans fired up to support Clinton, and O’Dowd told him that activists were hungry for a candidate who would change the long-standing American policy on Northern Ireland. Hyland asked who should chair the Irish Americans for Clinton committee, and O’Dowd suggested former Boston mayor Ray Flynn and Bruce Morrison.
O’Dowd said he would announce a New York meeting in the Irish Voice to bring together Irish Americans interested in supporting Clinton. Hyland then called Morrison, who immediately agreed to co-chair the committee.
For the most part, the policy change that Morrison, O’Dowd, and other Irish American activists wanted Clinton to promise didn’t seem to have a ma
jor political downside. Pretty much everyone who wanted American policy to remain pro-British was already firmly behind Bush. There was, of course, the danger of Clinton being called soft on terrorism, since the British considered the IRA and its allies to be terrorists. But in a pre-9/11 world, that vulnerability didn’t come close to offsetting the positive gains of a new Irish policy for the campaign. That didn’t mean, however, that opponents of the new policy on both sides of the Atlantic wouldn’t do everything they could to tar Clinton with the soft-on-terrorism brush.
An important plus in the effort to help Clinton understand both the importance and opportunity involved in changing American policy on Northern Ireland was that Clinton already had some familiarity with the Troubles. So he was all ears when Morrison gave him his analysis of how an American president could help in the peace effort. The key elements involved offering the United States as an honest broker available to both sides, supporting Sinn Féin’s efforts to move the IRA to a political path and helping to get all parties, especially those supporting the fighting, to the negotiating table. Recalls Clinton:
I remember thinking that I had been interested in this since the Troubles began because I was in Oxford when they started. I’d been thinking all this time that this is something where we can really maybe make a difference, but then there was a lot of grumbling and I thought, well, what the hell, this is something I’d really like to get involved in. Bruce had really made a case.
I was profoundly impressed by how much Bruce knew, how much he thought about it, and it’s clear he knew what ought to be done, and he knew at that time, before the Downing Street Declaration, that it was somewhat of a long shot, but it was the only card we had to play that had any reasonable chance of defanging the IRA violence and in the process opening up the British to a change—and that was all the strategy I needed to know.