by Penn Rhodeen
At the heart of the group’s planned approach in the north was the shared understanding that any solution to the conflict would have to accommodate Catholics and Protestants alike. The Americans didn’t know what that solution would look like, but they knew that it would have to come from the people on the ground in Northern Ireland. All of that meant they would be meeting with the widest possible range of political and activist groups, listening with respect to all viewpoints, making it clear that the Americans were there with open minds, not favoring any one side over the other and not holding a predetermined agenda. Their success depended on their being seen as honest brokers, not shills for Sinn Féin.
Morrison describes their approach this way:
We would make talking to everyone a defining characteristic of the visit. Our talking to everybody would not connote agreement or disagreement with who they were or what they were doing or what they might have done in the past. We would pay respect to everybody’s point of view. We had no agenda for settlement. We would make the point that Northern Ireland could not move forward economically if it didn’t resolve the political conflict and that it couldn’t move forward politically if people weren’t talking about economic opportunity for everyone. There should be a shared vision of the future.
Because Irish America was traditionally aligned with the republican cause of unifying the six northern counties with the rest of the Irish Republic, it was particularly important that the Americans meet with people representing the unionist political parties. Both the establishment Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the radical breakaway Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had tentatively agreed to meet with them. But when the newspapers reported shortly before their arrival in Dublin that they would also be meeting with Sinn Féin and its president, Gerry Adams, the firebrand cleric Ian Paisley, who headed the DUP, immediately denounced Morrison as a troublemaker (this was actually mild language for Paisley, who had once been removed from the European Parliament for loudly interrupting Pope John Paul II and calling him the antichrist; he would later refer to his unionist rival David Trimble as a “loathsome reptile”). He declared that his party would never meet with anyone who would meet with Sinn Féin. A party spokesman said sarcastically, “If you want to exclude yourself from a real say in Northern Ireland politics, meet with Sinn Féin.”
The response from the UUP also made it clear that their willingness to meet with the Americans was now in question. Party secretary Jim Wilson said, “the meeting with Sinn Féin throws a whole new light on the matter. It’s something I will have to address first thing tomorrow morning.” Tomorrow morning—Tuesday—was right when the Americans would leave for Belfast. The comments of John Taylor, a UUP member of the British Parliament, made it clear that it might be a rough morning for the Americans: he called them anti-Ulster meddlers and said they were “at the forefront of the campaign to get Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom.”
This wasn’t a good start. Morrison asked the American consulate in Belfast to do everything possible to persuade the UUP to meet with them. If the situation couldn’t be turned around, the American initiative would basically be dead in the water. Irish Americans coming to the North to meet with Irish Catholics would be the same old story: all green. It wouldn’t be news, it wouldn’t break new ground, and it wouldn’t advance the new American approach. Although the mission could survive the DUP refusal—these were angry extremists for whom rejection and refusal were their stock-in-trade—a refusal by the mainstream UUP would be fatal. Suddenly the success of the mission was hanging by a thread. But unbeknownst to the Americans, they had a rescuer, and he was hard at work turning things around.
Chris McGimpsey was a UUP councilor from Belfast, a big man, hearty and bold, more left-leaning than the typical UUP politician, and never afraid to put himself out there against the odds. A few years earlier, in defiance of IRA attacks on trains running between Belfast and Dublin, he had organized what became known as the Peace Train: a broad coalition that made highly publicized train runs, saving the crucial link between the two cities.
When he heard about the UUP’s reluctance, McGimpsey took it upon himself to change their mind, since he felt that Morrison, whom he had been so impressed by during the 1992 Mercy College trip, was exactly the sort of American the UUP needed to connect with. He hadn’t spoken with Morrison since 1992 and never expected to see him again, but now that he was on his way to Belfast, McGimpsey went right to UUP headquarters, ultimately taking his case directly to party leader Jim Molyneaux. As he recalls:
I thought to myself, “a significant opinion-former on Ireland, both now and potentially even greater in the future, is coming over here, and we’re saying we don’t want to talk to him?” I wasn’t worried about whether it would reduce their credibility in America, I was worried about the credibility of the unionist case.
I was still an officer of the party. Although I had no input into that decision, I advocated hard that we should meet with these guys. Not meeting with them because they were meeting with Sinn Féin was just so ridiculous. My counterargument was, “Sure, they’re meeting with Sinn Féin, but they’re meeting with lots of people. Why shouldn’t they hear our position—unless you want Sinn Féin to explain our position, which is exactly what they’ll do.”
I told them, “I’ve met this guy, he’s not a new Teddy Kennedy, he’s not part of the John Hume Appreciation Society. He’s an independent and he’s keen to learn. He is influential and he will continue to be influential.” To be fair, I wasn’t 100 percent convinced that he didn’t lean towards the other side. I felt he had over-listened to the republican-nationalists, but I wouldn’t have faulted anybody for that because of Unionism’s inability to sell its case.
So I told Molyneaux directly: “This guy is worth seeing,” and the agreement was made to meet them. It was the right decision. I think the fear was that there would be a major fallout within the party with the extreme right wing and also with the DUP. Unionists felt that God was on their side so they didn’t need the Yanks. So maybe a factor in our final decision was that people thought it was time for us to say we’re a different party, to stand up to the DUP.
En route to Belfast on Tuesday morning, the Americans learned to their great relief that McGimpsey had prevailed. UUP leader Jim Wilson, drawing heavily on McGimpsey’s arguments, deftly spun the meeting as an opportunity they shouldn’t pass up: “We certainly would not meet Sinn Féin, but I don’t think I have ever asked any visitor to unionist headquarters which office they have just been to or where they were going next. It would cost a fortune to send an Ulster unionist delegation to the States, so it would be downright stupid for us not to take this opportunity to put forward the unionist case and tell them eyeball to eyeball exactly what we think about the peace envoy plan.”
Morrison cites the McGimpsey story as evidence that life is “cumulative,” meaning that doing a good thing might pay off later in some completely unanticipated way. As they drove toward Belfast, the unofficial peacemakers had reason to hope that their mission would accomplish something.
But another foreshadowing of the difficulties and complexities in Northern Ireland occurred during the car ride itself. Niall O’Dowd noticed that their driver was paying unusually close attention to their conversation, which led him to believe that the car wasn’t a safe place to talk. So discussion about what they planned to do in the north and how they thought events might unfold stopped. Anything important was communicated by passing a note.
As the car sped north in relative silence, Morrison had plenty to think about. Exactly what might he and his companions face in Northern Ireland? In truth, he had no expectations of what lay ahead, and this uncertainty wasn’t comfortable for him. He was seriously concerned that beyond the very basic elements of their approach, the American team had embarked on an unscripted venture with a totally unknown outcome. It felt to Morrison, with his master’s degree in chemistry, like an off-the-cuff science experiment in which almost nothing is known
but a hypothesis.
Although he knew that he was pretty fast on his feet and could react effectively to the unexpected, his strong preference was to have a strategy and a well-developed message before undertaking an important mission. He was capable of winging it, but it wasn’t the way he preferred to operate, especially when the stakes were so high. The unavoidable truth, however, was that they’d be making it up as they went along, with important meetings arranged or rearranged on the fly.
One area where Morrison did feel confident was that he knew what happened when he got “in the room” where powerful people were deciding important things. In his early days as a politician, he was no stranger to anxiety about how well he’d measure up and how well he could perform. Soon enough, though, he’d learned that the rooms weren’t filled with geniuses and that there was no reason to be shy or trim his sails.
But to an extent that he couldn’t yet know, Morrison’s ability to be comfortable and assertive in Northern Ireland would be affected by what he refers to as the “adopted child syndrome:” an ongoing uncertainty about where you belong, if anywhere at all. Morrison found himself genuinely distressed when an Irish journalist he liked and respected exclaimed in an Irish Times article about his activities that he wasn’t even Irish. The observation left him feeling like a man without a place in a land where identity is literally a matter of life and death. But however much the lack of clear identity made him feel diminished, it also had its advantages as he moved between groups and communities in Northern Ireland. He was never “one of us,” but at the same time he was never “one of them.”
It was already clear to Morrison that the purpose of the trip was evolving. The original idea had been to respond to the request from Sinn Féin that the Americans meet with them in Belfast and then return home with a message to the new administration that Sinn Féin was ready to do serious business—and that it was capable of getting an IRA ceasefire as evidence of its intent and effectiveness.
For their part, the Americans had a message they wanted to deliver: Bill Clinton is personally involved and cares deeply about Northern Ireland, and if events move ahead on the right path, the president himself will come. They wanted to show that Clinton got it, that the issue resonated with him because, as a son of the American South, he knew firsthand about discrimination and what happened when groups were stuck in protracted conflict with each other. The core message was that Clinton had a new approach, recounted years later by Morrison: “The defining element was that the British and the Irish spent thirty years of the Troubles trying to make a deal in the middle that excluded the extremes. The Clinton analysis, which we pushed hard, was that you needed the big tent. You had to bring the political extremes into the political process because the war was caused by extreme feelings. The moderates were not the ones making war, so having them talk to each other wasn’t going to make peace.”
Morrison had plenty to work on as he thought through how he’d deal with all of the variables. He had to present the case for American involvement in a way that would fully realize the opportunities that might present themselves in Northern Ireland, while avoiding the pitfalls that had plagued so many American politicians before him.
It wasn’t long before his analysis of the challenges gave way to thoughts of the high wire, a worrisome image familiar to politicians in situations in which they have to stand out front, very alone, and speak about important matters with all eyes on them. It’s a place where stakes are high and mistakes are costly.
Morrison had been on the high wire many times in his political career, but never like this. He believed he could perform well up there, but the fact was that it had been nearly three years since he’d had microphones shoved in his face by clamoring reporters shouting questions that were often meant to do little more than reveal what a liar or jerk the politician before them was.
It was also true that the last time he’d been in the public eye, running for governor of Connecticut, it had ended in the epic defeat that made him a pariah in his own party and a political nobody in his own state.
Morrison was painfully aware of all of this, but he was sure he could do this new job well. He was excited by the challenge and grateful for the confidence and trust O’Dowd had placed in him.
Because the approach to Belfast from the south is fairly flat, a traveler from Dublin sees the Black Mountain and other high hills on the western edges of the city, but never a commanding vista of the city itself as it spreads out east of the motorway toward the water—only such glimpses as roadside buildings, trees, billboards, and road signs allow. The twin spires of St. Michael’s Cathedral in West Belfast—Sinn Féin territory—stand out, as do the gigantic yellow cranes known as Samson and Goliath in the Harland and Wolff shipyard, the place where the Titanic was built and where there were almost no jobs for Catholics.
Belfast sits near the mouth of the River Lagan; as the river passes through the sandy and muddy flats that gave Belfast its name, it opens out into the Belfast Lough, which in turn opens out to the Irish Sea. From that point, Scotland, ancestral homeland to so many in Northern Ireland, is just twenty miles or so eastward across the water.
People have lived in the place that is now Belfast since the Bronze Age, but the city came fully into its own in the nineteenth century, first as a center of the linen industry and later as the biggest and busiest shipbuilding center in the world. The great buildings of Belfast are for the most part products of the imperial eras of Queen Victoria and her ne’er-do-well (for a king) son Edward.
When the Americans arrived in 1993, the city had a population of about 250,000. It was unquestionably a war zone: There were checkpoints everywhere, and British army troop carriers and RUC armored Land Rovers were constantly patrolling the streets. Neighborhoods were often separated by high walls of brick, steel, or mortar, topped by high chain-link fences and razor wire and loaded with graffiti and partisan murals. These “peace walls” were intended to separate nationalist and loyalist working-class neighborhoods that were crammed too close together. They were usually erected at the request of residents who felt safer with high barriers between the different populations. To outsiders, the walls were a profoundly depressing sight, but to those who lived there, they were a crucial part of whatever sense of security they could muster.
The heart of the militant working-class unionist and loyalist population of Belfast, including the notorious Ulster paramilitaries, was centered on Shankill Road. The heart of the militant working-class nationalist and republican population, and with it the IRA, was centered on Falls Road. There were a few places in Belfast where these roads came absurdly close to each other. Residents took to painting the curbstones to identify who lived there. If you saw green and orange, you were in a republican neighborhood; if the curbs were painted in the colors of the Union Jack, you were in a loyalist neighborhood. If you were in the wrong place, you better get out fast.
These Belfast neighborhoods were the epicenters of the violence of the Troubles. IRA fighters and Ulster paramilitaries trudged along year after year on a treadmill of provocation, shooting, bombing, and killing. From 1969 to 1998, nearly 1,500 people were killed in the fighting in Belfast, a staggering number for a city of 250,000; in New York City, a comparable death toll from political warfare would be 48,000—basically a 9/11 every other year for thirty years. In the face of such a frightening and pervasive level of death, it wasn’t difficult to understand those who believed Northern Ireland would never see an end to the age-old cycle of violence. But to those who knew it had to stop—that people just couldn’t continue to live this way—it was clear that if anything was going to get better in the north, Belfast would be at the heart of it.
When the Americans arrived at Dukes Hotel, a compact Edwardian pile in a handsome area near Queens University, and bade farewell to their nosy driver, their concerns about security continued. Niall O’Dowd, ever alert to the possibility of intrusion, encountered strange bits of conversation whenever he picked up a hotel ph
one. Morrison was more casual, even somewhat fatalistic, about security concerns, especially in light of the omnipresence of the British internal security agency MI5. “On the scale of careful to not careful, I was much closer to the not-careful end of the spectrum,” he said, “I was just like I was in New Haven. I’m sure it was prudent to care about security, but there wasn’t anything to do about it. MI5 knew everything we were doing. They had moles everywhere. So there were no secrets. If they wanted us killed, we would have been dead. They probably didn’t want us dead.”
Finally, after all the planning, agonizing, maneuvering, and traveling, the meetings that had brought the unofficial peacemakers to Northern Ireland were at hand. The Americans’ agenda for their first day in Belfast included a visit with the moderate nationalist who had recently defeated Gerry Adams in his bid for re-election to the British Parliament, followed by a trip to the Stormont Estate in Ballymiscaw, just east of Belfast, to meet with the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland. After that, they would be off to the now-salvaged meeting with the Ulster Unionist Party leadership. The UUP meeting had to be held on the day they arrived in Belfast: As a condition of agreeing to meet, UUP insisted that the visitors meet with them before they met with Sinn Féin.
Although the Americans had no clear sense of how much media attention their visit might attract, on the day before they arrived in Belfast, the two major papers were already beginning to square off in their coverage.
The headline of the unionist-leaning Belfast Telegraph screamed, “Clinton Slams Britain.” The paper’s political correspondent wrote that the Telegraph had “today” gotten hold of a copy of a letter Bill Clinton wrote to Bruce Morrison about Northern Ireland, in which he criticized the British for not doing enough to oppose job discrimination against Catholics. The letter also discussed his idea of sending a US peace envoy to Northern Ireland. The article noted that Morrison “is a keen supporter of the envoy option.” Anyone reading the article would have thought Clinton had sent the letter to Morrison on the eve of his departure for Ireland and would assume that despite their claim to be arriving with open minds, the American team—or at least Morrison—were coming with a firm anti-British and anti-unionist bias.