by Thomas Maier
After the early 1970s Bloody Sunday riots in Northern Ireland, the Kennedy family’s commitment became more serious, more intensely political. Congressman Joseph Kennedy II visited Ireland in 1988 and expressed outrage at the “tremendous oppression” that existed in the northern six counties and at the “intimidation of Irish Catholics” by the Protestant majority. After visiting Northern Ireland, he traveled to the steps of Wexford Muncipal Hall and drew loud cheers when he called for a British ouster. “The British have no right to occupy the north of Ireland,” insisted this Kennedy named for the former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James. “The occupying forces are telling us what to do, what to eat, who to pray to, how to think.” It was the kind of speech that De Valera wished the congressman’s uncle might have given in 1963.The eldest son of RFK said he couldn’t be like Americans who observed the Irish troubles from an emotional distance.“You wouldn’t be satisfied with me if I came here simply as a tourist,” he explained.“We all have brothers in the north and they need our help and support.”
The British were not pleased. On the BBC television, one of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s top aides chastised Kennedy. “He should get back to Massachusetts as quickly as possible,” Energy Secretary Cecil Parkinson retorted,“and I hope we never set eyes on him again.”
WHILE IN NORTHERN IRELAND, Joe Kennedy II championed the cause of several young Irish Catholics jailed by the British as suspected IRA members. The inmates were found guilty of alleged terrorist bombing attacks, but supporters claimed their convictions were based on false charges. Joe Kennedy’s commitment went far beyond that of most contemporary Massachusetts politicians, beyond the token gesture and press release to please the Irish vote back home. He called on Thatcher’s government “to change its attitude to the Irish Catholics of this nation.”
Americans were no longer as concerned about Ireland as they were at the beginning of the century. In 1920, when three Irish nationalists starved themselves to death, more than a hundred thousand outraged Irish- Americans marched in protest to Boston Common. They provided a steady stream of money and weapons to their Irish cousins back home in their struggle for independence. Now, the flame of Fenian spirit barely flickered. The south of Ireland was its own Republic and Irish-Americans didn’t seem bothered by the troubles of the minority Catholics in the north. Indeed, when IRA suspect Bobby Sands died in 1981 during a hunger strike in prison, barely a hundred people protested outside the home of the British consul general in Boston. Some said that Representative Joe Kennedy’s motivations in Ulster’s dispute were an exercise in ethnic cheerleading. But his actions seemed compelled by family history as he became more outspoken on Irish issues than his Uncle Teddy.
Joe Kennedy visited in prison the so-called Guildford Four, including Gerry Conlon and Paul Hill, whose conviction on trumped-up charges for a 1974 bombing later became the inspiration for an Oscar-nominated film (In the Name of the Father, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson). Kennedy urged both Conlon and Hill to come to America after their impending release on bail and testify before a congressional hearing on human rights. At the April 1990 hearing in Washington, Hill recounted his story of spending fifteen years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Hill emphasized that he never joined the IRA, but was simply another Irish Catholic from Belfast whose life had been torn apart by the religious strife in the north. That same year, Hill published an autobiography about his experience, titled Stolen Years, describing IRA members in friendly terms. “To us, these men were not terrorist gangsters,” he wrote. “They were our neighbors, the brothers of our friends, the sons of respected people in the district.”
Hill’s hardscrabble existence in West Belfast was spent mostly on the streets. He was the long-haired disaffected son of parents, one Catholic and the other Protestant, who couldn’t get along at home. Paul wound up living with his grandparents, and had scant hope for the future. When the troubles started, Hill and the other Catholic youths rebelled against the British soldiers who invaded their community. “Every kid in West Belfast threw stones at the British army. Every kid in West Belfast sees themselves as the defenders of their neighborhood,” he said. “I engaged in political protest, but if you ask me if I lifted a gun, certainly not.” He and Gerry Conlon were petty thieves, not political terrorists. Yet when they were caught breaking into a hooker’s apartment, the two young Irish Catholics became suddenly entrapped in the political tragedy of Northern Ireland.
The October 1974 bombing of two crowded neighborhood pubs in the town of Guildford, outside London, killed five people, injured sixty-five more and left Britain in a revenge-seeking frenzy against the IRA’s campaign of terrorism. Until then, though the crucial decisions about Ulster’s fate were made in London, most of the resulting violence occurred in Northern Ireland. The Guildford attack was among more than thirty bombs planted in England. The four-month reign of terror prompted the British public and police to respond with outrage. Into this wide dragnet fell Hill and Conlon. Over the next two days, Hill faced an endless interrogation by police determined to make an arrest for the pub bombing. “I was beaten, slapped around,” Hill recalled.“I was threatened with firearms. Members of my family were threatened. I was denied sleep for long periods. I was denied food for long periods, completely disoriented, just—just utterly terrified. Sheer complete terror.”
In the panic over the IRA attacks, England passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act. It allowed suspects to be detained without the traditional civil liberties of Her Majesty’s other subjects, including rights to a defense lawyer. Hill became the first detainee under the new terrorism law, questioned on the same day the law went into effect. Pointing at him, the British police demanded and eventually got a confession for the bombing. “They said they were going to fucking kill me,” Hill recalled. Similar confessions, with no other evidence, were collected from Conlon and two other Irish hippies, Carol Richardson and Paddy Armstrong, whom the British press dubbed “the Guildford Four.” Conlon’s father and five other members of Conlon’s Irish Catholic family living in London were rounded up as accomplices. At a non-jury trial, Hill found himself convicted, along with the others, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The judge’s only regret, as he passed judgment on Hill, was that the defendant wasn’t charged with treason so he could impose the death penalty.
Over the next fifteen years, Hill languished in a prison cell even though British police soon obtained evidence of his wrongful conviction. After Hill’s trial, the police arrested a group of IRA bombers who confessed to the Guildford crime and provided enough specific details for authorities to realize they had condemned four innocent people. Yet, the fears and prejudices surrounding the British conflict in Northern Ireland prevented any action being taken for years. Journalists, human rights organizations and politicians such as the Kennedys brought enough international attention to these cases that an independent inquiry was eventually ordered by the British government. In 1989, the panel ruled that Hill and the other Guildford Four had been framed by the police. Their convictions were overturned.
When he appeared before Kennedy’s congressional hearing, Paul Hill was temporarily free pending an appeal for another alleged crime—the murder of an ex-soldier in Belfast named Brian Shaw—the charges based on the same confession fabricated by police. In the audience, Ethel Kennedy listened and was deeply moved by Hill’s tale. “What he said, and how he said it,was very powerful,” she remembered. Ethel Kennedy walked up to Hill when the hearing ended, introduced herself and began talking about her daughter Courtney and her interest in Northern Ireland. She said she wished Courtney had been able to attend, but her daughter had suffered a neck injury while skiing and was recovering inside her Manhattan apartment. By any chance, Ethel asked, would Hill be going to New York and possibly be able to stop by and say hello?
“Well, as a matter of fact . . .” replied Hill, and soon received Courtney’s New York address.
When Hill arrived at her Fifth Avenue a
partment, the fifth child of Ethel and Bobby Kennedy was feeling low; her decade-long marriage to a television producer had fallen apart and her broken body was trying to mend. Ethel called ahead to alert her daughter of Hill’s visit. Courtney quickly agreed with her assessment of Hill’s rough-hewn, long-haired handsomeness. As they conversed, she could barely understand Paul’s thick working-class Belfast accent, though she’d been to Eire plenty of times. As a young adult, she became fascinated with Irish culture after a visit abroad with her sister, Kerry, and later decided to study at Trinity College in Dublin. Paul teased her about all the get-well flowers in her apartment. The couple realized they shared a similar sense of humor and began seeing each other regularly.
Mary Courtney Kennedy, her given name, remained one of the most taciturn Kennedys. She was rather a reclusive thirty-five-year-old woman who had been an undistinguished student. She had developed an ulcer by age twelve—the year after her father was shot to death in Los Angeles. “I did not react well,” she later described. “I wasn’t rebellious like the boys, I just kept things in. I was unhappy.” Paul Hill’s suffering in Northern Ireland struck a chord in her, as though they were both victims of political violence. “I think there was some empathy and understanding that we had with each other that other people would not have,” Courtney said. “Our histories had some kind of similarities in that we both had sufferance in loss.” They recognized how many thought they were an odd match—the rich American girl of Camelot and the accused IRA terrorist—yet their relationship only became closer.“Our love has grown because we are concerned about the same things,” Hill explained. “It was important that her family had such a caring and moral stand. They too have suffered from political violence. Courtney is a supremely caring person, which is very hard to find in people who are established in life.”
By the time they became engaged, Hill was living off the proceeds of his best-selling autobiography and working as a volunteer for Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch and other human rights groups. Although authorities in Northern Ireland offered him a deal—an agreement to plead guilty to the Shaw murder in return for time already spent in prison—he adamantly refused. Before returning to fight his case on appeal, Hill married Courtney in July 1993 aboard a ship on the Aegean Sea. Ethel Kennedy attended along with several relatives, including a smattering of distant Kennedy cousins from Ireland. One of those in attendance was an Irish priest named Michael Kennedy from the coastal town of Dungarvan, who said he was a fourth cousin of the assassinated president, and was embraced by his American kin. Father Kennedy said Mass at the Hill- Kennedy wedding celebration and later that November served as chief celebrant of a memorial Mass in Dublin to mark the thirtieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s death, attended by the Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds. In a profile, the Times of London suspiciously described the popular priest as “closely identified with the republican cause” and a friend of Hill’s. When Rose Kennedy was dying, the family asked Father Kennedy to fly over to lead the family’s final prayers. “He has got a lovely, kind, warm face,” Courtney described.“The whole feeling about him is, I suppose, very holy.”
Hill knew how lucky he was to marry into the Kennedy family and recognized what they had meant historically.“The Kennedys were kind of the epitome of what Irish people could do in America,” he explained. “They were the American dream for Irish people.”
ON A SNOWY DAY in Belfast, a limousine pulled up to the High Court. Paul Hill and his new American family stepped out briskly past cameras and reporters and took their seats in the front rows of the justice chamber. The Kennedys were out in force—Ethel Kennedy, her daughters, documentary maker Rory, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, her son, Michael, and another Kennedy on his way in a jet, Joe Kennedy II. “We’re here to support my brother-in-law in his struggle for justice in Northern Ireland,” the Massachusetts congressman declared, arriving in time for the session after lunch.
The British were appalled. Never before in their relationship as allies with the United States had they witnessed such prominent American figures coming to their shores to raise such ugly issues as political torture and gross violations of human rights in Northern Ireland. Before his return, Hill and his in-laws had appeared on American television shows to tell his side of the story. Some television shows intermingled film clips from In the Name of the Father and treated Paul and Courtney as the latest rising stars in the Kennedy constellation. As if to highlight the inequity in the case, the Kennedys invited sixteen international observers to attend Hill’s appeal hearing. “The Meddling Kennedys,” decried a Times of London editorial writer, who equated the family’s support for Hill with their alleged sexual misdeeds in Palm Beach and their “pro-German grandfather” when he was ambassador to Britain.“For Irish-Americans in general, and the Kennedys in particular, the grim and grey political situation in Northern Ireland is black and white, an opportunity for moral and nationalist posturing, but little serious contemplation,” said a Times columnist. In London, the Evening Standard’s headline of the proceeding (“Scum As Kennedy Clan Fly In To Aid Terror Case Man”) was hardly contemplative of the miscarriage of justice that might have occurred with Hill. The Daily Mail aimed much of its wrath at Joe Kennedy. “He is a loud, hate-filled voice against Britain on Capitol Hill, but his real knowledge of the Irish problem is only as deep as a plate of water,” opined columnist John Edwards, who reminded his readers that the Kennedys were “the nearest America ever got to its own royalty.”
Hill won his appeal, though there was little sense of justice. Sir Brian Hutton, the Lord Chief Justice, tossed out the conviction. He ruled the police’s use of a gun to coerce Hill’s confession was a “disgraceful and grossly improper action, which clearly constituted inhuman treatment.”Yet the halfhearted attempts by Ulster authorities to prosecute the police for their criminal actions eventually collapsed. Even Hill didn’t have the stomach for pursuing it. The family of murdered Brian Shaw—pistol-whipped to death by IRA interrogators—remained convinced the authorities had convicted the right man. They were outraged and saddened to see Hill go free. The IRA men in jail who confessed to the crime were never charged. And Hill himself, who received two hundred thousand pounds as an interim compensation payment, felt little vindication. “No one knows the monetary value you can put on fifteen years,” he explained. “I don’t think there is anyone alive who can come out of that experience and not be scarred. . . .To those who say, oh, he’s livin’ well, you have no idea.”
Over the next several years, Courtney and Paul Hill lived permanently in America, though they maintained their ties to Eire through repeated visits. A reminder of this Irish connection arrived in 1997 when Courtney gave birth, at age forty, to a baby girl they named Saoirse Roisin, Gaelic for “Freedom Rose.” Grandma Ethel Kennedy nicknamed her “Rebel.” Through the Kennedy family’s involvement, Hill’s case came to the attention of President Clinton. Eventually, Great Britain changed its view, realizing the injustice to the Guildford Four. Six years after Hill’s successful appeal, Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a formal apology; he addressed it, tellingly, to Courtney Kennedy Hill. “I believe that it is an indictment of our system of justice and a matter for the greatest regret when anyone suffers punishment as a result of a miscarriage of justice,” Blair wrote. “There were miscarriages of justice in your husband’s case, and the cases of those convicted with him. I am very sorry indeed that this should have happened.”
The false charges against Hill and the other Guildford defendants underlined the rush to judgment by a nation feeling itself in the grip of terrorist attacks. England’s concession was extraordinary, something considered impossible only a few years earlier—and it happened mostly because of the Kennedy connection.“They’re behind me solidly, as any Irish family would be,” Hill said of his new in-laws. “And that’s perhaps indicative of their Irishness, that—that they are prepared to stand with me right to the end of the road.”
Hill began a
new life in America, yet like so many émigrés from political strife in Ireland, he maintained a long-held view about his homeland.“I believe Ireland is a separate country,” he insisted.“I believe that, in my lifetime, I will see a unification of Ireland. A political solution is the only solution to the current troubles.”
WHILE THE PAUL HILL legal saga played out in a Northern Ireland courtroom, another Kennedy turned her sights on Ireland to fulfill a family promise and eventually became fully immersed in the process of a political solution for the Irish troubles.
On a long trip in summer 1992, Jean Kennedy Smith, the youngest of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s daughters, visited Dublin and other parts of Ireland. She traveled about in the same way that other family members and so many Irish-Americans each year returned to see the sights of their ancestral homeland. Her vacation proved almost therapeutic after one of the most difficult periods of her life—following the 1990 death of her husband, Stephen, and the sexual assault trial of her son,William Kennedy Smith. For Jean, the trip kindled an intense interest in Ireland. There were her memories of accompanying President Kennedy on his triumphant trip three decades earlier. She visited the beautiful surroundings of the U.S. ambassador’s residence at Phoenix Park, where Jack joked about supporting any presidential candidate who’d send him back as the new Irish ambassador. And she remembered how Jack had promised to “come back in the springtime” as he departed Ireland.
Upon her return to America, Jean shared her memories with brother Ted. She floated the idea of becoming the Clinton administration’s new ambassador to Ireland. “It sort of developed as a wisp of a thought,”Ted recalled. “We had all been to Ireland and we talked about that house [at Phoenix Park] and how wonderful it would be to live there. We were chatting about it as if we were dreaming.”Ted Kennedy set out to ensure his sister’s appointment. Though there were other candidates for the post, including some who were friendly with the Massachusetts senator, Kennedy convinced the president to nominate Jean. Clinton’s announcement took place on St. Patrick’s Day, 1993.With a bowl of shamrocks before him at the White House, Clinton introduced Jean, noticeably nervous, as his new ambassador-designate. The president touted her “as Irish as Americans can be. I can think of no one who better captures the bonds between Ireland and the United States.”