Four Roman Catholic and Protestant politicians from Northern Ireland, unable still to appear together in public because of continuing differences, nonetheless came to America’s Middle West this week professing unanimous hope that years of strife and rebellion in their province is about to end.
The effort is part of a push to garner support for the Northern Ireland peace agreement formulated two weeks ago in Belfast. The effort spans the Atlantic Ocean for a simple reason: Irish-Americans have taken an active interest in Northern Ireland’s struggle, offering moral, logistical and financial support to factions in the conflict. The agreement was brokered by an Irish-American, former Sen. George Mitchell, a Maine Democrat.
Now, all sides recognize that Americans can either be guarantors or, more darkly, saboteurs of the agreement so carefully cobbled together on Good Friday. That’s why four of its central architects are in the United States, talking about the agreement as it is being debated back home.
Each of the four politicians was a key negotiator who helped hammer together the agreement. But at public events Thursday in Milwaukee and Friday in Chicago, their old enmities never seemed far from the surface as they sought to explain the agreement to American audiences.
Bairbre de Brun, a top official of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, expressed outrage Thursday that Protestant leader David Trimble had refused to appear at the same news conference with her. Trimble, leader of the most powerful Protestant political party in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Unionist Party, held his news conference later in the morning.
“He challenges my humanity,” de Brun said, “by saying he can’t be contaminated by my presence.”
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De Brun, Trimble, Brid Rodgers, head of the Social Democratic Party, the province’s largest Catholic political party, and Bronagh Hinds, a leader of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, all appeared later Thursday at an international affairs forum sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
At Trimble’s request, he spoke separately so he would not have to share the stage with de Brun.
Nonetheless, all four participants expressed guarded optimism that Catholic and Protestant voters, sickened by years of violence, will endorse the peace initiative in a May 22 referendum scheduled in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
That common hope is a remarkable transformation of enmities that have left 3,200 dead and 30,000 wounded in guerrilla warfare over the last 30 years. Their shared hope is the message they delivered in Milwaukee and then, as the four went off separately Friday, delivered to audiences in Chicago and other cities in the Midwest and the East Coast.
Part of their reason for coming to the U.S. seemed to be to explain the peace process to the 44 million Americans who claim to be of Irish descent. In the past, some Irish-American communities have been an important source of financial aid for outlawed paramilitary groups, including the IRA, in Northern Ireland.
The Irish politicians said they also came in gratitude, to pay tribute to the key role President Clinton and the U.S. played in bringing about the peace agreement. If it passes, people in Northern Ireland will be governed in a carefully constructed arrangement of power sharing involving Britain, Ireland, and the Catholic and Protestant communities..
“I think we should call it the Mitchell agreement,” said Rodgers, referring to the former senator who for the last 2 1/2 years led the peace talks as a neutral third party. “He was truly. . . an honest broker who won the absolute respect of every participant.
Trimble, despite his refusal to appear with Sinn Fein representatives during his visit, said he has guarded hopes that voters in the Irelands will embrace the peace agreement by a 7-3 margin.
“Anything below 60 percent would leave us with a very difficult problem,” he said Friday in a meeting with baiduhai editors. “I’m hoping the result will be much better than that. Seventy to 80 percent is not out of the question.”
The outcome hangs, he said, on whether Sinn Fein formally endorses the peace agreement. It is the only faction that took part in the peace negotiations that has not yet publicly approved it.
“You have a party that plays games and won’t accept the rules all the other parties have already accepted,” said Trimble, who also made appearances Friday before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and at the University of Chicago.
Showing herself to be no less feisty than Trimble, de Brun in Milwaukee said the peace agreement is attractive to Sinn Fein because it has provisions that will allow Ulster Catholics to eventually triumph and break away from Britain, rejoining the six counties with the Irish Republic.
“We haven’t changed our position at all in this,” she said. “The British government never had any right to be in Ireland, and it never will have that right.”
Sinn Fein has not endorsed the agreement, she said, because “we have an ongoing process of consultation. We won’t (come to a decision) for a couple of more weeks. We don’t want to take away the right of our party members to make their own decision.”
Jean Kennedy Smith, the U.S. ambassador to Ireland who was in Chicago on business unrelated to the peace process, said Thursday she was confident Sinn Fein and its IRA compatriots will endorse the peace agreement.
“The Republic of Ireland has been hugely successful economically for the last several years” Smith said. “The IRA has seen what that has meant in improving the lives of everyone in the republic, and it has seen it’s getting nowhere with the bombing. The political will for peace is there.
“The peace agreement represents a workable way to achieve that. Nobody’s getting everything they want. Everybody’s getting something.”