A Terrible Duty is Done – or a Grave Mistake is Made? The Queen and Mr McGuinness

I have had the pleasure of refusing to shake the hand of Gerry Adams, but I have never had the chance to snub his fellow Godfather, Martin McGuinness. I spent several weeks following Mr Adams around North America in the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton gave him a visa to come and make propaganda (and raise funds). We did not become friends.

The correspondent who demanded evidence of American support for the IRA cause (can anyone be so naïve as to doubt it?) surely must grasp that this act alone was decisive. In the Cold War years, the Anglo-American alliance was still too important for any US President openly to sympathise with the IRA, though Ronald Reagan had more than one frosty conversation with Margaret Thatcher on the subject, and I have always assumed that the ghastly and mistaken Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985 resulted at least partly from American pressure. Though the EU was by then also beginning to stick its oar into Anglo-Irish relations.

But the Clinton intervention was something entirely new. It was done in direct and open defiance of the wishes of the British government, and on many occasions steps were taken behind Britain’s back. Britain’s vast and supposedly well-connected Embassy on the grandest stretch of Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC was several times utterly wrong-footed, whereas Dublin’s tiny mission further down the hill was always on top of the case.

My friend Conor O’Clery, then the Washington correspondent of the Irish Times, wrote an excellent book on the affair ‘the Greening of the White House’, which is a manual in miniature of American politics as it really happens, and describes the pressures and alliances that put Bill Clinton at the side of Sinn Fein and the IRA.

At the heart of this was( and is) the enormous importance of the Irish-American vote, and of Irish-American money, in President elections. The Irish vote is important in several of the states with the biggest electoral college votes, notably New York, Massachusetts, California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, and is not unimportant in Ohio either. Nor is it some sort of hick, backwoods section of the population. Irish America is now very well-represented in business, and has lots of money to contribute to Presidential and Congressional campaigns.

Clinton’s big problem in 1992, was that Reagan Republicanism had stolen a lot of Roman Catholic working class votes from the Democrats. The issue of abortion had been very important in alienating them from the Democrats. He realised, being an astute campaigner, that he could regain many of these votes (without annoying the pro-abortion voters who were also essential to his victory)  if he pledged to advance the Irish Republican cause. And so he did. He didn’t, as far as anyone could tell, care very much about it at the time, or known very much about it. It wasn’t a big deal in Arkansas.

And he largely forgot his pledge until, after his Party suffered very bad mid-term reverses in November 1992, Irish America came to him and said , more ior elss ‘We helped you; now you help us’.

Soon after that Mr Adams was laundered from terrorist Godfather into Man of Peace. The New York Times, the Izvestia of America’s liberal ruling class,  started publishing adulatory drivel about him, and  he went about comparing himself with the (peaceful) Black Civil Rights movement.

In fact ( I think this was in Detroit) he actually appeared alongside the adored and revered Civil Rights campaigner Rosa Parks, who had somehow been persuaded to share a platform with him. I am rather proud that I asked him how he, an apologist for bloody violence, dared to so much as sit next to Rosa Parks.

He turned angrily towards me, and snapped ‘Who said that>?!’

I was happy to identify myself, and to repeat ti for the cameras, of the local TV, who had missed it the first time.

From then on, Mr Adams and I had a sort of relationship as his circus criss-crossed the USA. We only met in private and face to face once, in a Canadian TV studio green room in Toronto, and he made it very plain that he was displeased with my behaviour. It was a few months later when he came to open a Sinn Fein office in Washington DC, that he called for me to be ‘decommissioned’.

This followed what is in many ways my favourite question to him. He had said that the new Sinn Fein office would not be a mere bureau.  It would be a Sinn Fein Embassy in the American capital.

In that case, I enquired sweetly, would it be having a military attaché?

There was a short silence, followed by ‘I think it’s time you were decommissioned, Peter’.

Some people get the odd  idea that, because I’m against Sinn Fein and the IRA, I am in some way  a sympathiser of the ‘Loyalist’ murder gangs. On the contrary, I refused to shake hands with them, too, when I was introduced to them at a very strange occasion in Washington DC. I despise them. Or they think that I’m some kind of crude anti-Irish person. This is also ludicrously false.

Far too many people assume that there are only two positions in any argument – that if you loathe the Tories you must be a Labour supporter, that if you’re against the Iraq war you must be a pacifist, that if you think Britain’s conduct of World War Two was badly misjudged, you must be a Hitler sympathiser, that if you’re not an atheist you must be Elmer Gantry,  and so on.

It’s simply not true.

I have, As it happens, a great deal of sympathy for the Irish national cause. No proper British patriot could be unmoved by another people’s desire for the independence that we have (or rather, used to have). No traveller in Ireland could fail to grasp the strong bonds of patriotism , mingles with love of landscape, poetry and history, that are so similar to our own.  No reader of Irish history could fail to eb shocked and ashamed by many of the things done to Irish men and women by the English and the Scots.

But my ability to understand the patriotic feelings of others also means that I have a great deal of sympathy for the Irish unionists.  They are Irish too. And here for many years has been the problem for any thinking person. How can these two movements be reconciled on the island of Ireland?  I for one thought and still think that direct rule of the six counties of Northern Ireland from London was the best and most just solution, so that neither group could ever lord it over the other. This also suits the Republic, which has been a very successful state more or less since the end of the Civil War, but really does not need to take charge of a disgruntled, resentful Unionist minority in the North.

Sinn Fein’s version of Irish nationalism is not the only one available. There are other more thoughtful and rational traditions  - which I admit were dealt a very bad blow by Britain’s ham-handed response to the 1916 Easter Rising, and especially the executions of its leaders, which alienated so many Irish people who otherwise felt goodwill towards England. That led on to the frightfulness of the War of Independence, and the gross behaviour of the auxiliaries and the Black and Tans.

It was that horrible and destructive period for which the Queen so wonderfully sought to atone in Dublin in May last year. As I watched that visit on television, I began to wish very much that I had gone to see it in person, as it was plainly one of the great events of my lifetime. British people are still largely unaware of the enormous effect that it had on decent people of goodwill in Ireland ( I exclude from that category the fanatical supporters of Sinn Fein, who didn’t like it much) .  British people aren’t in general as interested in Ireland as they should be ( and I suppose I owe my escape from that uninterest and ignorance to Gerry Adams , who at least compelled me to learn in detail what I was arguing against).

Out of that visit grew two idea, both still very tender plants, but both of which may in time become great trees,  that all Irish people have more in common with each other than they do with anyone else, and that the barriers which separate them are now largely in the mind; and the other idea, that the four peoples of the British isles have far more in common with each other than they do with any other peoples or nations.

That is why, even though I balked at some of the things Her Majesty did in Dublin, I recognised that it was precisely *because* I balked at them that they were so valuable. They were difficult, hard to swallow, going further than most had expected she would. Well, exactly. They cost her, and Britain, something, as all decent gestures of reconciliation should.

That was a duty, that rebuilt a broken bridge between the good people of both countries. Shaking hands with Martin McGuinness was, alas, a gesture of appeasement towards an evil movement, which does not truly speak for Ireland and which should be frozen out of public discourse by the contempt of all.