One obvious answer was that there was a very active Irish-American lobby and that it was important to Clinton. A consequence of two centuries of migration was that Ireland had an outsized presence in the US and thus in the global media. It was also true that the Troubles had the peculiar fascination of white, European Christians killing each other and the epic resonance of a conflict that could be construed as the tragic working out of immemorial history. But the most important truth about the Northern Ireland question was that it was, in fact, answerable. For Clinton, and for Tony Blair who
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