media could easily relate to what was happening in Northern Ireland, particularly in 1968–69 because it was almost a copy of the Civil Rights Movement in their own country. The complexities were not easily understood in the United States; people understood civil rights, housing, electoral reform, discrimination, all of these things were understood. What was not easily understood was: Where was Northern Ireland? Why was it a part of the United Kingdom? What was the background? Why did people want a United Ireland, and of course in the Irish-American community, why don’t we achieve it by violence? In 1969, even people who subsequently became phenomenal supporters – Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, and Hugh Carey – were inclined to look towards what became the Provisional IRA. That was their first instinct.
In time these supporters – Hugh Carey, then in the US Congress and later Governor of New York, Ted Kennedy who was a senator from Massachusetts and Tip O’Neill who was a rising star in the Democratic party – were to join with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senator for New York, and form very powerful grouping concerned to support Ireland’s search for peace and justice. Thus, as American politicians became more involved, the need for an effective communicator, who combined a deep understanding of the historical evolution of the political problems in Northern Ireland with a vision of their solution, became even more necessary. Bloody Sunday, and the broader disintegration of the North of Ireland in 1972, focused the attention of Washington on the Irish Question as perhaps never before. The massacre in Derry that day made the need for a touchstone on the Irish Question all the more necessary for US politicians wishing to engage on Irish matters.
Bloody Sunday and its Repercussions
From any point of view, Bloody Sunday was a diplomatic disaster for British policy makers. After the massacre of innocent, non-violent protesters on their own streets, Britain’s moral case to act as an ‘honest broker’ among a divided people instantly proved risible. To exacerbate the sense of injustice in Derry, and to completely extinguish Britain’s integrity, Lord Chief Justice Widgery, who presided over a Tribunal on Bloody Sunday, exculpated the Parachute Regiment – which was guilty of the murders – and instead blamed the marchers. The international community’s sympathy for the Catholic victims of the massacre in Derry was apparent no less in Washington. Senator Ted Kennedy, who had called for a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland in 1971, stated in Congressional Hearings on Northern Ireland: ‘Just as Ulster is Britain’s Vietnam, so Bloody Sunday is Britain’s My Lai.’ Tip O’Neill, by now House Majority Whip, was similarly exercised, if less outspoken in public. As Seán Donlon remembers:
When Bloody Sunday happened there was a huge reaction and enormous criticism of the British military, of the British political system. At that stage, Tip O’Neill got together with some of his colleagues in the House of Representatives and arranged to hold hearings on the Northern Ireland situation; technically, he did that through a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
When Tip O’Neill invited a delegation from Derry to Washington to give evidence Hume declined the invitation, judging that at such a fraught time his focus needed to be squarely on the domestic situation at hand. As a result of those hearings, O’Neill sponsored a petition signed by 102 House members in response to the Northern Irish crisis. At the same time, a perception was growing in the US Congress that Hume would be central to any effort to address the crisis.
The need for a new voice on the Northern Ireland Question, someone who could show a way forward, was also shared by visiting American media reporters, and early on it was recognised that Hume could be that voice. As The New York Times reported in August 1972:
The Social Democratic and Labor party, a disparate grouping of Opposition politicians, sometimes is described as ‘six men and one mind’. The mind belongs to Mr. Hume, who at 35, is generally held to be the deepest thinker and most able tactician in the group. It is not just intellect that accounts for his importance in efforts to break the impasse here. Mr. Hume is also believed to have won, in part through frequent television appearances, more prestige in Dublin than any other politician in Northern Ireland. But his strongest claim to influence is his ability to speak for Derry … That ability has been somewhat eroded by the successive waves of violence, for Mr. Hume has consistently condemned the terrorism of the Irish Republican Army, even when much of his natural constituency was ready to condone it. But he retains strong support and is respected enough to get a hearing where he can no longer count on automatic allegiance. ‘I can’t influence the I.R.A.’, he says, ‘but I can influence the people’.1
The American Dimension: An Irreversible Shift in Perspective
The background to the first substantive encounter between Ted Kennedy and John Hume is somewhat protracted. Hume and Kennedy had briefly met at Trinity College Dublin in March 1970, not long after the Chappaquiddick incident. Kennedy had also sent a supportive telegram to Hume in 1969, stating that the Catholic minority did not struggle alone and that ‘the reforms you seek are basic to all democracies worthy of the name’.2 Meanwhile, in Derry, street violence began to escalate. However, it was not until a visit to London in 1971, after an encounter with an Irish woman, that Kennedy committed himself fully to working with Hume. The woman challenged Kennedy for having criticised the Kent State Massacre and yet having done, in practice, nothing to assist the Catholic minority in the North of Ireland. Kennedy’s Chief of Staff, Carey Parker recalls:
The Senator felt she was right, and in October 1971, a month after his return from Europe, he signed on to a resolution that Senator Abe Ribicoff and Congressman Hugh Carey, who was a member of the House at the time, introduced in Congress calling for immediate British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and the reunification of Ireland. That was what the American Irish wanted to hear, but as John Hume indicated to some friends of ours in Ireland, ‘We can understand your frustration, but that’s not the way the crisis in Northern Ireland will be resolved’. He wanted to talk to the Senator, and the Senator said, I have to go see John Hume.3
The Meeting
After Bloody Sunday, the smouldering conflict in Northern Ireland ‘became a war’, in the words of Eamonn McCann. Non-identification with the State on the part of the Catholic minority continued – civil servants and Catholic police resigned, public spaces became more clearly identified as ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’ – and against that backdrop, forging an inclusive approach to politics became considerably more difficult. The deepening divide fed absolutist and paramilitary ‘solutions’. With politics in Derry deteriorating, the timing for a determined American engagement on the Irish Question was right.
John Hume, unemployed since the Stormont Parliament had been prorogued by Prime Minister Ted Heath, was sitting in his kitchen at West End Park in Derry when he received an unanticipated telephone call from Senator Ted Kennedy. Hume was initially disbelieving, thinking the call a hoax, but the caller assured him that he was indeed Ted Kennedy and that he wanted to meet. Kennedy was scheduled to travel to Bonn for a NATO meeting and he asked Hume to come to Bonn to see him. As Hume’s wife, Pat, remembers: ‘I was teaching. I was the bread winner. We had five small children. But he realised that this was very important.’ Hume borrowed money from the Credit Union (of which he had been president) and bought a flight to Bonn. That meeting took place at the residence of the then Irish Ambassador to West Germany, Sean G. Ronan, at 65 Rolandstraße, Bad Godesberg, and as Senator Ted Kennedy himself put it:
He came to Bonn, and I spent a couple of hours with him in the residence of the Ambassador … that’s where John began the great education of Edward Kennedy about Northern Ireland and planted the seeds that grew and grew and grew into a wonderful relationship … Hume was pointing out to me, certainly, that if we were going to have any success with a political process, we had to stop the flow of arms and funds for arms to the IRA from the U.S.4
Seán Donlon recalls: ‘The ambassador had set up the meeting, arranged dinner, but the meeting was just between John Hume and Ted Kennedy. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but I do know that immediately afterwards Kennedy
