was in the saddle.
The other aspect of Kennedy’s education was the clear-headed perspective and constant stream of solid information provided by his exceptionally talented Chief of Staff, Carey Parker. Parker worked the phones on the Irish Question like nobody in the US. In the early phase of the conflict, Parker found that the British effort was ‘not so much to try to reach reconciliation between the two sides as it was to end the violence, and they treated it as a war that they had to win, not as a peace they could negotiate’.5 That a United States senator consciously sought out Hume was indicative of a rapidly sharpening view of Northern Ireland among senior US politicians. Kennedy wished to identify a trusted partner through whom he could channel what would become enormous US influence on Anglo-Irish relations. Hume had appeared to be that man and the meeting in Bonn confirmed Kennedy’s belief that Hume was. Carey Parker corroborates:
That meeting began a decades-long relationship, during which we didn’t do anything on Northern Ireland without first talking with John Hume … We felt that the Irish issue needed a voice in Congress that was clearly for reconciliation and peace, so it was the only voice in Congress that wasn’t being heard via the IRA. … It was largely a way of showing that Republicans and Democrats could work together on the Irish issue and that we were all in favor of the John Hume initiative.6
But the question remained: why did US politicians feel moved to become involved at all?
Background to Tip O’Neill’s Involvement
Something in Tip O’Neill’s background helps to explain the emotional centre of gravity for many Irish-American politicians. O’Neill’s son, Tom O’Neill, relates:
My father’s mother’s family came from Buncrana in Donegal – the Drumfries area of Buncrana, a farm area – and both sides of her family worked in the soil. His father’s father had worked in brickyards in Ireland and when he came to America he landed naturally enough in Cambridge, because there were brickyards in North Cambridge.
He certainly knew the history of the Irish and what the Irish-American condition was, not only in North Cambridge but in Dorchester, South Boston, and other enclaves where the Irish lived. He was old enough and early enough in American history to understand the British and what they felt about the Irish coming to America. I’m talking about the Brahmins and the Patrician Yankees here in New England and how they treated the Irish, and others frankly, coming in from other European nations, and how they were not welcomed.
There was a bank run by the Yankees in North Cambridge which bypassed all the ethnics, all the Irish and Italians, and never gave them loans. So my father went to the bank president and said: ‘You know, you’ve got on deposit all the Irish money and all the French Canadian money from our neighbourhoods. There’ll be a run on your bank if you don’t start loaning the money out’. And so the next day the bank started loaning the money out.
Tip O’Neill brought his inherited grasp of the Anglo-Irish imbroglio with him to the House of Representatives. O’Neill’s first Congressional speech, given on 5 March 1952, was ‘a five-minute address on a bill he had sponsored to improve working conditions and salaries for longshoremen. With an eye toward his new constituency, he spoke out on behalf of foreign aid to Israel and Italy – and for Irish reunification’.7 Even so, without a coherent framework rooted in the realities of the North of Ireland, any effort by a would-be supporter such as O’Neill in favour of Irish reunification or any aspect of policy relating to Ireland, was destined to fail.
Resolutions introduced in the US Congress on Ireland – given that Congress was becoming more Irish as decades passed – were a source of anxiety for the British. This became apparent when sixteen anti-partition resolutions were proposed in the US Congress between 1948 and 1951. These were substantially driven by Congressman John Fogarty of Rhode Island, who also tried to leverage US Marshall Aid to the UK by linking it to a push to end the partition of Ireland. As James Sharkey relates:
This was strongly opposed by the State Department by Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The State Department secured a major abstention in the vote and, as a consequence of that, the resolution failed. The British Embassy, reporting back to London at that time, spoke not just about the defeat of the Irish lobby in Washington, but the defeat of any ethnic lobby which came forward to divert American policy from its mainstream intent.
A tight alliance of the US State Department, the British Embassy and the White House was able to forestall any effort to reassess the US relationship with Ireland. But that coalition was about to be challenged by a concerted movement of influential figures in the US Senate and the House of Representatives.
Ted Kennedy, like Tip O’Neill, had imbibed Irish nationalism from an early age, through his maternal grandfather, John ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, who had been Mayor of Boston. This included walks through Irish parts of the city where the NINA (No Irish Need Apply) culture that had prevailed excluded the Irish from circles of power in both politics and commerce. The core lesson Honey Fitz imparted to JFK when he ran for election was: ‘He said: “The only thing you have to know about foreign policy is that Trieste belongs to Italy, and all of Ireland will be united and free”, and with those two things, you could get elected in Boston.’8 While that simplistic view may have worked for the ethnic politics of Boston, and indeed coloured Kennedy’s earliest pronouncements on Ireland, Hume disabused him of the validity of such simple views when applied to the contemporary Irish reality.
Yet even before Hume fully embarked on his partnership with US politicians, the establishment of a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland in 1973 had emerged from talks between the Irish and British governments at the Prime Ministerial level (Liam Cosgrave on the Irish side and Ted Heath on the British side). Hume, who had long identified power-sharing as a key element to solving the problem of Northern Ireland’s divided people, immediately and wholly committed himself to the power-sharing arrangement contained in the Executive agreed at the Sunningdale Conference, in Berkshire, England.
The Sunningdale Agreement
In the preliminary talks leading to the Sunningdale Agreement in December 1973, it was clear that any discussion on a settlement in Northern Ireland would involve a recognition in London and Dublin that the conflict could not be defined solely within the Northern Irish State; rather, the Irish and British governments would have a considerable role to play in the creation of any new structure for Northern Ireland. That was an analysis that Unionists largely rejected. Similarly, the Hume/SDLP concept of a ‘New Ireland’ which provided for territorial unity by consent was assailed by the Unionist population on the grounds that a New Ireland was a Trojan Horse for a United Ireland by stealth. ‘Dublin is just a Sunningdale away’ ran a contemporary Unionist slogan. Undeniably, however, the Irish dimension to the Northern Irish crisis needed to be recognised: the Irish and British governments were expected in any authentic reassessment of the Northern Irish State to construct institutions that would reflect all of the strands of Northern Irish political identity.
At Sunningdale, the Irish delegation insisted that everything be recorded in writing. There were six meeting rooms at Sunningdale to accommodate the talks, though in practice a great deal of the negotiations actually took place in the corridors. The British representative was James Allen, who reported directly to the British government, and he was assisted by Philip Woodfield, Deputy Head of the Northern Ireland Office. Their counterparts from Dublin were Declan Costello and Garret FitzGerald, both of whom were immersed in the details. William Whitelaw, Secretary for State for Northern Ireland, put his political career at risk to guarantee Sunningdale’s success and at key moments in the negotiations he would speak at length with John Hume and the SDLP in camera to ensure their views were accommodated. Eventually, on 9 December 1973, a deal was agreed which provided for a power-sharing Executive in Belfast and a North–South Council of Ireland, in the form of a Consultative Assembly made up of thirty members from the Northern Ireland Assembly and thirty members from Dáil
