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 said to Ambassador Sean Ronan, “that’s the man … that’s the man I will listen to”. ’ The first horseman 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