Starr gets taste of `neutral recognition' in tour of Dublin

President Clinton's long-running adversary, Mr Kenneth Starr, is in Ireland and experiencing what he describes as "neutral recognition…

President Clinton's long-running adversary, Mr Kenneth Starr, is in Ireland and experiencing what he describes as "neutral recognition".

Mr Starr, a former judge and independent counsel on both the financial issues of Whitewater and the more salacious issue of Mr Clinton's relationship with Ms Monica Lewinsky, delivers the fifth annual Nissan lecture at Trinity College in Dublin tomorrow night. Organised by the School of Law in Trinity, Mr Starr's lecture will focus on the lessons to be learned from America's age of independent counsel.

A 20-minute question time period is also expected to cover such issues as how to (nearly) bring down a President and how to turn a lowly White House intern into an international star. The cream of the State's legal fraternity is expected to attend.

Mr Starr is staying in the upmarket Westbury Hotel in the centre of Dublin. It is his first visit to Ireland and he is due to spend a week holidaying in the State with his wife and three children.

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Speaking to The Irish Times yesterday evening, he said he had spent a "wonderful" day touring the city by car. "I visited St Patrick's Cathedral and St Stephen's Green and then we had tea in the afternoon," he said.

While he would not be drawn on the details of his speech tomorrow evening - for which he will receive no fee - he said he was looking forward to touring the State with his family "and meeting as many people as possible".

The world's most famous legal eagle had been recognised a few times as he toured the capital, he said, and the response of those who spotted him was one of "neutral recognition". He added he was "delighted" to be here for the lecture and that his reactions to all he had seen so far were "very positive".

He is understood to have agreed to only one slot on radio with RTE and one newspaper interview. A source said this was because he was very conscious of the level of support for Bill Clinton in the Republic.

In the US meanwhile, controversy still abounds about whether the 21-year-old Special Prosecutor law, which created Mr Starr's job after Watergate, should be scrapped.

Mr Starr himself has said he opposes renewing the law, which is now viewed with intense cynicism by the American public. "The statute should not be re-authorised," he wrote in a testimony for his appearance before a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

The intricacies of this issue are likely to be explored at length during Mr Starr's lecture tomorrow but what most people will want to hear is his reaction to the criticism he has received for his treatment of Monica Lewinsky, his efforts to impeach President Clinton and for what some regard as the semi-pornographic content of the Starr report.

If sales of Ms Lewinsky's much-hyped autobiography here are anything to go by, that interest does not appear as acute as might be expected. A spokesman for Eason on O'Connell Street in Dublin said that it had sold only 100 copies of Monica: My Story since its release in March.