US SECRETARY of state Hillary Clinton is expected to travel to London, Dublin and Belfast from October 10th until October 12th.
Though not yet officially confirmed by the US state department, the visit was mentioned in Belfast yesterday by Declan Kelly, Mrs Clinton’s envoy to Northern Ireland, and by Shaun Woodward, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who was speaking at the Labour Party conference in Brighton.
Mrs Clinton will spend about a day in each city, and will probably meet Taoiseach Brian Cowen, Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin and President Mary McAleese in Dublin.
They are likely to discuss Northern Ireland, North-South economic ties and a range of bilateral issues.
It will be Mrs Clinton’s first visit to Ireland since she became secretary of state.
The inclusion of the Irish-born Mr Kelly, a longtime Clinton loyalist and a successful businessman, shows the emphasis on investment. Mrs Clinton met Peter Robinson, the First Minister for Northern Ireland, and Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister, on the sidelines of a session devoted to the Northern economy at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York last week.
Mrs Clinton is likely to link US investment to progress on political questions in Northern Ireland.
“Put bluntly, if they get their political act together, economic advantages will flow,” said a knowledgeable source. In particular, Mrs Clinton wants to advance devolution in policing and justice in the North.
British prime minister Gordon Brown will visit Stormont on Monday in an effort to secure the troubled devolution of policing and justice powers.
He will meet political leaders including Mr Robinson and Mr McGuinness. The First Minister and Deputy First Minister have had an increasingly strong worded and public spat on the issue.
The DUP has denounced as absurd claims by the Northern Secretary and others that inward investment would flow from an agreement to devolve policing and justice powers to Stormont.
The party’s deputy leader Nigel Dodds and industry minister Arlene Foster dismissed Mr Woodward’s claims, made at the British Labour Party conference in Brighton, that successful devolution of policing and justice powers would make the North more attractive to investors.
“The notion that investors will be taking into consideration whether or not we have a policing and justice minister is utterly and completely absurd,” Mr Dodds said.
Mrs Foster said that on her overseas investment trips “not one person has ever raised the issue of policing and justice with me”.
“Not one single business figure or investor has ever said to me: ‘I am holding off investing in Northern Ireland because the devolution of policing powers to the Assembly has not happened yet,’” she added.
DUP MP Gregory Campbell has warned there was no hope of policing and justice powers being devolved in the immediate future.
He said: “I have never met any potential inward investor who has come either from New York or Johannesburg or anywhere else who gets off the plane in Belfast, goes to InvestNI and says, ‘Well, what’s the policing and justice situation like here?’ It just does not happen.”