MUCH of the ground covered by this book - Irish America during the Troubles - has already been gone over in at least two earlier volumes, The American Connection by Jack Holland (Poolbeg) and Washington's Irish Policy 1916-1986 by Sean Cronin (Anvil). Both authors were close to the story they were telling, and they told it well. This chronology of events by Andrew Wilson, an academic at Loyola University in Chicago, adds significantly to the detail of the last three decades, and he has taken pains to be fair to all sides. But I was disappointed to find that, despite the dates in its title, the last few years up to 1995 are condensed into a lightly researched postscript.
These three or four years constitute one of the most important and dramatic periods in Irish American history relevant to the conflict in Ireland. In this time, thanks to Bill Clinton and "new thinking" both in the United States and in Dublin, Irish America came in from the cold and helped alter the course of what the author calls the "Ulster conflict".
Clearly the end of the Cold War helped create the conditions for historic Irish American gains. It diminished the importance of the "special relationship" under which the State Department view prevailed in Washington that Northern Ireland was an internal problem of the United Kingdom.
The relationship had never been more than dented before. Irish American Congress members including Senator Edward Kennedy and the late "Tip" O'Neill, working closely with the government of Dr Garret FitzGerald, managed to persuade Ronald Reagan to overrule the State Department and raise Northern Ireland with Margaret Thatcher. President Reagan went on to endorse the 1995 Anglo Irish Agreement with more enthusiasm than Margaret Thatcher might have liked.
But there was no question of the White House doing anything in those days for which it did not have tacit British approval. The first attempts by Irish Americans to get a US President to defy the State Department was more colourful but less effective. Father Sean McManus of the Irish National Caucus and others persuaded President Jimmy Carter to walk in the St Patrick's Day Parade in New York, where someone stuck an "England Get Out of Ireland" badge on his lapel, and to make some outspoken comments about human rights in Northern Ireland.
Unsophisticated as this approach might have been, it pointed to the possibility that one day, it just might work. And it highlighted the disgraceful failure by Dublin to build up friends and contacts either in Washington or in Irish America.
I found the account in this book of the hijacking of Jimmy Carter particularly fascinating in the light of the subsequent and successful recruitment of Bill Clinton by Irish Americans, which I witnessed as Washington correspondent for The Irish Times during the last four years.
The motivation of Irish Americans then was the same as now - to gain the American president's support for their cause. But in the 1990s the approach was more sophisticated, the subject more willing and the cause had changed.
One of the most significant and little acknowledged factors which brought Irish America to this point was the fight for green cards for Irish immigrants and undocumented Irish in the last 1980s. Prominent members of Congress and grass roots activists joined forces to secure two major visa programmes, which were named after their sponsors, Congressmen Brian Donnelly and Bruce Morrison.
The success of their campaign marked a new level of professional lobbying, and most importantly brought home to activists that a unified Irish American lobby pursuing legitimate goals, and backed by Dublin, could gain great things and capitalise on the enormous reservoir of goodwill in high places in America for Ireland and the Irish.
Irish America itself was also changing. Corporate Irish America was in the ascendancy. One in four CEOs or company presidents in America is now of Irish descent and top executives like Bill Flynn, Chuck Feeney, Don Keough, Dennis Kelleher and the Dunfey brothers have become big names in the Irish American community (as are union leaders like Tom O'Donahue and John Sweeney of the AFLCIO).
Their inclination, and that of the new generation of Irish American strategists like Bruce Morrison and New York publisher Niall O'Dowd, is towards engagement rather than confrontation. There were political calculations at work in this but for the first time many important Irish Americans have been facing up to the political realities of Northern Ireland and seeking dialogue with the Unionists they have traditionally demonised. They make the stereotype of the Irish American with which we are all familiar as relevant to America as the barefooted colleen is to modern Ireland.
THE strategy of the new Irish American leaders was to make common cause with the Dublin government and northern nationalist leaders to persuade President Clinton to involve the US administration in Northern Ireland as a counterweight to Britain.
When they succeeded in getting Mr Clinton to authorise a visa for Gerry Adams in January 1994, they not only cracked the "special relationship" between London and Washington, they gave a vital shot in the arm to the peace process, probably advancing the IRA ceasefire by up to a year.
They were helped, of course, by Mr Clinton's conversion to the view that he himself is Irish American ("Look at me, I'm Irish," he said once); the fact that there is a strong willed Irish American in the Park in the figure of Jean Kennedy Smith, and - most crucially - by the coincidence that the process towards peace in Ireland was already well under way.
President Clinton's involvement continues to make a difference. It has provided a focus for the peace process a number of times, viz the President's investment conference in May 1995, his triumphal visit to Belfast in November, and the Mitchell disarmament commission. And of course it works two ways. As long as the US president is helping nudge the process along, Irish America will wholeheartedly endorse the democratic process.