US president Donald Trump’s ability to create confusion and mayhem wherever he goes was on display last weekend when he casually backed the notion of a united Ireland. His host Taoiseach Micheál Martin was taken aback, while some of Trump’s most vocal critics in this country were delighted with his sudden burst of enthusiasm for Irish nationalism.
Given Trump’s support for anti-establishment nationalist parties across Europe, his united Ireland démarche may well have been a deliberate strategy. It has certainly emboldened Sinn Féin while putting the Taoiseach’s carefully calibrated approach to a shared island on the back foot for the moment.
Successive US presidents have had a direct impact on Ireland over the past half century or more, but not always in the expected way. The election of John F Kennedy as the first Irish-American Catholic president in 1960 prompted high hopes that he would weigh in and back the Irish government’s anti-partition campaign.
The then minister for external affairs Frank Aiken urged the ambassador to Washington Thomas J Kiernan to raise the partition issue with the president and persuade him to put public pressure on the British in advance of his visit to Ireland in 1963.
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However, reporting back after meeting Kennedy on St Patrick’s Day, Kiernan ruefully recorded that the president had no intention of adopting the Irish government line.
“He is by education British-inclined and in the present international conjuncture he makes no secret of his firm attachment to Britain ... He would therefore regard our suggestion as embarrassing to the British,” Kiernan explained to his superiors in Dublin. At a later meeting in June 1963, just before he made his historic visit to Ireland, Kennedy “looked as if another headache had struck him” when the ambassador, on instructions, raised partition again.
By contrast with Kennedy’s refusal to get involved, president Jimmy Carter, a southern Baptist, broke with the US diplomatic precedent of treating events in Northern Ireland as a purely internal British matter and made a wide-ranging public statement on the issue in August 1977.
Influenced by the speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill and senator Ted Kennedy, who were working closely with John Hume of the SDLP and Michael Lillis from the Irish embassy in Washington, he took the view that the US had a special relationship with Ireland, as well as Britain, and should make a determined effort to help resolve the conflict.
In the so-called Carter initiative, he called for the establishment in Northern Ireland of a government which would win acceptance from both traditions, alongside an overall solution which would have the support of the Irish government. In the event of such a settlement, the US would be prepared to see how job-creating investment could be encouraged, to the benefit of all the people of Northern Ireland.
His successor, Ronald Reagan – whose visit to Ireland in 1984 prompted much bigger protests than those that greeted Trump last weekend – followed up on the Carter initiative and discussed Northern Ireland with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher at every opportunity.
Garret FitzGerald in his autobiography recalled how he had appealed for Reagan’s help at a crucial stage in the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. Reagan responded by putting pressure on Thatcher and the difficulties in the way of the agreement were smoothed out.
When the Agreement was signed, Reagan honoured the Carter promise by setting up and funding – with the EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – the International Fund for Ireland. Former Irish ambassador Seán Donlon has written that the resources committed to the fund amounted to almost $1 billion , supporting more than 6,000 projects in Northern Ireland and Border areas.
The role of Bill Clinton as US president in the development of the peace process during the 1990s, culminating in the Belfast Agreement, has been well documented. The involvement of his administration in detailed work at every stage of the process was critical to its success.
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More recently, Joe Biden’s support for the Irish Government’s position on the Northern Ireland protocol that formed part of the UK’s Brexit agreement with the EU helped to bring the wrangling over its implementation to a conclusion.
In light of the serious commitment of successive US presidents to an even-handed approach to Ireland, the casual announcement by president Trump of his support for a united Ireland is probably about as serious as his ambition to take over Canada, but it has emboldened Sinn Féin to beat the Border poll drum even louder.
The Taoiseach was right to dismiss the attempt to pressurise the British government into an early referendum on unity as “ráiméis”. But the noise generated by the Trump intervention has made Martin’s task of building consensus about a shared future on this island that bit more difficult.
