Clinton Urges Final Push in Irish Peace Talks

Amid annual St. Patrick’s Day celebrations here, President Clinton met with key players in the Northern Ireland peace process Tuesday, urging them to seize the chance for a settlement that all agree is tantalizingly near.

“This is the chance of a lifetime for peace in Ireland,” Clinton said, paraphrasing the message he was delivering to Irish political leaders gathered in the nation’s capital. “You must get it done. You must do it for yourselves and your children.

“Concessions that today might seem hard to accept will seem so much less important in the light of an accord that brings hope and peace and an end to violence,” the president added. “No one will be the loser if agreement is reached.”

Clinton made his remarks after meeting at the White House with Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. The 40-minute meeting dwelt almost exclusively on the final steps needed to end the recurrent waves of sectarian violence that have set Protestants against Roman Catholics in Eire’s six northern counties for nearly 80 years.

The latest round of what the Irish call “the troubles” has sputtered on since 1969, blighting normal life and claiming more than 3,000 lives in the British province.

Clinton, together with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), met with Ahern and political leaders from both sides of Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide. A White House official said the visitors were given the same basic message: Push forward now for an agreement.

“These weren’t detailed negotiations today. There was some cheerleading and a little cajoling if necessary,” the official said.

Mediators have set a deadline of Easter, which falls this year on April 12, for completion of the current round of talks between Northern Ireland’s sectarian political leaders. If an agreement is reached, it will be subject to an all-Ireland referendum the following month.

Negotiations have progressed on the basis of giving the province’s minority Catholics substantial power for the first time while ensuring that Northern Ireland remains under British rule for the foreseeable future.

Just last week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair described the talks as “agonizingly close to agreeing certainly to the framework, the outline, of a settlement.”

Clinton, who traces his own roots to an Irish ancestry, has been involved in the search for peace in Northern Ireland since early in his presidency. As early as the summer of 1994, senior White House officials met quietly with Protestant political leaders from the troubled province in the search for a settlement.

A year later at the White House, Clinton received Gerry Adams--leader of the outlawed Irish Republican Army’s political wing, Sinn Fein--in a controversial move that angered Britain’s then-prime minister, John Major.

The peace talks are mediated by former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell.

During a breakfast for reporters at the British Embassy on Tuesday, British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam praised Clinton’s 1995 visit to Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital, saying it “made a difference” in bringing the parties closer together. She also praised Mitchell’s work.

“I don’t think we’d all still be there [at the talks] if George wasn’t with us,” she said.

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Mowlam said she hopes that Clinton will pay a return visit to Ireland before any referendum because she predicted that his presence would swell the vote in favor of the pact.

“The bigger the vote we get in the referendum, the more marginal those who are using violence will become,” she said. But she cautioned, “I don’t believe the random violence will stop,” because the paramilitary organizations on both sides of the controversy are trying to destroy the peace process.

While conceding that the process still suffers from a lack of confidence on all sides, Mowlam said, “Three years ago, you wouldn’t have expected to see all the parties at a St. Patrick’s Day reception at the British Embassy,” as happened this year.