US officials were angered by 'blase' attitude to IRA
The US government was angry and perplexed that neither the Irish or British governments were putting pressure on Gerry Adams to insist on the end of IRA criminality prior to entering Stormont.
The US special envoy on Northern Ireland pulled up the Irish Government after Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern said that Sinn Fein support for policing should not be a "precondition" for the party going into government. In a series of recorded interviews with high-ranking US officials involved in the negotiations prior to the settlement, an American academic has revealed that following Mr Ahern's remarks in May 2006, the Americans issued a "call for clarification" from the Department of Foreign Affairs.
The research shows that the Bush administration was infuriated by the IRA's training of FARC guerrillas in Colombia and also by the murder of Robert McCartney and the Northern Bank robbery. They insisted that Sinn Fein buy into policing and that the IRA decommission and declare and end to its "war
The revelations come as former Minister of State Liz O Donnell admitted that the Irish Government had been "taking risks with democracy" when it first began to bring Sinn Fein into the peace process during the 1990s.
"There had to be a suspension of critical faculties," she tells interviewer Bryan Dobson in RTE's One to One programme on Monday.
But US officials believe that appeasement of Sinn Fein and the IRA by the Irish and British governments continued right up to last year.
Despite the accepted belief that the Clinton Administration was more instrumental in pushing the peace process, Mary Alice C Clancy of Queen's University's School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy contends that President Bush's envoys, Richard Haass and Mitchell Reiss, played a greater role in pushing Sinn Fein towards an agreement acceptable to the DUP than either the British or Irish.
Senior US administration officials said that the decision to withdraw Gerry Adams's visa for a fundraising trip to the US was key to Adams moving the IRA to decommission arms and join the Northern Ireland Policing Board.
One of the officials interviewed described the murder of Robert McCartney and the Northern bank robbery as the biggest such crime in history.
The combination of the two events was, according to one US official, "the perfect storm", and Adams would feel its full effects when he travelled to the US in March 2005. If Dublin was proving a 'cold house' for Adams, Washington would prove even frostier on St Patrick's Day. He was not invited for the annual St Patrick's Day celebration at the White House, while Robert McCartney's sisters and partner were the guests of honour instead.
Ms Clancy quotes another senior US official as saying there was amazement in the Bush administraion that "elements of the Irish Government, the British government appeared rather blase about IRA criminality."
"This was the biggest irritant between us and the Northern Ireland Office. I don't believe that they had ever issued a policy statement to the police to tell them to ignore IRA criminality as long as it did not turn into bombs on the mainland, but I believe that many, many police thought they operated under those rules. And the explanation we got quietly when we asked about a well organised £1.5 million robbery was: 'If we were to say it was the IRA, we'll be accused of interfering in the (June 2004 European election, in which Sinn Fein gained two seats) outcome.'"
Ms Clancy also quotes senior officials as saying the United States' attitude to Sinn Fein changed in the light of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US and after the three IRA men were caught on their way home from training the FARC narco-terrorist group and when Gerry Adams visited Cuba against US advice.
She writes: "Upon becoming special envoy in 2001, (Richard) Haass made it clear that any solution to Northern Ireland did not lie in Washington, and that it was up to the local leaders to strike a deal. Events, however, would cause Haass to assume a more active role. Adams's decision to travel to Cuba against US advice in 2001 and the discovery of three IRA members in Colombia, allegedly training FARC guerrillas, exactly one month before the September 11 terrorist attacks caused the Sinn Fein leader problems in the US, and one official has admitted that the administration's view of Adams 'dimmed' shortly thereafter. Moreover, Haass's unwillingness to give Sinn Fein the benefit of the doubt in perpetuity was exposed on September 11, when Haass -- to borrow from the graffiti of south Belfast -- told Adams to 'FARC off' as it were."
She quotes a US official stating that after the replacement of special envoy Haass with the new envoy, Mitchell Reiss from Massachusetts, and the Robert McCartney murder and Northern Bank robbery, the US introduced the visa ban on Adams and became even more insistent on Sinn Fein signing up to policing. And, it was at this point that the American protest was made over Dermot Ahern's interview in The Irish Times.
