Kenny and O'Bama Talk Peace
Irish Prime Minister Edna Kenny came to Washington today to have lunch with the president, vice president and members of Congress, and then head to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for an evening gala of laughter, toasts, music, and good times. Kenny and President Barry O'Bama -- I only write it that way in this context – will be discussing world affairs today; not “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, which have ebbed, but troubles in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world.
The reasons that bombs and bullets are no longer the language of politics in Ulster are numerous: the people of Northern Ireland tired of the violence; the “hard men” of the IRA and the Protestant paramilitaries grew older, or died, or went to prison; the killing wasn’t working. But also, and mostly, men and women on both sides of the Irish Sea – and both sides of the Atlantic Ocean – rolled up their sleeves and undertook the painstaking drudgery of diplomacy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, the Good Book tells us. And in the mid-1990s, all parties to the Irish question engaged in this work. They were aided in these efforts by a president whose wife is now the U.S. secretary of state and who led a nation of immigrants far removed physically -- but not psychically -- from Ireland's trauma.
Nearly five decades ago, a grandson of Ireland, John F. Kennedy, undertook a nostalgic visit to his family’s ancestral homeland. It is doubtful any presidential trip to that island can ever rival JFK’s. It was, the Cork Examiner observed, “a union of hearts.” Nonetheless, Kennedy’s precedent has been followed by many, from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
Last year, Obama trekked to County Offaly, a place where the grandfather of his grandfather, a man named Falmouth Kearney, lived as a boy. Some 80 million Americans claim Irish blood, but even those who don’t can appreciate the message offerred by the current president across the sea. Obama celebrated not just Ireland’s contribution to the United States, but America’s contribution to the world: the idea that those with the humblest of origins can rise to the top in a land that affords its citizens such opportunities.
When John Kennedy visited the Emerald Isle in 1963, some of the island’s worst days were still ahead of it. The prime minister then was the famed statesman Eamon de Valera, who pushed JFK regarding Irish grievances with Great Britain.
“If you are weak in your dealings with the British, they will pressure you,” de Valera told his guest, relates James R. Carroll in his excellent book on the trip. “If you are subject to flattery, they will cajole you. Only if you are reasonable will they reason with you, and being reasonable with the British means letting them know that you are willing to throw an occasional bomb into one of their lorries.”
No Irish political leader would talk that way today, even in private, to an American president. Leaving 9/11 aside, too many bombs were tossed into lorries (and pubs, and marketplaces) and too many innocent people were killed from 1968 to 1998.
It is theologian John R.W. Stott, an Englishman and a Protestant cleric, who speaks for our age. Remarking on the Sermon on the Mount, Stott lauded a generation of diplomats, Bill Clinton and John Major included, when he noted, “Peacemaking is divine work.”
