As he celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with Ireland’s prime minister and selected two prominent Irish-Americans for diplomatic posts, President Clinton backed off Wednesday from the Emerald Isle’s most vexing problem: the division between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland.
The president said he will nominate Jean Kennedy Smith, sister of the late President John F. Kennedy and an advocate for the arts and the disabled, to be the ambassador to Ireland. He also asked Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn to serve as his emissary to the Vatican.
The president’s nomination of Smith would send to Ireland a member of what undoubtedly is the world’s best known Irish-American family.
Flynn’s decision to accept posting to the Vatican would leave Clinton without one of his chief liaisons to Irish-Catholics in the U.S.
But, just as he did in the election, Flynn, an abortion opponent, could in his new role help to smooth relations with the Roman Catholic Church, which opposes Clinton’s moves to ease restrictions on abortions.
Courting 44 million Americans of Irish descent during the campaign, Clinton promised to send a special envoy to Northern Ireland who could help mediate an end to the longstanding violent struggle.
His promise has run into opposition from the British, and Clinton on Wednesday backed off his pre-election eagerness to get involved in the decades-old dispute.
Clinton, wearing a bright green tie, met Wednesday with Ireland’s Prime Minister Albert Reynolds, and afterward the president said it was agreed that naming a special envoy or sending a fact-finding mission is something “that I should leave open.”
“I don’t think the United States can make peace in Northern Ireland,” said Clinton, adding that negotiations between the Irish and British governments-begun last year but now in suspension-“offer the real chance of producing a framework within which peace could occur.”
Reynolds, welcoming Clinton’s interest, said his government is “determined not to allow another generation to suffer the scourge and savagery of violence.”
But such talk was only a small part of what was otherwise two days of celebrating.
Reynolds presented Clinton with a crystal bowl filled with shamrocks. Later the two leaders went to a Capitol Hill corned beef-and-cabbage luncheon hosted by House Speaker Thomas Foley (D-Wash.).
Attending the American Ireland Fund dinner Tuesday night, the president was presented with a Waterford crystal vase engraved with a shamrock, a harp and a saxophone.
Clinton noted that he has some Irish blood-though he had to borrow a green pocket handkerchief to add the appropriate touch of color to his tuxedo.
“I have often been accused of having a certain gift for blarney,” he told the crowd in a Washington hotel, “although those were not the words used last year.”
