[Extract, p.15-18]

Young Ireland. Do you have a few minutes?

Mitchell Go ahead, yes.

Young Sort of putting the cart before the horse, but referring back to your observation that in the rhythm of human events, there is a time when people feel the need to have something done, what is now—we’re referring to healthcare. People saying something is wrong, something has got to be done. And then you look at the bloody and long history of conflict in Ireland. Did you have a sense, when you got first involved in this, that that was happening, or not? When you started out into this. It doesn’t look from the outside as if that were the case when you started out, so it’s kind of interesting. And then after the Good Friday Agreement gets put to a vote, with 71 percent and 94 percent.

Mitchell That’s right. It was amazing. Well, let me go back a little bit. My father’s parents were born in Ireland. They emigrated to the United States some time before the turn of the twentieth century. My father was born in Boston, his family name was Kilroy, but he never knew his parents, because he and all his siblings were raised in orphanages. So my father was raised in an orphanage that existed at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Huntington Avenue, where the Boston Symphony now stands. He was ultimately, after several years, adopted by an elderly couple from Maine who were not Irish. I never heard my father say the word Ireland in his life. He had no education, he left school after fourth grade. My mother was an illiterate immigrant who couldn’t read or write, and they never traveled anywhere. So I had no sense of Irish heritage as an adult or when I entered the Senate. I knew about my father’s background. I had never been to Ireland and my father had never been there and to the best of my knowledge, no member of my family had ever been there.

One of the areas in which I got to know Ted some was with respect to Irish issues. Ted and Chris Dodd and Pat Moynihan were very active and interested in them, and began increasingly to discuss them with me. They were not the only ones, there were others as well, but they were among those who I probably discussed this with more.

Young This is while you were still in the Senate.

Mitchell While I was in the Senate. After I became Majority Leader and after I began in Ireland, completely unrelated to me, to try to get a process going, there was a dispute over a visa for Gerry Adams. I recall Ted and Pat Moynihan and Chris Dodd speaking to me about joining on a letter, to try to get the President to grant a visa, which was very controversial at the time. The U.S. Ambassador in London was adamantly opposed to it, some in the State Department were. It was granted and it helped move the process forward, and so I gradually began to become acquainted with it on a Congressional visit. I think we visited Russia at the time and stopped on the way back. I got off the plane and spent two days in Ireland, the only time I had ever spent there before now, just to become acquainted with it, and I began to develop an interest in it.

By the time I got to Northern Ireland, as the advisor to the President and the Secretary of State, after I left the Senate, in 1995, a nascent effort was underway. A ceasefire had been declared a few months earlier, a common nationalist position was developing, and so it was like a little seedling was developing, but it needed a lot more effort, and that’s what led into the effort that I had. During the time I was there—although during the negotiations, I was not an employee of the U.S. government, I was an independent person—I stayed in close contact with President Clinton and with Senator Kennedy, Senator Moynihan, and Senator Dodd, and a few House members who were very active and interested in the subject. In fact, when I first went, my participation was bitterly opposed by some on the unionist side.

Young He’s from the Kennedy stable.

Mitchell Exactly.

Young That’s what they said.

Mitchell I had, in their minds three strikes against me. I was an American, I was Catholic, and I was a Democrat and a friend of Ted Kennedy’s. Those were seen as nationalist credentials. But over time, it worked out pretty well. Ted was very active, very well informed and very much involved in Northern Ireland issues all the time that I was there. Of course for a period of time, his sister Jean [Kennedy Smith] was the Ambassador in Ireland, and he visited. She was very active. And so I used to see him, not often, but a fair number of times, to brief him and other interested members of Congress on what was going on, and get their views and so forth.

Young During the negotiations that ended with the Good Friday 1998, what was the network besides President Clinton, who were working on this with you?

Mitchell In the U.S.?

Young In the U.S.

Mitchell It was fairly limited. When I first went, I went as the President’s representative, but when the British and Irish governments asked me to chair the negotiations, they were very explicit in requiring that I not have any direct relationship with the U.S. government, to the extreme that I had three members—I had a very small staff. Three members of my staff, two who had worked with me in the Senate, one who had been a State Department employee. The British and Irish governments insisted on assuming responsibility for paying their salaries. They offered to pay me, I declined. I really did want to be independent, but they paid all my expenses. The U.S. government stopped paying my expenses and the British and Irish did.

So they wanted to be able to say, fully accurately, that I was completely independent and I was not a U.S. government representative there. At the same time, one of the reasons they wanted me to do it is they knew of my prior relationship with the U.S. government, and the fact that I had been Senate Majority Leader, had been involved with President Clinton and all the others. So what I did was I maintained a regular briefing schedule.

For example, many Congressional delegations go to Ireland, and I would meet with them there and brief them. I would come to Washington regularly and would meet and brief them, and invariably, Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd and Pat Moynihan would be part of the group that I met with. There were many others, particularly in the House, who were interested as well. Now, in terms of support, they were always fully supportive of the effort.

Young Yes.

Mitchell In fact, it was a common refrain, What can we do to help? That’s what I’d be asked all the time, What can we do to help? Sometimes it would call for action, statements, calls. Many times I asked Ted or President Clinton or some other prominent American to call someone in Northern Ireland, to make a point, make an argument and so forth. I think in general, the American effort was, We want peace, you’re there, you work it out and we’ll support what you’re doing, and that’s basically what happened.

Young Ted started out, in his first public statement, quite a way back, and it really got the British government going. It was Brits out, sort of.

Mitchell Yes. But over time, attitudes changed.

Young But he came around. Did you know John Hume?

Mitchell Oh, very well. Yes, extremely well, spent a lot of time with John Hume, a truly great man. A truly great man who contributed a lot, and John of course idolized Ted and all of the Kennedys, and they in turn felt the same about him. So there’s no doubt that American attitudes evolved. There’s no doubt that attitudes evolved on the island of Ireland and to some extent in the United Kingdom, but that was because there began to be a recognition that the course that they were on held no promise for the future.

The notion that the nationalists in Northern Ireland could forcibly expel the British from Northern Ireland was a fantasy; it could never be realized. The notion, on the other hand, that citizens of the UK unreservedly supported the policies of the local governance of Northern Ireland, which was for a prior period in history discriminatory, could be sustained, was also a fantasy. Both sides recognized that as difficult as the alternative of getting to peace was, it was better than what was going on.

In fact, during the negotiations in the last stages, when we came down to the end, the most effective argument I used, I felt, was saying to the participants on both sides that If this fails, there will a return to conflict. The one certainty about the return to conflicts is each resumption is more violent and destructive than the preceding one, if for no reason other than weaponry improves and it has enhanced the ability of humans to kill humans increasingly over time, and that’s what you will be remembered for in history.

Young Sure.

Mitchell It was a powerful disincentive to fail. It was an incentive not to fail, and so it couldn’t have occurred ten or twenty years earlier, because attitudes were just different then. They had to go through the experience that they had gone through to get to where they were, and I think Ted really was the same way, along with almost all Americans who were actively involved in the process. Well, thank you very much.

Young Thank you.

Mitchell It was a pleasure.