What Hillary Clinton Accomplished in Ireland

In a story widely picked up in the U.S. media, Lord David Trimble—once an Ulster Unionist Partyleader, now a member of the Conservative Party—while speaking to The Daily Telegraph this weekend, dismissed Hillary Clinton’s contributions to the Northern Ireland peace process, calling it “silly” and saying Clinton was active only in a “woman politicky sort of way.” Here, veteran Irish journalist and author Nuala O’Faolain’s responds:

Oh friends, let me mark your cards!

I’m telling you as an Irish journalist, who was in Belfast in the bad, dark times, and has a view as to how much Hillary Clinton mattered: watch who is being quoted about her track record here. Watch who is talking about women.

They did lose, you know, the loyalist/unionist tight little pro-British, Protestant majority. A long-worked-for, brilliantly complex Peace Deal did screw the unionists out of the power they’d ruthlessly exerted over Northern Ireland for more than 300 years. A new Ireland began with the Anglo-Irish Peace Agreement of 1998, and it is a pleasure to mention Westminster and Washington and the EU and Dublin in the shaping of the achievement. The one lot of players that was ignored at that time and has been utterly forgotten since then is the sad little rump of former unionist leaders. That’s who is being quoted about Hillary Clinton.

Nobody’s asked their opinion on anything at all for years.  Then, hey presto! A right wing English newspaper sees an opportunity to put down Hillary Clinton and all of a sudden the phone rings in forgotten bungalows. Hey, old guys, what’s your opinion?

There was never a chance that that lot ever took anything any woman did in public life with respect. Especially, I might say, any American woman. We’re talking deep, impacted misogyny here.

Lord Trimble, who was given half a Nobel prize to unprize certain grips from Northern Ireland, says Clinton was just a cheerleader—and while he’s at it, he insults the few other women who tried to come into the political endgame. “The Women’s Coalition will think they were important,” he’s quoted as saying. “Other people beg to differ.”

The stuff is hardly worth passing on.

But it is worth revisiting the broken Belfast of the end of the twentieth century, where Hillary put in her time. It goes without saying that she was not one of the secret, fulltime peace dealmakers; indeed, journalists like me didn’t know how far forward Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and John Hume and George Mitchell were beginning to get. I don’t know what she knew about that gathering.

I do know ordinary women weren’t allowed anywhere near all that. About 95 percent of all the women in Northern Ireland were outside every loop. No one took any notice of women’s attempts at activism.

What Hillary did to transform matters was turn up. She turned up. She turned up with hope and energy to a city which, when I moved there in 1998, was leaving one murdered Catholic a week just on my street, merely to keep the level of intimidation going. A city where women were almost all tribally opposed to each other. A city where there were very few meetings and if they were women’s meetings they were jeered at or ignored. She came at least four times with President Clinton—and twice on her own.

It may sound small to people now that what she came for was a woman’s conference on one occasion and a lecture on another, that she knew people’s names and histories and took note of them—and was no doubt sometimes lied to and misled and laughed at by women as well as men (outsiders often strike skeptical locals as simpleminded).

But she kept turning up anyway.

It was not small what she did.

Not small at all.

When the old guys obediently trot out their criticisms of what she did in Belfast, ask yourself: Who else did what she did? Who else gave what she did? Who else gave at all?

Even today, when it is all over, I don’t know whether even Hillary Rodham Clinton knows how much someone like me thanks her—how aware I still am of what her bright, friendly, caring  presence meant, when despair was very near.