Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on April 16, 1999:
Senator George Mitchell
Thank you very much, John, for that very generous introduction. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your presence and for your warm reception.
I began this book tour about ten days ago in New York, and at the first event my wife accompanied me. There was a huge poster blown up of the book with a big picture of me and a very generous introduction somewhat like the one John just gave me and a nice reception. When we left I embarked to travel around the country, and my wife said "Well, now you’d better be careful you don’t get a swell head every day at noon and at night getting these very nice introductions and pictures and blowups and signing of your book." I said, "Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be very careful about that". Well, lo and behold, the very next night I spoke at the Connecticut World Affairs Council and there was an even bigger picture, an even bigger blowup of the book, and an even more generous introduction. In fact, I’m sad to confess I began to succumb to feeling an inflated notion of my self importance. I began to think that maybe I really was as good as all of these words. Then I walked into the room where the book signing was to take place and a very nice woman was there and she stood up and said "Well, I’m glad to meet you, but I must tell you I’m very surprised and disappointed." I said "Why is that?" She said "Because you don’t look anything like your photograph." I said "Well, that’s something over which I have no control, but will you explain to me what you mean?" She said "Well, I don’t have to explain it Here, look for yourself." And she handed me a poster with a very large photograph of Henry Kissinger.
So I’ve continued this tour in a properly deflated manner, but I really hadn’t realized it until Curtis said it that I have been here five times. It really is a great a pleasure to be back. I know from that experience that your programs are limited in time, especially those held at lunch because people have to go off elsewhere, so I want to begin with two assurances: The first is I assure you I’m not going to speak for the entire hour, that I will leave time for questions. The second assurance is that I easily could speak for the entire hour if I chose to do so because one of the dubious skills I acquired in fifteen years in the United States Senate was the ability to speak at indefinite length on any subject with no prior notice, usually neither possessing nor conveying any knowledge but taking up a lot of time--which is one of the principal qualifications for service in the Senate.
I had the pleasure right before lunch to meet with a group of high school students. They’re all over here now. Why don’t you students stand up and let’s give them a round of applause to welcome them. After listening to their tough questions I’m confident that I can handle anything from the rest of this crowd. But it reminded me of a story that I’ve heard told in Ireland about a young student who was taking his university examination and it was more difficult than he had anticipated. When he got to the last question he couldn’t think of what to write for the answer, so he wrote "God alone knows the answer to this question," and then, since they were about to break for Christmas. he said "Merry Christmas." About ten days later he got the paper back from the professor, who wrote "God got an A. You flunked. Happy New Year." That tells you something about the Irish sense of humor, which is really great. I spent three and a half years there and learned that it is not only a beautiful country in terms of the landscape, but in terms of the people. They’re warm and wonderful, generous and lively. They are talkative and can be quarrelsome and that has led to some problems in the north of Ireland which is the subject matter of my book and will be the subject matter of my remarks here today.
The long and often tragic history of Ireland is much too detailed to tell in a few moments here and so I’ll make no effort to go back over the 800 years of tangled relations between Britain and Ireland and the conflicts that have resulted from that. Nor will I attempt to provide a detailed analysis of the peace agreement that was reached last Good Friday because it is very long, 70 pages, and covers a large range of issues. I’ll just touch briefly on some aspects of the history and the negotiations that led to the conflict so that perhaps you can have some understanding of the background there. Then, of course, I will look forward to the question and answer period.
Ireland is a land that is very rich in the history of literature and poetry and so I’d like to begin today, as I began my book, with a few lines from a poem. The poet is no one you’ve ever heard of. She’s a young woman who was fourteen at the time she wrote the poem. She’d lived her entire life in Northern Ireland and during her entire life the bitter sectarian conflict raged at its peak. The title of her poem, written as she has since told me, in the depth of teenage despair was "No Hope But Tomorrow" and it begins with these words: "I am afraid, afraid of the land that I lived in, that I was born in, the ground I tread each day resounds with shots and with screams. It is saturated with tears, tears that have never ceased flowing. My life has been full of murder but I have never known peace." Sadly, those moving words describe life for many in Northern Ireland over the quarter century of sectarian war that has come to be known as simply "the troubles." Thousands were killed, tens of thousands injured. More than the number of dead and wounded, however, was the scarring of the heart and soul of almost every person in that society. The well-attended extremely emotional and highly publicized funeral became a staple of life in that society and a vicious cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation, assassination and bombings set in, creating an overwhelming sense of fear and anxiety.
About a decade ago, in the l980s, the British and Irish governments, which had not been cooperating since Irish independence was obtained earlier in the century, concluded that if there was to be any hope of bringing these periodic outbursts of sectarian violence to an end it would have to begin with the governments themselves. And so they set aside their differences and began to work together to create a process that they hoped would culminate in a negotiation that might produce peace in Northern Ireland. For more than a decade they persevered over many obstacles and with great difficulties, including domestic political difficulties in both countries and through several prime ministers of different parties. When the history of this era is written I think the British and Irish governments will finally get the credit that they’ve not properly received for their central role in establishing the foundation that led to this peace agreement. When, finally, in 1996 they were able to get a negotiation underway the prime ministers of Britain and Ireland asked me to serve as chairman of the negotiations.
I had been in Northern Ireland for a year and a half in other capacities, beginning as President Clinton’s special advisor and then serving as Chairman of the Commission on the Disarmament of paramilitary organizations there. So I was very well aware of the daunting task and the unlikelihood of success, but in reflecting on the Prime Minister’s request I thought about my own life. My father was the orphaned son of immigrants from Ireland; my mother was herself an immigrant from Lebanon. Neither of my parents had any education. My mother could not read or write, and they worked at the most menial of tasks in our society. Because of their efforts, because of the openness of American society, the most free, the most just, the most open society in all of human history, and because I received a helping hand from so many people along the way in my own lifetime, I could not refuse the request of the Prime Ministers. My father, a man who had no education but who had a lot of wisdom, taught me that every human being has an obligation to help other human beings in need, and he said, "The better you do, the greater the obligation." That the people I was asked to help were in the land of my father’s heritage was but a fortuitous coincidence. That I could help was what mattered, so I undertook to chair the negotiations in recognition of the fact that most people there regarded it as a hopeless task.
Indeed, one of the most striking things about my time in Northern Ireland was the pervasive attitude of pessimism that existed. It’s a small and very well-informed society, and shortly after I went there I became very well known. Every day on the street, in a restaurant, the airport, in the lobby of the hotel, people would stop me over and over again and, strikingly, no matter who they were, which community they were in or what their background, they all said almost exactly the same thing: "Thank you very much, Senator. We appreciate what you’re doing. God bless you." And then, always, the despair, "But you’re wasting your time. This conflict can’t be solved. We’ve been killing each other for centuries and we’re doomed to go on killing each other forever." For the two years of the negotiations the polls consistently showed public pessimism. Indeed, one week before the agreement was reached the polls showed that more than 80% of the people of Northern Ireland thought an agreement not possible.
Fortunately, we were able to reach an agreement. The title of my book is Making Peace, because a durable and sustainable peace has not been achieved. When I announced the agreement I said that it did not by itself provide or guarantee peace, but only made its achievement possible. I predicted that there would be many difficult decisions to make, many controversial issues yet to resolve and that is, of course, occurring, as John pointed out so accurately in his introduction. Right now, today, the parties in Northern Ireland and the Prime Ministers of Britain and Ireland have been meeting, trying to get past the latest controversy--so far without success--but they will resume next Monday. My hope and prayer is that they will be able to come together to reach an agreement.
It won’t be easy. There is no history or culture of compromise or working together there. Indeed, one of the most unusual aspects of the negotiations and a measure of their complexity is that under the legislation enacted by the British Parliament, creating the legal basis for the negotiations, a total of twelve parties were eligible to participate - the two governments and ten Northern Ireland political parties--and yet in two years of negotiations, not once, not for a single moment were we ever able to get all of them into the same room at the same time. Some parties were excluded, some were expelled, several walked out. I learned early that the dramatic walkout is a staple of politics in Northern Ireland. Finally, for a variety of reasons which I think only history will be able to effectively comprehend and record, we were able to get an agreement to find common ground to bring them together.
Political leaders are maligned in every society, including Northern Ireland, but I think the real heroes of this process are the political leaders of Northern Ireland and the people of Northern Ireland. The Prime Ministers of Britain and Ireland deserve a lot of credit, President Clinton deserves a lot of credit. People there recognize that there would not have been an agreement without his commitment. He’s the first and only American president ever to place this problem high on the American agenda, the first and only American president ever to visit Northern Ireland while in office. But in the end it was the leaders themselves who risked not just their political careers but their lives and the physical safety of their families to take risks to get the agreement. The huge irony now is that the opponents, both those who engaged in violence through bombing and assassinations and those who oppose it in the political arena, have failed to bring the agreement down. The failure now can only come from those who supported it and who disagree over its interpretation and implementation. What we’re seeing in Northern Ireland is what we saw in the Balkans, what we saw in the Middle East. Getting a peace agreement is very difficult in these conflict situations. Getting implementation of the agreement is even harder, and it takes a great deal of patience and perseverance and leadership, including that of the United State, to see that these agreements are in fact carried out.
I want to conclude these brief remarks with the way I concluded the book. The negotiations lasted two years; they were extremely long and tedious. Think about this: listening to the same politicians say the same thing, not for two hours, not for two weeks, but for two years. That was by far the hardest thing I had to do. Now, I had good preparation for it. I served as Majority Leader of the Senate for six years and I had listened to sixteen-hour speeches. One fellow spoke for eight hours after he got up and said "I want to make a few comments." So, although I didn’t realize it at the time, the Lord in the mysterious way in which He works was preparing me for the Northern Ireland peace negotiations. It was difficult and during that time, of course, I came to know the political leaders very well and then the last two weeks were pretty much nonstop, the last two days were nonstop. We didn’t sleep at all for about 40 hours, so when we finally reached the agreement there was a great deal of emotion, total exhaustion. In our final meeting I told the delegates that for me reaching the agreement was the realization of a dream that had sustained me through the most difficult years of my life.
Now that that dream has been realized I have a new dream, and it is this: in a few years I will take my young son to Northern Ireland. We’ll travel through that beautiful country, feeling the warmth of a generous people, and then one afternoon we’ll drive to the Northern Ireland Assembly Building where we’ll sit quietly in the Visitors Gallery, and we’ll watch and listen as the members of that assembly debate the ordinary issues of life in a democratic society: education and health care, tourism and agriculture. There will be no talk of wa,r for the war will have long been over. There will be no talk of peace, for peace will be taken for granted. On that day, the day on which peace is taken for granted in Northern Ireland, I will be truly and finally fulfilled.
Thank you very much for your attention and your invitation.