Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T22:00:33.849Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ronald Reagan in Ireland, 1984: A Different Cold War?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2013

VAN GOSSE
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

On 2–5 June 1984, Ronald Reagan toured Ireland. He was met by widespread protest regarding US policies in Central America, including reproofs from the Irish government, and snubs from the Catholic hierarchy. Yet for Irish diplomats, engaged in a long-term effort to encourage Britain towards a settlement of the civil war in Northern Ireland, the visit was a success. This article argues that these immediate resonances have wider meanings, which complicate our understanding of the Cold War. Both large and small “cold wars” (the US in Central America; the US versus the Soviets; Ireland versus Britain) got mixed up with each other during this visit, contributing to the resolution of all three: the Europeans pushed the US to the negotiating table in Central America; following re-election, Reagan began his rapprochement with Mikhail Gorbachev; in September 1984, the President began nudging his closest ally, Margaret Thatcher, towards a rapprochment with the Irish Republic. The relationship between these overlapping frames underlines the article's claims that “cold wars” are a useful category of international relations, in which small nations can be significant factors. Tensions over Ronald Reagan in Ireland remind us that the global Cold War was always much more complex than superpower rivalries.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4: The “Un-American” , November 2013 , pp. 1155 - 1174
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gleijeses, Piero, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar; see Smith, Hazel, European Union Foreign Policy and Central America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the almost universal European opposition to Reagan's war in Central America, as well as a host of more topical studies from the 1980s. On the concept of a second Cold War, initiated by Reagan as a form of global revanchism, see Halliday, Fred, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983, and subsequent editions)Google Scholar.

2 Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999). Even when it receives mention, as in Smith, Geoffrey, Reagan and Thatcher (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 136–37Google Scholar, it is dismissed as a folksy occasion made for the camera, which “symbolized the importance of the Irish dimension in Anglo-American relations,” though Smith does devote attention to how Reagan's discreet pressure on the British Prime Minister led to a thaw in Anglo-Irish relations.

3 Reagan, Ronald, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 373–74Google Scholar, where he refers to his ancestor as “Michael Reagan”; Cannon, Lou, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 463Google Scholar.

4 See Irish Times, 2 June 1984, with times and addresses of the many events on each day, including a “Climb for Peace” up Galtymoor Mountain by the Templars Mountaineering Club, and various “Penal Masses,” evoking the oppression of Ireland's peasantry and priests in relation to the Central American wars.

5 Interview with Garret FitzGerald, 2 March 2006, where he stated, “I never discovered why” Reagan was invited to receive a degree at University College Galway (UCG), although he acknowledged, “Somebody there must have pushed the registrar,” and that he had heard that UCG president Colm Ó hEocha had made the invitation, perhaps to further the goals of the New Ireland Forum, set up by FitzGerald's government as a joint effort by the nonrevolutionary nationalist parties in all parts of Ireland, seeking a solution to war in the North.

6 Irish Times, 12 May 1984. In 1992, a scandal broke, the first of many for the Irish Church, when it was discovered that Bishop Casey had had an affair with an American woman decades earlier, and was her child's father. He was retired from his bishopric in disgrace, although many, especially in Galway, retained a fondness for him.

7 FitzGerald, Garret, All in a Life: An Autobiography (Dublin: Macmillan, 1991), 578Google Scholar.

8 See Irish Times, 4 June 1984: “Bishop's Snub Linked to Shultz Trip,” and an article the following day reporting that the New York Times had “interpreted the absence of Cardinal O Faiach from the country as a snub,” underlining the self-reinforcing quality of press coverage in this instance.

9 Irish Times, 4 June 1984 (editorial); Irish Times, 5 June, reporting that while the Cardinal's trip had already been scheduled, “church sources say privately that he would have found another alternative engagement to the Reagans – such as a confirmation service.”

10 FitzGerald interview; interview with Peter Barry, 28 Feb. 2006; interview with Seán Donlon, 14 June 2006.

11 Interview with John A. Boyle and E. Mark Linton, Sept. 2006.

12 Several weeks before the trip began, a leading policymaker, speaking on background, when queried about “rather massive demonstrations timed for the President's visit,” and whether “there will be any embarrassment concerning his visit there,” reminded the White House press corps that there had been “a fairly formidable demonstration in Bonn” in summer 1982 which had no effect on the NATO Summit. “There will probably also be some demonstrations in Ireland on the subject of Central America, but, again, I think that – they will not have any real impact on the success of the visit.” See “Background Briefing by Senior Administration Official on the President's Trip to Europe, May 18, 1984, The Briefing Room,” in “The Trip of President Reagan to Ireland, Normandy, and the London Economic Summit, June 10, 1984; Advance, Office of Presidential; Series IV: G-7 Summits,” Presidential Papers, Ronald Reagan Library.

13 CBS Evening News, 21 May 1984.

14 NBC Nightly News, 31 May 1984.

15 ABC News, 3 June 1984.

16 NBC Nightly News, 3 June 1984.

17 New York Times, 27 May 1984, 1 June 1984, 2 June 1984, 3 June 1984, 5 June 1984.

18 Cronin, Seán, Washington's Irish Policy, 1916–1986: Independence, Partition, Neutrality (Dublin: Anvil Books, 1987), 318–22Google Scholar; Wilson, Andrew J., Irish America and the Ulster Conflict, 1968–1995 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), chapters 9–10Google Scholar; Donlon and Barry interviews.

19 The Times, 5 June 1984. The articles collated in the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service document that this temporary “peace offensive” was largely successful, as even government newspapers in communist countries largely emphasized this latest twist in the US – Soviet relationship.

20 Donlon remembers this aspect of the visit's planning with some bemusement: “In the month of May, Mike Deaver came over … He and I did a tour of Ireland by helicopter to select sites that would be suitable for the President. Frankly, we didn't care very much. I mean, our interest was the political Northern Ireland one … So I brought Deaver around to eight or ten sites … Deaver's a very visual person. He saw everything in terms of ‘how would it look on American TV programs?’ ” Underlining the gap in sensibilities, he also asked, “Is there any possibility we could get the Pope to say Mass?” evidently unaware of the deep rift between Rome and FitzGerald's government because of the latter's attempts to secularize and modernize Ireland by, among other things, legalizing divorce. Deaver also responded very positively to the offer of an honorary degree from University College Galway because of its visual appeal: “It has a beautiful quadrangle. Deaver said ‘Jesus, wouldn't this be great with the early morning views … in June all the flowers will be out and in full bloom,’ even though we had told him this was going to raise havoc.”

21 Barry interview, describing the consensus among all of the Dublin parties that “any other problem paled besides that” of Northern Ireland.

22 We badly need studies of return immigration to Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s, how Irish Americans responded to neutrality in 1939–45, the significance of family remittances for the Irish economy, the transatlantic weight of Irish Catholicism, and much more.

23 Leading books in Irish American history almost entirely treat the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; see, for instance, Dolan, Jay, The Immigrant Church: New York's Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Miller, Kerby, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Diner, Hasia, Erin's Daughters: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kenny, Kevin, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meagher, Timothy J., Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Emmons, David, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Anbinder, Tyler, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Meagher, Timothy J., ed., From Paddy to Studs: Irish-American Communities in the Turn of the Century Era, 1880 to 1920 (New York: Greenwood, 1986)Google Scholar. Exceptions to this include Bayor, Ronald H. and Meagher, Timothy, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Erie, Steven, Rainbow's End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Formisano, Ronald P., Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Freeman, Joshua, In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

24 Cronin, 154–59: “de Valera rallied Nationalist Ireland behind him in a way not seen since 1918 … perhaps the greatest triumph of his political career,” noting that Churchill “halted travel and trade between the United Kingdom and Eire for ‘military reasons.’ ”

25 On this balancing act see Skelly, Joseph Morrison, Irish Diplomacy at the United Nations, 1945–1965: National Interests and the International Order (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

26 Aiken quoted in ibid., 325.

27 Quoted in Cronin, 56, 63.

28 Irish Times, 2 April 1984.

29 Cox, Michael, “Bringing in the ‘International’: The IRA Ceasefire and the End of the Cold War,” International Affairs, 73 (1997), 671–93, 677CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 The scholarly literature on Irish American politics in the twentieth century is surprisingly thin; besides those books already cited, see Wills, Garry, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Little Brown, 1982)Google Scholar; O'Connor, Thomas H., The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1995)Google Scholar; Carty, Thomas, A Catholic in the White House? Religion, Politics, and John F. Kennedy's Presidential Campaign (New York: Palgrave, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finan, Christopher, Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior (New York: Hill & Wang, 2002)Google Scholar; Slayton, Robert A., Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (New York: Free Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Beatty, Jack, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874–1958 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992)Google Scholar; Bayor, Ronald G., Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 An example relevant to this essay came in the spring of 1976, when Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, under pressure to secure his nomination, courted the Irish vote by making statements that, on their face, seemed to favor the Provisional IRA; see Wilson, Irish America and the Ulster Conflict, 126–29.

32 Cronin includes many references, in private diplomatic cables between Dublin and Washington, to this constraint upon US diplomacy.

33 Ibid., 70, describing how, a full generation after independence, “Ireland's trade with Britain made up nearly 95% of the state's external commerce.”

34 See Keogh, Dermot, Twentieth-Century Ireland, revised edn (London: Gill & Macmillan, 2005)Google Scholar.

35 Barry and Donlon interviews.

36 Although its accuracy has been challenged, the historic name of Ireland's militant republican party, Sinn Féin, was usually translated into English as “ourselves alone.”

37 Cronin, 165, quoting Ambassador David Gray during World War II.

38 See Keogh, Dermot, Ireland and the Vatican: The Politics and Diplomacy of Church – State Relations, 1922–1960 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, xv, on how “diplomatic relations with the Holy See symbolized much more than the equivalent relationship with the United States, Canada, Britain, [and] Australia” because a “shared Catholic ideology bonded Dublin and ‘Rome’.” Keogh provides ample evidence of the Irish governing elite's understanding of themselves as a “Catholic State” leading a “staunch, militantly Catholic people,” as de Valera put it to Pius XII, during a visit to Rome in 1957.

39 Peadar Kirby, a key participant observer, provides an excellent brief history of this shift in Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Trócaire and Gill and MacMillan, 1992).

40 Interview with Brian McKeown, 2 March 2006. For the mission statement see www.trocaire.org/thecatholicchurch.

41 Trócaire, Ten Years of Action for Justice and World Development: Trócaire 10th Anniversary International Seminar, 16–18 June 1983, Galway (Trócaire: Co. Dublin, 1985), 10Google Scholar, noted that at its inception Trócaire's was “the highest church collection ever taken up until then in Ireland,” and since then had increased from 500,000 to three million Irish pounds.

42 Interview with Peadar Kirby, 11 January 2006, describing how little awareness there had been among Irish people regarding Latin America as a whole until the late 1970s, when, as in Europe and the US, a certain fascination arose within popular culture (citing the Clash's album Sandinista! as an example).

43 The sense of a connection to El Salvador was reinforced when four North American churchwomen were murdered by Salvadorean security forces on 4 December 1980. That two of the three women religious, Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, were Irish American, was a point that resonated in Ireland, but the greatest impact came from the story of Jean Donovan, a layworker from Cleveland, Ohio. In 1979, she had studied at University College Cork, and met Father Michael Crowley, a former missionary returned from El Salvador. It was his appeal to her commitment to the poor that impelled her to leave Ireland and go to El Salvador. Her death was told with great force in the 1982 documentary Roses in December, which aired extensively on RTÉ.

44 Interview with Senator Michael Higgins, February 2006: “I was Mayor of Galway and Bishop Casey was Bishop and the murder of Archbishop Romero had taken place. Trócaire asked would there be any public people willing to go to Salvador and find out what was going on. I volunteered with two others. I went to El Salvador in January of '81,” with two deputies, Niall Andrews of Fianna Fáil, and Catherine Lawlor of Fine Gael. See also Report on a Visit by a Trócaire Delegation to El Salvador (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Trócaire, 1981), describing a 6–9 August 1981 visit by McKeown, Casey, and Sally O'Neill, their point person for Central America, which denounced “the brutalizing policy to the point of genocide which the present Government of El Salvador is perpetrating” and stated that “US military aid to the present Government merely prolongs and intensifies the oppression of ordinary people and takes us further from a solution.” Report of A Trócaire Delegation to Guatemala, August 1983 (Co. Dublin: Trócaire, 1983), with Casey and O'Neill joining a larger “official delegation of CIDSE, the umbrella organization of Catholic agencies for Third World development,” which concluded that that “under General Rios Montt, a programme of virtual genocide against the indigenous population was carried out by means of collective massacres.”

45 Central America became a subject of debate, often unplanned, on the following dates: 8 Nov. 1979, 4 March 1980, 29 April 1980, 15 May 1980, 20 June 1980, 23 Oct. 1980, 9 Dec. 1980, 12 Feb. 1981, 11 March 1981, 26 March 1981, 20 Oct. 1981, 2 Dec. 1981, 8 Dec. 1981, 10 Dec. 1981, 24 March 1982, 15 June 1982, 26 April 1983, 4 May 1983, 17 May 1983, 21 June 1983, 5 July 1983, 6 July 1983, 8 July 1983, 20 Oct. 1983, 25 Oct. 1983, 26 Oct. 1983, 9 Nov. 1983, 10 Nov. 1983, 16 Nov. 1983, 24 Nov. 1983, 30 Nov. 1983, 1 Feb. 1984, 15 May 1984, 28 June 1984.

46 Letter from FitzGerald to McKeown, 4 June 1982, copy in author's possession.

47 The complete absence of the putatively revolutionary Provisional Sinn Féin/IRA is described by contemporary observers as a sign of their parochialism and irrelevance, and perhaps a fear of alienating wealthy Irish American backers.

48 Brian McKeown claims that the cardinal agreed to leave Ireland during the visit in response to a direct request from Trócaire, although Bishop Casey does not remember any such meeting.

49 In 1989, Donlon gave a much-remarked speech assailing the irresponsible “anti-Americanism” of much of Irish society, and, although he did not name Casey personally, he clearly had Trócaire in mind; it is reprinted in Kirby, Ireland and Latin America.

50 As FitzGerald put it in our interview, when asked why, during the Cold War, people like himself could feel solidarity with communist revolutionaries: “we were nationalist revolutionaries.”