As the world mourns the 39th President of the United States, it is important that Ireland recognizes the unique and lasting role that President Jimmy Carter played to support peace and political reform in our country.

Carter’s foreign policy record is closely associated with the landmark Camp David Accords in 1978 and the disastrous Iranian hostage crisis which, more than anything else, torpedoed his re-election bid. Other foreign policy concerns spring from the history books of Carter’s presidency: China, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, NATO, the Nicaraguan Revolution. Against that tumultuous backdrop, Carter’s decision to commit to becoming involved in Northern Ireland was singular.

In the late 1970s, the prevalent attitude towards Northern Ireland in many key US cities was supportive of Irish resistance to the British occupation of Northern Ireland. It was encapsulated in two words: ‘Brits out’. Patriotic passion, more than reasoned analysis, characterised the Irish Question, something to which, initially, Carter himself was not immune. Prior to his election, Carter had allowed himself to be associated with the simplistic agenda that prevailed in the US: he wore an ‘England Out of Ireland’ button in the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York on March 17, 1976.

Politicians elected to the House of Representatives had to face pressure to intervene from their constituents in heavily Irish cities like New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. As the Troubles endured, that pressure intensified. Yet, because the seat of US foreign policy, the White House, was instinctively mute on the matter, the British dominated the Irish Question in Washington. Even during JFK’s brief tenure as president, albeit before the Troubles, the tragedy of the Northern Irish minority was unmentionable. The White House’s stance of non-intervention was apparently steadfast.

On his arrival in Washington in 1977, President Carter sounded the protection of human rights as a keynote for his presidency. He listened to his advisors and began to form a new perspective on Northern Ireland, linking it to human rights. He was above all facilitated in promulgating this new perspective on Northern Ireland by a group of well-informed senior politicians known as The Four Horsemen: Speaker Tip O’Neill, Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Governor Hugh Carey.

One of the horsemen, Tip O’Neill, had grown up in North Cambridge where knee-jerk responses and slogans such as ‘I supported the IRA’ were commonplace. Those positions were anathema for a serious politician in Washington. So, together with Senator Ted Kennedy and the other two horsemen, O’Neill sought out and befriended the person whom they believed to be the most reliable touchstone on Northern Ireland: civil rights leader turned politician John Hume. Kennedy later recalled that in the 1970s Hume ‘looked at this as a political process that was going to be built upon different traditions and mutual respect. It was going to be resolved in a political evolution … A process was going to be established that he believed could move the whole debate and discussion within a non-violent framework and could result eventually in some settlement’. That embryo germinated into the agenda that the Four Horsemen adopted and conveyed to President Carter.

They found President Carter receptive. As President Carter recalled in a film I made about Hume’s political work in Washington DC: ‘Governor Hugh Carey from New York, Pat Moynihan and Ted Kennedy in the Senate, and Tip O’Neill started giving me information about it quite often. Pat Moynihan and the others, Tip O’Neill, would quote John Hume and his efforts for a peaceful resolution of the Irish problem. I became convinced that the United States should speak out for change on this issue’. With the authority of Kennedy in the senate, O’Neill in the House of Representatives and Carter in the White House, a new agenda on Northern Ireland emerged, one which needed urgent articulation.

Throughout the first summer of Carter’s presidency, 1977, a battle waged between the State Department and the White House over the wisdom of intervening in Northern Ireland. The State Department was completely dominated by the British and would brook no dissent on the US’ traditional position vis-à-vis Northern Ireland: absolutely no involvement in ‘a domestic UK matter’.

Operating from the National Security Council within the White House, the key person driving the new agenda on Northern Ireland was Robert Hunter. With a mastery of Western Alliance policy and a close relationship with National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński, Hunter worked closely with Irish embassy’s political officer, Michael Lillis. Their aim was to protect the essentially interventionist aspect of what became known as the Carter Statement on Northern Ireland. O’Neill and Kennedy, and their formidable teams, were particularly exercised that the president should breach tradition and express himself on Northern Ireland. On August 30, 1977, President Carter issued his statement to be read on the White House Lawn calling for a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland and indicating that US investment would flow to consolidate it. As Michael Lillis put it, the statement constituted the end of ‘US subservience to British policy on Northern Ireland which had obtained since 1921 and its replacement by an independent (of the UK) position by Washington’.

Another Southern Democrat president, Bill Clinton, is rightly acknowledged as the most assiduous supporter of peace in Ireland to have occupied the White House. Clinton’s role in delivering a new political process in Northern Ireland cannot be overstated. Yet Clinton’s record on Ireland, like many US presidents who came before and after him, was considerably moulded by the blueprint document read at the White House in August 1977.

By putting Northern Ireland on the White House’s agenda, Carter at a stroke prised the issue from being exclusively the preserve of the Congress in Washington and instead made it a US foreign policy priority. In doing so, he helped to fundamentally shape Ireland’s relationship with political Washington and consequently to reshape Anglo-American relations. The Carter Statement changed Irish history, and it deserves to be properly understood. ~Maurice Fitzpatrick, January 2024

Maurice Fitzpatrick is the author of John Hume in America: From Derry to DC and the director of the documentary John Hume in America.