Jimmy Carter’s forgotten peace project

How the president opened the door to an American role in Irish peace-making

Politicians and integrity are words that do not always sit easily together. Rules have exceptions. Jimmy Carter was one. The tributes paid to the former president have carried none of the manufactured kindness of most political obituaries. Carter’s decency in office and his tireless humanity during a full life beyond it has rightly eclipsed the Iranian hostage crisis that denied him a second term.

The Camp David peace deal between Israel and Egypt, the first between the Jewish state and one of its Arab neighbours, is the standout accomplishment of this single-term president. His powerful opposition to apartheid, including backing a UN embargo on arms sales to South Africa, paved the way for broader western sanctions against Pretoria and presaged the eventual collapse of white minority rule. The Carter Centre, established after his defeat by Ronald Reagan, campaigned without pause for democracy and human rights in every corner of the world. In 2002 it earned him a Nobel Peace prize. Such dignity seems lost on modern leaders.

Amid all the richly deserved plaudits, however, one act of peace promotion has largely slipped from diplomatic memory. Carter engineered the change in US policy that set the diplomatic ball rolling towards an eventual peace settlement in Northern Ireland.

By the time he reached the White House, the violent conflict between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists had engulfed the province. The Provisional Irish Republic Army (PIRA), waging all out war against the British army, had determined to drive Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. Loyalist paramilitaries were indiscriminately killing Catholics in the effort to preserve the Protestant hegemony in the north bestowed by the partition of Ireland in 1922.

Washington opinion was instinctively on the side of nationalists, not least because of the influence wielded in Congress by the large Irish-American diaspora. House speaker Tip O’Neill and senators Edward Kennedy and Pat Moynihan, along with New York governor Hugh Carey, led the Democratic party’s powerful Irish lobby. More radical colleagues in the Irish congressional caucus harked back to the 19th century Fenians and channeled American funds directly to the PIRA through the Irish Northern Aid Committee (Noraid).

Successive US administrations, however, had remained resolutely neutral, accepting British insistence that events in Northern Ireland were a matter of domestic politics into which allies should not venture. For all the emotional and familial connections with Ireland, Washington judged that Britain was the more important ally. It was a vital pillar in the alliance against Soviet Communism. Dublin had remained resolutely neutral since refusing to join the fight against the Nazis during the second world war.

Carter’s about turn in the late summer of 1977 followed an intense diplomatic campaign by the Irish government in concert with O’Neill and his colleagues. On the face of it, the White House statement released in late August 1977 was scarcely front page news. It called for an end to violence by the paramilitaries on both sides and talks between the two communities in the province about sharing political power. By condemning violence, it drew the necessary distinction between constitutional nationalists and the hard men of the PIRA.

But those who studied these things closely could see that Carter had broken a taboo. For the first time, the US had staked out its own position on the conflict. Previously, in the description of an Irish ambassador in Washington, the Americans had “slavishly followed the British line”. Carter had thrown the White House’s support behind the idea that a political settlement in the province must be based on power-sharing between unionists and nationalists. He also linked a promise to promote American investment in the province to the conclusion of such a settlement.

Carter later admitted that the State Department had not approved of his initiative: “But I didn’t really consult them too thoroughly. I had a lot of confidence in Pat Moynihan, and Tip O’Neill was visiting me every day. Hugh Carey was very important to me as a politician, so was Ted Kennedy”.

The British embassy in Washington had sought to block the statement. Once it was published, James Callaghan’s government felt obliged to welcome it, Through gritted teeth. Michael Lllis, a young Irish diplomat in the the US capital and subsequently a leading player in negotiations between London and Dublin, saw the significance.

The initiative, Lillis has sbsequently observed, was “one of the foundation documents of the Irish peace process and one of its vital assets; it profoundly transformed the basic power calculus of Anglo-Irish relations”. This “was epitomised in Margaret Thatcher’s tongue-in-cheek explanation to Lord McAlpine, the treasurer of the Conservative Party, for her motivation in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985: ‘The Americans made me do it’.”*

Another Democratic president Bill Clinton has been widely praised for his role in promoting the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998. Carter had opened the door 20 years earlier.

*For Lillis’s inside account of the diplomacy see The Dublin Review of Books, January 2025