Book Review When America finally connected with Ireland

By Terry Golway

THE AMERICAN CONNECTION, by Jack Holland. Roberts Rinehart Publishers, Boulder, Colo. 300 pp. $14.95.

You shouldn’t need a reason to re-read Jack Holland’s journalism, but now you have one. His 1987 book, "The American Connection: U.S. Guns, Money and Influence in Northern Ireland," has been updated and reissued by Roberts Rinehart, with a new afterward analyzing the Clinton Administration’s role in the peace process. As with all good, well-reported journalism, Holland’s new chapter reads like the first draft of history.

Of course, what’s amazing is that there is an afterward worth telling. The original edition of "The American Connection" was published when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were very much in power, and Washington was taking its cues from Downing Street on all matters relating to Northern Ireland. Reagan, who made a great deal of his Irishness, steadfastly refused to make Ireland a foreign-policy priority, and Thatcher could not have been more delighted. Though both leaders clearly were closer to the end of their careers than the beginning, there was little reason to believe that anything would change.

And yet, with the coming to power of Bill Clinton, everything did change, and with breathtaking speed. In just one manifestation of the new dynamic, Holland describes the transformation of the media image of Gerry Adams: "The man routinely denounced as an apologist for terrorism" in the Reagan-Thatcher era became a celebrity, "profiled and interviewed extensively in a manner unthinkable a decade before." That passage explains why Roberts Rinehart shrewdly published this updated version of "The American Connection." The definitive explanation of America’s connection to Northern Ireland, circa 1987, is now the definitive explanation, circa end-of-millennium. Now that’ s savvy publishing.

In his afterward, Holland examines some of the same ground his Irish Echo colleague Ray O’Hanlon covered in his 1998 book, "The New Irish Americans," as he chronicles events leading to Adams’s first visit to New York in 1994. And he also offers a solid analysis of the box in which groups like Irish Northern Aid found themselves as Adams and Sinn Fein moved closer to mainstream politics. In an unattributed but telling quote, Holland notes the observation of one activist: The members of "Noraid do not matter if you’re doing your political business through the Kennedys." Indeed, and the tale of how Sinn Fein and Adams got to that point surely is one of the most intriguing news stories of the 1990s. It’s one Holland tells with the insight of a Belfast native and the story-telling abilities of a novelist.

The new world that Clinton ushered in — to the fury of the British establishment, it must be remembered, and with no guarantee of a political payoff at home — is summed up in any number of well-reported scenes, but here’s one of my favorites, as Holland describes the 1995 White House St. Patrick’s Day party. "UDA chief Joe English sat with Gary McMichael a few feet away from Clinton, the First Lady, Paul Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, and Irish Prime Minister John Bruton and his wife. A few feet behind the loyalists stood Gerry Adams, the spokesman for the organization that killed McMichael’s father. Meanwhile, Frank Patterson, the Irish tenor, sang ‘The Rose of Tralee.’ "

No wonder some people have had just a little trouble making the adjustment.

Holland also gives us a dramatic look at the months after the IRA’s first cease-fire ended with an explosion at Canary Wharf in London. He notes that during the next year and a half, the IRA’s organization in Belfast was effectively shut down. "Belfast was the key to any IRA campaign, and the fact that it was crippled there meant that the campaign as a whole was doomed," he notes. The new cease-fire, then, was inevitable, but Holland rightly credits Clinton and John Hume with not breaking off contact with Adams and Sinn Fein after Canary Wharf.

The updated information and analysis in "The American Connection" is a fresh reminder of the role that Irish Americans have played in framing the debate over Northern Ireland. And now, the book even has a surprise ending. After all, who among Holland’s readers in 1987 would have ever expected to see Gerry Adams in the White House?