Egan’s photo-op with ex-IRA man raises questions

By Jack Holland

The U.S. administration is moving rapidly to contain what is now emerging as a major diplomatic embarrassment after the U.S. ambassador to Ireland, Richard Egan, was pictured shaking hands with Joe Cahill, a leading member of the IRA, who was convicted of running guns from Libya to Ireland.

Sources sympathetic to Sinn Fein and the IRA have played up the meeting as a sign that the Bush administration has given the “imprimatur” to current Sinn Fein policy. However, a senior Irish diplomatic source said that “imprimatur” was the wrong word to use and that Egan’s visit is a sign that “communications space is being kept open” between Sinn Fein and the U.S. administration. A State Department spokesman confirmed that the ambassador’s visit was “not meant to signal anything more than that we view Sinn Fein as a key player in securing a lasting peace in Northern Ireland and that we continue to call on them to do their part in securing this peace.”

Egan met Cahill, a founding member of the Provisional IRA, and a man regarded as the movement’s original link to Libyan strongman Col. Muammar Gaddafi, at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis two weekends ago. The meeting came as the U.S. administration was gearing up to build a coalition for its war on international terrorism, following the attacks on New York and Washington by Islamic fundamentalists.

Attempts to portray the meeting as proof that the U.S. administration was taking a “benign” view of recent allegations that the IRA had links to a Colombian terrorist organization FARC have been rebuffed by a State Department spokesman. He said that the administration would be “very concerned” if the allegations were true. FARC has been waging a war against the U.S.-backed Colombian government, and has powerful ties to Colombian drug traffickers. A spokesman said that it is “incorrect” to say the ambassador’s visit to the Sinn Fein conference was a sign that the U.S. viewed the allegations benignly. He referred back to State Department envoy Richard Haas’s statement that if proven, these allegations would have “serious consequences” for the Bush administration’s attitude to Sinn Fein and the IRA.

The visit of the recently appointed ambassador to the Ard Fheis has been played up by Sinn Fein sources as giving an “imprimatur” on the party’s current policies, including that on the decommissioning of IRA weapons. But well-informed sources in both Ireland and the U.S. warn that it could “backfire badly” on Sinn Fein as it is certain to embarrass President Bush’s strong anti-terrorist campaign.

Egan is a former businessman from Massachusetts who was the founder and CEO of EMC, a computer data storage company. He resigned this position when his ambassadorial appointment was confirmed. Cahill is one of the most prominent members of the Provisional IRA and a long-time member of its governing body, the Army Council. In 1972, he was believed to have been involved in smuggling rockets from Libya into Ireland. In March 1973, he was arrested with five tons of Libyan weapons on board the Claudia, a German-registered cargo ship, in Waterford Bay, after having sailed from Tripoli in Libya. After his release from prison, he was known to be a frequent clandestine visitor to the U.S., where he met republican fund-raisers and gun-runners, including the head of the gun-running network, George Harrison.

The handling of the Egan visit comes in the wake of a series of incidents that have threatened Sinn Fein’s standing in Dublin, London and Washington. The first was a huge IRA robbery of millions of dollars worth of cigarettes in Belfast on June 8, the day after the British general election, when Sinn Fein won four seats, followed by a robbery of a gun shop in Athlone in July. The most serious incident came with the arrest of the three republicans in Bogota, Colombia, on Aug. 11.

Observers have been puzzled by what they see as the maladroit handling of these incidents by Sinn Fein. At the beginning of September, Gerry Kelly, a leading member of the movement, dismissed the U.S. administration’s concerns about the FARC links by saying that Richard Haas “can have his own opinion” about the matter.

Some observers have interpreted the incidents and Sinn Fein’s reaction to them sinisterly, while others have put it down to either hubris or sheer stupidity.