October 31, 2004
El Presidente
TG4 showed another one of their excellent and thought-provoking documentaries Saturday evening. It was called Fáilte, Mr. President, and told of the protests that greeted Ronal Reagan's visit to Ireland twenty years ago. The documentary focused mainly on the Galway part of the visit, and featured extensive interviews with Michael D Higgins & Brendan Ryan (who were prominent among the protest organizers), Garret Fitzgerald (who was Taoiseach at the time), Sean Donlon (former Irish ambassador to the US) and a rather circumspect Eoghan Harris.
The cause of the protests was the ongoing violence in Central America - particularly in El Salvador and Nicaragua. And if ever the past was a foreign country, the grainy RTE footage certainly proved it. 1984 seems a strange place nowadays, the last days of a grim and hopeless Ireland. As the programme shows, unemployment was 15%, many people were hoping to emigrate (either legally or illegally) to the US and the Bishop Eamonn Casey was still best known for his work with Trocaire.
Naturally, the document drew comparisons between the protests against Reagan and the protests against George Bush earlier this year. There were a couple of similarities; the prospect of protests affecting the wider US-Ireland relationship (in 1984, the government wanted US support for the Anglo-Irish agreement; in 2004, the government just wanted the dollars to keep flowing). Though I missed the beginning of the programme, it seemed that Eoghan Harris' contribution was limited to a few pithy comments. As someone who has broadly welcomed the invasion of Iraq, and who is often critical of "the Left", a more detailed contribution from him would have provided a more interesting balance and analysis.
It's not hard to see how people could make the connection with the Central american situation. For many Irish people, the story of Ireland is the story of a small country struggling against overwhelming odds to be rid of the influence of a superpower - and to many people, the Nicaraguan independence struggle mirrored Ireland's own quest for independence. And there were uncomfortable analogies between El Salvador (where the government stood accused of repression )and the situation in Northern Ireland at the time. p>
The Catholic Church at home in Ireland was seen as very much as part of the Establishment (in 1984, there was no divorce, homosexuality was illegal and the previous year, abortion had been banned in a referendum and a doctor had been prosecuted for distributing condoms directly to a patient). Missionaries were a different story. They were well-respected – many families had a member who ‘was out on the missions - and their work in Central America reminded many in Ireland of the role that priests played in Ireland long ago - teacher, preacher and sometimes activists, and often the target of government repression [at the time of the visit, another missionary, Fr. Niall O' Brien was sharing a jail cell with local land activists in the Philippines - a case that was of huge interest in Ireland but is strangely not mentioned in the documentary ]. The situation in Central America had a powerful resonance with Irish people. The prospect of a small, struggling democracy being destablised by a neighbouring superpower (in Nicaragua) was something that identified closely with Ireland’s own recent history, as did the prospect of a puppet government using the army to suppress sections of its own population (in El Salvador). [The documentary showed an interview between Brian Farrell and Reagan, fobbing off criticism as Russian and Cuban propaganda, intercut with Eamonn Casey passionately arguing that all the [mainly religious and charitable] organizations who were present in the two countries could hardly all be Communist dupes].
It was also the case that, rightly or wrongly, Reagan, like Bush today, genuinely scared a lot of people in Ireland. The installation of Cruise Missiles throughout Europe had been deeply controversial – these battlefield nukes were smaller, less powerful and therefore ‘more usable’ missiles. So the protests were far more heartfelt and widespread than would be expected from the usual anti-American elements. And then, as now, there was the suspicion that the visit was part of a re-election photo-opportunity.
A rosier future lay in store for all. Reagan was re-elected later that year, and by the end of the decade, the Soviet Menace simply fell apart at the seams. From the mid-Eighties, the Irish economy began to grow, fuelled in no small part by American investment. And in Northern Ireland, the reason that Garret Fitzgerald wanted Reagan to visit in the first place, Garret's successor, Albert Reynolds and John Hume would begin the process to bring Sinn Féin and the IRA in from the cold (how much the Anglo-Irish agreement had to do with it is another story). Peace even broke out eventually in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Well, the future was not rosy for all. The influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland would collapse under a succession of scandals, beginning with, yes, the revelations about Bishop Eamonn Casey’s son in 1992.
There were a few threads in the programme that I would have liked to seen followed up. Even in the US, Reagan's US policy was controversial - his administration's support for the Contra guerrillas was banned by Congress (and famously circumvented by the Iran-contra affair, which, come to think of it, involved a few dodgy Irish passports). And while it was perhaps natural for a US government to denounce socialist organizations in Central America as pawns of the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Vatican was distinctly lukewarm in its support of clergymen and women involved in the struggles in El Salvador and Nicaragua, at least until the murder of Archbishop Romero. Though the link between the Reagan and Bush visits is an obvious one to make, given that the reception was much the same, it’s a pity that the programme didn't compare those visits against the more successful ones.
How could Bill Clinton, who probably ordered as many foreign interventions as his successor, be welcomed warmly in all parts of Ireland with nary a protest? And the most obvious question of all - twenty years before Reagan, another US president who had tried to overthrow the government of a neighbouring country in a bloody coup visited Ireland in a re-election year. But John Kennedy was not so much welcomed as worshipped when he arrived in Ireland, and in all the recent commemorations of his visit (it was forty years ago this summer), I don’t recall any mention of protests.
And finally, what about the missionaries ? There is a whole generation of old men and women from Ireland, living out their final days in far-flung corners of the globe. Even twenty years ago, they could have hoped for reinforcements from their own country. Now, it looks more likely that, if the Church is to survive in Ireland at all, it is the countries where they now live that will send their own missionaries back to Ireland to keep the faith alive. It would be interesting to hear their stories…
.PS The toasts given by then Irish president Hillary, and Ronald Reagan at a state dinner can be read here.
PPS The single most striking image of the documentary was footage of the drive into Dublin from the US Embassy in the Phoenix Park. Not that, as a protest, people stayed away so that only an unbroken blue line of Gardai stood guarding empty streets, but that the streets (along the river) looked more like Beirut in 1984 rather than Dublin.
PPPS 1984 wasn't the first time that Reagan visited Ireland. He arrived, as Governor Reagan, in 1972 as a special envoy of President Nixon. Here is a picture of him with another president who elicted strong opinions…
Posted by Monasette at October 31, 2004 07:57 PM