Bill Clinton: Windsor framework for dealing with Northern Ireland is ‘as good as anyone is going to get’

Gerry Adams told a conference in New York that the Good Friday accord was most important political agreement of our time

The new Windsor framework for dealing with Northern Ireland in the aftermath of Brexit is “as good as anyone is going to get”, former US president Bill Clinton has said.

Addressing a conference to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement in New York on Monday he urged that politicians in Northern Ireland return to the Stormont assembly.

Mr Clinton told the audience of the difficulties he had faced as president in his decision to grant the then Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams a visa to enter the United States in 1994.

The move has since been seen as a pivotal moment in the Northern Ireland peace process but at the time was opposed by many in the US Government as well as by London.

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Mr Clinton said only his own national security staff in the White House had backed the move.

“The state department thought I needed to be committed.”

He said his ambassador to the United Kingdom Admiral William Crowe, who had backed him for the president in 1992 despite serving previously as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Ronald Reagan, had told him he had made his job impossible.

Mr Clinton said in his address: “They had an election in Northern Ireland. Brexit was a roadblock that threatened to blow up the whole thing.”

“The Windsor framework, I think, is about as good as anybody could get and we ought to stand up the Government and, I think, get on with the business that the people voted for delegates to serve in the Northern Ireland parliament.”

Mr Clinton said he had been involved in trying to find peace in various trouble spots around the world.

However, he said that “of all the peace agreement that have happened over the last 25 years, there was nothing like the Northern Ireland agreement in terms of its endurance”.

“You may see its flaws and you may see its imperfections (but), you have no idea unless you looked at all these other things, just how hard it is. Just how improbable it was how good you should feel about yourselves for what you did.”

“You need to finish the job now. Because this whole world could go off the rails.”

Gerry Adams told the conference that the Good Friday accord was the most important political agreement of our time in Ireland.

He said it was be “totally and absolutely unacceptable” that the political institutions in Northern Ireland were suspended due to what he described as the intransigence of the DUP and the machinations of successive Tory governments in London.

“The result of the last election to the Northern Ireland Assembly needs to be respected”, he said.

Mr Adams said the “Democratic Unionist Party needed to take up their ministerial posts with the rest of us.”

“And if the DUP remain intransigent, then the two Government should move ahead, using the Good Friday Agreement’s All-Ireland mechanisms. We cannot have a return a direct rule from London, it is not an option.”

“The agreement has mechanisms, has political architecture, and both governments should use those to move forward.”

“And the Government also needs to implement elements of the agreement still not in place, including a bill of rights for the North.”

Mr Adams also called on the British Government to scrap its “flawed and offensive” legislation on legacy issues arising from the Northern Ireland Troubles.

He said embedded in the agreement was the right of the people of Ireland to decide their future.

“For the first time in our history, there’s a peaceful way to end the union with England and to build our own future. ”

“The Irish Government should establish a Citizens’ Assembly or a series of such assemblies to discuss the process of constitutional change, and the measures needed to build an all-Ireland economy, a truly national health service and education system and all the other needs of society.

“And we need national reconciliation. We need a citizen-centred, rights-based society, including the rights of our unionist neighbours, the Orange Order and other loyal institutions. The protections of the Good Friday Agreement are their protections also. The island of Ireland is their land, their own place, a unionist are our neighbours, we want them to become our friends.”

Martin Wall

Martin Wall

Martin Wall is the former Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times. He was previously industry correspondent