Former US presidential candidate John Kerry is to become the latest senior American politician to deliver at lecture at a Northern Ireland universities.
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who ran US President George W Bush close in the 2004 election as the Democrats' candidate, will deliver the Tip O'Neill lecture at the University of Ulster's Magee campus in Derry on Sunday.
He has been invited by former SDLP leader John Hume and will address the issue of "Security in the 21st Century".
Previous speakers have included former US President Bill Clinton; Taoiseach Bertie Ahern; former European Commission president Romano Prodi; UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald.
During the election campaign Senator Kerry accused the Bush administration of pushing the Northern Ireland peace process down the foreign policy agenda.
His February 2004 statement called on the IRA and loyalists to disarm but he also angered the Rev Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists by insisting they should not be allowed to disenfranchise half the population of Northern Ireland by refusing to form a government with Sinn Fein.
He was also a signatory to a letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair from a number of leading US senators, including Edward Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton who expressed concern at the British Government's handling of demands for a public inquiry into alleged security force collusion with loyalists in the 1989 murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.