The Mayor of Limerick, who is due to confer the freedom of the city on President Clinton on Saturday, has strongly criticised US foreign policy and in particular the recent attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan.
Councillor Joe Harrington yesterday accused the US President of applying double standards by condemning the Omagh bombing and yet ordering missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan.
However, he said he would fulfil his functions in conferring the freedom of the city on Mr Clinton. He was representing Limerick City Council, which had agreed without a vote to confer the freedom of the city on the President. "I will not use my position to score political points with anybody", he said.
Mr Harrington, an independent socialist councillor since 1985, will not wear his ceremonial robes: he is one of seven of Limerick's 17 city councillors who refuse to wear robes on formal occasions.
He told The Irish Times yesterday that he had gone to Omagh to meet relatives of the victims and attend some of the funerals. "It is very hard for me then to turn on the television and see missiles being fired into backward countries in Africa and Asia. It's a double standard I couldn't possibly support."
Mr Harrington said that he sympathised with the victims of the bombings in Nairobi and Dares-Salaam. "But I don't believe missiles are an answer to that. I believe the fundamentalist politics coming out of the Middle East arise out of a history where the West has played a part in dividing the Arab world. We are now seeing the consequences in the form of terrorism. I'm not justifying it, but we must put it in context."
He hoped Mr Clinton did not "go around the world with a sermon in his pocket", but instead would listen to, and be influenced by, people he met on foreign trips.
Mr Harrington said he supported the right of those who planned to protest during the freedom of the city ceremony to do so, but he would not be participating in the protest.
The Workers' Party staged protests in Dublin and Belfast yesterday over the attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan. The party mounted a picket outside the US embassy in Dublin and handed in a letter of protest. A similar protest took place simultaneously outside the office of the US consulate in Belfast.
The party's president, Mr Tom French, said that the attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan amounted to "nothing less than state terrorism" and were "in total contravention of international law".
The WP is calling on President Clinton to comply with requests from Sudan for an independent inspection of the building bombed in Khartoum. The US has claimed it was a chemical weapons plant, but Sudan maintains that it was a pharmaceutical factory.