Madam, – Niall O’Dowd’s attempts to save face after his over-selling of the Hillary-Clinton-as-special-envoy story are long on personal invective against me, but rather short on facts.
The most egregious of several misrepresentations in his article (Opinion, August 15th) was the suggestion that he never went beyond a vague claim that Clinton would “handle” the North to state that she would become special envoy.
This is demonstrably untrue. In an article on his irishcentral.com website on July 23rd, Mr O’Dowd wrote, “The news that Hillary Clinton will be the special envoy to Northern Ireland . . . is very good news for Ireland.” This was not a slip of the pen. If Mr O’Dowd believed only that Clinton would engage with the North, without any such official role, he had a perfect opportunity to make this clear in an interview on Morning Ireland on July 22nd.
“Is there a precedent for this; for a secretary of state making themselves an envoy as well as being overall in charge of America’s foreign affairs?” he was asked.
He replied: “I don’t think so.” Moments later, Mr O’Dowd asserted that Ms Clinton would visit the North in September with the purpose of introducing herself “to party leaders and everyone else as the secretary of state and also as the envoy.” Now, he brazenly and preposterously casts his admission that the Obama administration will “not appoint a political envoy” as consistent with his previous statements.
The fiasco from which Mr O’Dowd is desperately trying to extract himself is a prime example of two broader realities: that his claims about the political importance of Irish America are grossly inflated; and that the Irish media’s tendency to take those claims at face-value only leads to embarrassment all round. – Yours, etc,
NIALL STANAGE,
West 115th Street,
New York,
US.