Nine Irish Lives

by Mark Bailey

  “Once you’ve walked in the shoes of being undocumented, you never forget it,” O’Dowd said on CNN in 2007. “I feel I have had my chance at the American dream, and it is very important to me to allow other Irish people to experience the greatest country in the world and live their version of the dream.”

  O’Dowd has done that for a diverse array of Irish immigrants. Brendan Fay is one of the many Irish immigrants who legally settled in America after learning about Morrison visas via the Irish Voice. But O’Dowd had touched Fay’s life even before that. Fay said he will never forget a story O’Dowd wrote in the early 1980s about gay Irish people in San Francisco. Fay was living in Ireland at the time and recalls reading O’Dowd’s portrayal of gay Irish people in America and the thrill of thinking, “We belong!” He had not seen anyone else writing about them at the time—it was as though people like him didn’t exist. Fay wound up moving to the United States and later founded the Lavender and Green Alliance, which advocated for gays to openly march in New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.

  Many Irish in America were socially conservative and had been brought up in strict Irish Catholic homes. But O’Dowd frequently confronted them with topics that others avoided, including the toll of the AIDS epidemic on the Irish community. He once called a public meeting through his newspaper to discuss the issue, and to his surprise a couple of hundred people turned out. “No one else was writing about the deaths, the desperation at that time,” recalled Fay. “The Irish Voice was the place we got to tell our story and to hear our story being told for the first time.” When Fay married his partner in 2003, O’Dowd featured the wedding prominently on the newspaper’s front page.

  O’Dowd drew the ire of many of the more conservative members of the established Irish community in New York, including the head of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, when he pressed for gays to be included in the biggest celebration of St. Patrick’s Day in the world—the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade. O’Dowd didn’t flinch. He fought hard for the right of openly gay and lesbian groups to march, and after years of resistance, it finally happened in 2016.

  To O’Dowd, it proved the promise of America, a land where even an Irish schoolteacher’s son can stand up and make a difference.

  “I believe in this country,” O’Dowd said. “Even coming to America, pretty penniless, everything worked out for me, and it’s to the credit of this country, period. I know a lot of people born in America don’t understand this. But people have a tremendous opportunity to get things done when they come to America. I never forget that.”

  ABOVE EVERYTHING ELSE, though, O’Dowd was consumed with the issue of peace in Northern Ireland. And when a young Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton appeared on the U.S. political scene, the journalist saw an opening.

  O’Dowd had been making the case for U.S. involvement to members of Clinton’s campaign for months. He told them Clinton had a chance to make history, to make peace, and to shine on the international stage. And he pointed out that there could be a huge political bonanza for the candidate, since more than forty million people in the United States claim Irish roots.

  When O’Dowd finally met Clinton in January 1992 in New York, they spoke briefly, and Clinton signaled his interest. “Niall, tell your friends Ireland is on my radar screen,” Clinton told him. “I think we can do something.”

  O’Dowd sensed a historic opportunity. Irish leaders all the way back to Éamon de Valera in the 1920s had been trying to get a U.S. president to inject America into the Northern Irish debate, but none had ever seriously taken it on—not even John F. Kennedy, the first Irish American president. The bond between Washington and the UK government was just too strong.

  O’Dowd could see that Clinton was not as reflexively aligned with Great Britain. Although he had studied at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1968–69, his time in the UK coincided with some of the most traumatic times in the Northern Ireland Troubles. He was well steeped in the civil rights issues raised by the conflict, which was at the top of UK news every evening. It also helped that the British Conservative Party under Prime Minister John Major made no secret of its support in the 1992 election for President George H. W. Bush. Perhaps most important, Clinton was well aware of the voting power of millions of Irish Americans.

  “If there had been five Irish Americans in the United States it probably wouldn’t have gotten the same attention” from Clinton, said former U.S. congressman Bruce Morrison, also a key player in the peace process.

  With Clinton focused on the issue, O’Dowd felt “we had one hand on the Holy Grail.”

  To get the other hand there, O’Dowd believed he needed to get prominent Irish Americans involved. In the past many had been skittish about being politically active in the north, finding it too controversial. There were Irish American backers of the Northern Irish Aid Committee (Noraid), which supplied money to the IRA, but as the bombings continued, Noraid’s support was waning. Noraid had leveraged nostalgia and Irish patriotism to raise money among immigrants, but no high-level official in the United States, Ireland, or Britain viewed the organization as a serious player in any potential peace process.

  Washington couldn’t solve the Northern Ireland issue on its own, but O’Dowd hoped that the United States could be an effective outside force to help the Brits and the Irish find a way to stop shooting each other.

  O’Dowd’s plan was to assemble a prominent group of Irish Americans, people who had close ties to Clinton, and to use them to push for peace in Northern Ireland. They would act as unofficial intermediaries between Washington, DC, and Northern Ireland and its warring parties, most notably Sinn Féin and the IRA. Through O’Dowd’s connections, the group would have the blessing of both the White House and the IRA—but both sides could still officially deny that they were talking to each other.

  O’Dowd’s first stop was Chuck Feeney, the self-made Irish American billionaire who had cofounded duty-free shops all around the world. Feeney was one of America’s most prolific philanthropists and was in the process of giving away most of his vast fortune. O’Dowd knew that Feeney, while not particularly political, was concerned about the Northern Irish Troubles—he was born in New Jersey, but his roots were in County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland. He also knew that Feeney was reclusive and avoided any public exposure.

  Over dinner at P. J. Clarke’s, an Irish bar in Manhattan, O’Dowd made his pitch to Feeney. He argued that the group had a chance to make history, to be honest brokers who could help defuse one of the most intractable conflicts in the world. Or they could fail miserably and publicly. Feeney didn’t hesitate. O’Dowd had his first recruit, then quickly signed up Bill Flynn, who ran Mutual of America Insurance Company in New York and was well respected in the worlds of business and politics.

  Most important, O’Dowd needed a trusted, well-known figure to be the effort’s spokesman. O’Dowd felt that for the group to be seen as legitimate in Ireland, the leader ought to be an American with an American accent. O’Dowd immediately thought of Bruce Morrison, who already had won credibility for his Morrison visas and who had also attended Yale with Hillary Clinton and was a close friend of the first couple.

  O’Dowd and Morrison had been talking about Northern Ireland for months, and Morrison had been impressed by both O’Dowd’s passion and his connections. As Penn Rhodeen recounts in his 2016 book about Morrison, Peacerunner, Morrison was looking for a way to do something constructive in Northern Ireland. The answer, Morrison said, “was Niall thinking very big thoughts about what we could do.”

  Morrison later said O’Dowd’s idea to make Northern Ireland an international issue on the agenda of a U.S. president “was a radical notion at the time.” And his idea of creating an unorthodox group of unofficial peace envoys was equally inspired and outside-the-box. “Niall was the convener,” Morrison said. “If Niall had not been there, the group wouldn’t have formed.”

  With his group in place, O’Dowd next needed to be sure that the IRA was t
ruly willing to get involved. He met with Ciaran Staunton, another Irishman living in the United States, who had deep IRA and Noraid ties. Staunton said O’Dowd’s plan was ambitious, but he came to believe that it could work. “When all is said and done, there’s usually a lot more said than done,” Staunton said. “Niall’s not like that. He gets things done.”

  Staunton helped O’Dowd create his quiet channels into Sinn Féin and the IRA itself. He helped arrange the Dublin meeting with Ted (O’Dowd later learned his full name was Ted Howell) where O’Dowd made his initial pitch, and Ted relayed O’Dowd’s message to Adams and top IRA leadership.

  O’Dowd had first met Gerry Adams in 1983 when he interviewed him at Sinn Féin’s heavily fortified headquarters on the Falls Road in Belfast. At age thirty, O’Dowd was an eager young journalist profiling Adams for his start-up newspaper in San Francisco, the Irishman. Back then, by order of the British and Irish governments, the media was banned from even broadcasting Adams’s voice. But O’Dowd thought that silencing Adams was not smart; it offended many around the world who valued free speech. He especially admired the United States for its commitment to free speech and often said, “I love the First Amendment.”

  A few years after their first meeting, in the mid-1980s, O’Dowd offered Adams a monthly column in his Irish Voice, giving the Sinn Féin leader a way to get his message out in America. O’Dowd felt a better-informed public was the more effective way to get past the decades of deadlock. O’Dowd and Adams stayed in touch through Adams’s columns in the Irish Voice, and both men have said that trust grew between them over the years. O’Dowd’s wife, Debbie McGoldrick, the Voice editor, would sometimes type up the columns Adams dictated over the phone.

  By the early 1990s, O’Dowd had come to believe that Adams was sincere about trying to persuade the IRA to “give up the gun” and press for nationalist causes through peaceful means. Adams, eager to create new international pressure to find peace, saw in O’Dowd a man he could trust. “If we gave Niall a message, it would get to the appropriate people in the White House,” Adams said. “I didn’t have any doubt of it.” O’Dowd kept Sinn Féin apprised of his progress. As an added security measure, they usually communicated in Gaelic; O’Dowd and his Sinn Féin contacts were both fluent.

  Word came back to O’Dowd that they needed a current elected official as part of the group to give it more gravitas and attract more attention. So O’Dowd enlisted Boston mayor Ray Flynn, a prominent Irish American and close Clinton ally.

  Now, in early 1993, with Clinton fresh in office, O’Dowd needed something from the IRA. He sent a letter via courier to Belfast explaining that his group was ready to publicly come over to Ireland and engage with Sinn Féin. But in return, they needed a sign of good faith: the IRA had to impose a weeklong cease-fire during the group’s visit. Nancy Soderberg, Clinton’s Deputy National Security Advisor, told O’Dowd she needed concrete evidence that the IRA was serious about working on peace.

  “If we go over, and I get a cease-fire, will you take me seriously and deal with us?” he asked her.

  “Prove it. Do the cease-fire, and we’ll start believing you,” she replied.

  A week after O’Dowd sent his letter to Belfast, a man showed up at O’Dowd’s New York office, handed him an envelope, and left without saying a word. The IRA had agreed: there would be a seven-day cease-fire starting on May 4, 1993.

  O’Dowd put down the paper, thrilled. This was a breakthrough. He notified the group, and they started making arrangements. O’Dowd alerted Senator Kennedy’s office, which passed the news to the White House. But then, just a few days before the start of the trip, Ray Flynn, the mayor of Boston, got cold feet about the politically risky endeavor and abruptly dropped out. The plan quickly unraveled without its high-profile political face. O’Dowd thought he looked like an amateur and an idiot to the White House. His contacts in the IRA were furious, and they summoned him to Belfast to explain himself.

  A week later, O’Dowd found himself sitting in the living room of an unremarkable and secret West Belfast home, facing Gerry Adams, Ted Howell, and several men he recognized as top leaders of the IRA. Adams explained that getting the IRA to agree to a cease-fire had been a monumental feat. Having the American delegation cancel was a blow that would give ammunition to factions in the IRA that opposed any peace deal.

  For the next two hours, O’Dowd explained the situation as honestly as he could to the IRA men, who were clearly skeptical. “I’m sitting there with these characters, and they said, ‘Are you misleading us? Are you a spy?’ ” O’Dowd said. “I said, ‘No. I screwed up. I picked the wrong guy.’ ” He thought Ray Flynn had been a mistake.

  In the end, Adams accepted his explanation and asked him to reschedule the trip.

  In September 1993, O’Dowd had another letter from the IRA secretly pledging another weeklong cease fire. He and his core group—Feeney, the billionaire entrepreneur; Morrison, the former congressman; and Bill Flynn, the insurance executive—arrived in Dublin and met with Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds and U.S. Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith, then moved on the next day to Belfast, keeping the White House quietly updated through Senator Kennedy’s office.

  In Belfast, the group did two things that marked a major departure: they met with Protestant Loyalist political and paramilitary groups and Sinn Féin. While O’Dowd’s heart was with Sinn Féin, he also knew that any peace plan needed the blessing of the Protestant Loyalists. He knew their voices had to be heard too, so he reached out to them. He also recruited Gary McMichael, the son of a key Loyalist figure, to write articles for his newspaper. O’Dowd would later write the foreword to McMichael’s book The Ulster Voice.

  At the Sinn Féin headquarters on the Falls Road, the group attended a public meeting to hear the stories of residents of the working-class Catholic neighborhoods that made up the core Sinn Féin constituency. People told them they had faith that American involvement could finally win them some better treatment and respect. One woman spoke of how her son had been shot by the British Army, and when she was finished, she took O’Dowd by the hand and said, “Thank you for not treating us like animals.”

  The group then met privately with Adams and other Sinn Féin leaders and emerged feeling that the IRA was committed to seeking peace. At the end of their eight-day visit, news broke in the local press about the IRA’s specific cease-fire for the American delegation. The cease-fire, the first since the 1970s, was a clear signal that IRA leaders were serious about working with the Clinton team. Though unannounced, the cease-fire was also accompanied by a specific written statement that the White House had demanded.

  At first, Nancy Soderberg didn’t trust O’Dowd. She wouldn’t even talk directly to him. But eventually she became his primary contact in the White House during his secret peace negotiations. She came to realize that he wasn’t just a messenger but the interpreter of the message—especially the signals of Gerry Adams. “One of the frustrating things about working with Adams at the time was that the language was so cautious and twisted and contorted, it often just looked like gobbledygook to me,” she said. “And Niall helped peel that onion back so that you could sort of read between the layers and understand what was going on.”

  Soderberg came to admire O’Dowd and appreciate that he could interpret what Adams was saying, observe what was happening on the ground, and predict what was ahead. “He was absolutely correct every single time, so I got to trust him. Nothing ever leaked, so I became really quite dependent on his analysis and interpretative skills and his discretion. And it is very unusual to have an outsider play that role.”

  Over the next months, O’Dowd, Morrison, and their group urged the White House to have Clinton grant Adams a long-denied visa to visit the United States. There was fierce opposition from British officials and many in the United States, including most of Clinton’s own national security team, who considered Adams a terrorist. O’Dowd argued that the IRA had shown good faith by agreeing to the cease-fire, and now t
he White House needed to offer them something. In the end, Clinton agreed to the visa, and Adams made a high-profile visit starting on February 1, 1994.

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1994, O’Dowd and his group remained in close contact with Sinn Féin. They traveled to the party’s annual conference in Letterkenny in the spring and met behind closed doors with Adams and other leaders. The goal was a complete, public, unequivocal cease-fire, but O’Dowd and his group knew that trying to rush the IRA into that was a waste of time. The IRA was deeply divided and supremely cautious. The tide appeared to be moving in the right direction, but it was happening slowly.

  On August 10, O’Dowd received a letter from the IRA, delivered by a Sinn Féin contact, stating that the group had an “urgent need” for details of what the Americans would give the IRA in return for a cease-fire. That letter, produced on an old-fashioned printer, is the only document from the process that O’Dowd has kept for history. It included one potentially disastrous demand, a possible deal-breaker: the IRA was demanding $1 million to open a Sinn Féin office in Washington and fund its operation for the first three years.

  O’Dowd panicked. He knew that visibility and legitimacy in the United States was critically important for Sinn Féin—it had to be included in the deal. So now he had forty-eight hours to come up with a million dollars.

  He knew only one man who could make that happen: Chuck Feeney.

  Feeney’s response was what it had been every time O’Dowd asked for his help.

  “Of course,” he said.

  O’Dowd, Morrison, and the others, in indirect collaboration with Soderberg and her White House team, drew up a document that promised U.S. business investment in Northern Ireland, regular visas for Sinn Féin leaders, and limits on the deportation of people with ties to the IRA. It also promised to permit Sinn Féin to open a U.S. office. And while Feeney didn’t pay the IRA or Sinn Féin directly, he did cover the bills for their office for the next three years. O’Dowd’s wife, McGoldrick, then faxed the letter off to a secret contact in Ireland.