BY MARY JORDAN AND KEVIN SULLIVAN
A dark hotel bar in Dublin. Just after Christmas, 1992.
Niall O’Dowd was new to the secret agent game, and more than a little awkward at it. He was an Irish-born journalist who had been living and working in America for thirteen years, and now he found himself in an odd and audacious position.
President Bill Clinton’s White House wanted to make contact with the Irish Republican Army. Clinton was intrigued by the notion he could help bring peace to Northern Ireland, which had been wracked for years by violence between Protestants and Catholics known as the Troubles. Peace would only work if the IRA was interested in a cease-fire—but the American president couldn’t exactly send his secretary of state to Belfast for a cheery sit-down with a group considered terrorists in Washington and London.
There needed to be a no-fingerprints, totally deniable approach to the overture.
And into that opportunity walked O’Dowd, a soft-spoken writer, illegal immigrant, Gaelic football player, and house-painter who had risen to become publisher of two influential publications based in New York, Irish America magazine and the Irish Voice newspaper.
O’Dowd offered to serve as a clandestine, off-the-books bridge between the two powerful and skittish players, who just might be interested in ending three decades of bloody misery.
After making his pitch to a man in New York with “friends” in Belfast, O’Dowd received a cryptic handwritten note. A man from Sinn Féin, the political party closely associated with the IRA, would meet him at 11:30 a.m. in the bar at Wynn’s Hotel, just off Dublin’s famous O’Connell Street. His contact would be reading the Irish Times, with a pint of Guinness in front of him.
O’Dowd arrived drenched with rain and twenty minutes late, frantic that he had messed up his first attempt at amateur spy craft. He stumbled into the half-empty bar, where a couple of regulars were drinking pints. There at a table was a tall, bearded man with thick, graying hair who was dressed in jeans and a casual jacket. He looked up over his Irish Times, a Guinness on the table.
“Ted,” he said, holding a hand out and introducing himself.
“Niall,” O’Dowd replied.
Ted started ordering more pints, but O’Dowd had long since sworn off alcohol. So he settled for a very un-007 mineral water.
O’Dowd felt out of his depth with his water and his proposal for peace, which began to sound wackier and wackier the more he explained it.
Ted just looked back at him, difficult to read. O’Dowd wasn’t sure if he was interested or annoyed that O’Dowd was wasting his time.
O’Dowd made the pitch: He’d personally spoken to Clinton a few months earlier, and Clinton had made it clear that he wanted to get involved in Northern Ireland. But not publicly, at least not yet. O’Dowd was in contact with people in Senator Edward Kennedy’s office who could relay messages to and from the White House. O’Dowd told Ted that he could put together a group of sympathetic Irish American businessmen and politicians who would come to Belfast and publicly meet with representatives from all sides of the conflict—including an unprecedented meeting with Sinn Féin.
The idea was to “internationalize” the issue—to give this domestic British problem the kind of international attention that had helped undermine apartheid in South Africa.
Sinn Féin’s bloody campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland had left it out in the cold, isolated. In return for any thaw in relations, the IRA would have to first agree to a weeklong cease- fire during the American group’s visit to the north, O’Dowd said. It would be a goodwill gesture to prove that it was serious about wanting to work toward peace.
Peace in Northern Ireland had always topped O’Dowd’s list of priorities, and he wrote about it constantly. He believed in the IRA’s cause of kicking the British out of Northern Ireland and reuniting it with the Irish Republic but disagreed with its violent tactics. At the same time, he knew how much blood had been spilled in the violent clashes between Protestant unionists loyal to Britain and the Catholic Irish nationalists opposed to British rule. Some thirty-six hundred people had died in the guerrilla war. And in order to have what he called “an honorable peace,” an agreement had to be seen as respectful to those on both sides. An IRA official had once told O’Dowd that the IRA could only accept a deal “the dead can live with.”
O’Dowd stressed to Ted that his group could have no official status from the White House, but that it would be “very well connected.” If the IRA took that first step, O’Dowd said it was very possible that Clinton would buck pressure from London to not get involved and appoint a U.S. peace envoy to Northern Ireland. Britain, the United States’ closest ally, was fervently opposed to U.S. involvement in what it considered its internal affairs. And, O’Dowd said, it was possible that Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams might finally be able to break a long-standing logjam and receive a visa to visit the United States—a long-term goal in Sinn Féin’s campaign to have the world hear its voice.
Don’t miss the opportunity, O’Dowd told Ted. The conditions had never been this favorable.
Ted looked at his eager, idealistic partner—soggy from the rain, clearly nervous, a thirty-nine-year-old man of average build who did not stand out in any way except for the dimple on his chin. The rumpled journalist playing secret statesman listened as Ted said that Sinn Féin wanted to engage with America, wanted peace negotiations. “Part of our objective is that our movement is not isolated,” he said, without committing to anything, but without rejecting anything, either.
Ted hadn’t laughed at him, and he hadn’t walked out. Trying to read the hard man sitting opposite him, O’Dowd sensed that Ted thought the idea wasn’t totally crazy.
If it did go forward, Ted said, here’s how communication would be handled: All documents would be destroyed after being read. There would be a code: the Irish American effort would be called “the project,” Gerry Adams would be “chairman,” letters would be hand-delivered by trusted couriers. The IRA would be “the local football team”; U.S. ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith would be “dream woman,” a reference to a mythical figure in Gaelic poetry; and Senator Kennedy would be “the brother.”
Without another word, Ted got up and left.
O’Dowd felt overwhelming relief. “I had not been laughed out of the court,” he would say later. “The American connection was up and running.”
NIALL (PRONOUNCED “KNEEL”) Oliver O’Dowd, born in County Tipperary in May 1953, was one of seven children and thought he would be a schoolteacher like his father. His family moved to Drogheda, an industrial port north of Dublin, when he was nine, and as he grew older, he felt the small island was too constricting. “The sons of lawyers became lawyers, sons of doctors became doctors, sons of teachers, as I was, became teachers,” he says now. “A few hours’ drive in any direction,” he said, “and you fall into the ocean.”
Like many young Irish around him, O’Dowd felt the gravitational pull of America that had moved so many generations of Irish before him. His imagination was fired by Superman comic books, and then by the works of Whitman, Faulkner, and Hemingway, which were brought to his attention by an inspiring teacher named Brother Nolan.
America seemed so endless, so full of possibility, a place where anybody could be anything. To O’Dowd, nothing represented the vast greatness of America more than Muhammad Ali. “I read a Playboy interview with him,” O’Dowd said. “He was unbelievable. Giving up everything for his beliefs, basically. I thought he was an extraordinary person. He was magnificent in terms of what he achieved and what he was challenging. He was a hero. You couldn’t do anything like it in Ireland.”
One of his most vivid memories was waking up before dawn on May 26, 1975, and watching with his father Ali’s much-anticipated second world championship fight against Sonny Liston. They turned on the TV just in time to watch Ali knock out Liston only two minutes into the first round. “We went back to bed 10 minutes later,” O’Dowd said.
In the spring of 1976, when he was twenty-two, he flew to Chicago on a six-month student visa. He was a respectable Gaelic football player, fast on his feet and sturdy enough to absorb the game’s brutal hits. And he found a local team in Chicago that was willing to sponsor his visa and pay one-way airfare for their new Irish recruit.
A couple from Kerry who helped run the team took him in. Later, a teammate invited him to live in his fraternity house at Loyola University during the summer. He found a job in construction with an all-Irish crew, spending his days shoveling mortar into a wheelbarrow in the hot sun. But the thick-necked foreman who had arrived in the United States before him didn’t get on well with the college-educated newcomer. One day their argument—and O’Dowd’s job—ended in a fistfight.
He returned to Ireland that fall and went back to University College Dublin, where he graduated in 1977 with a degree in English and Gaelic. Despite his big dreams of faraway lands, he took a job teaching in an inner-city school in Dublin. He found himself frustrated and dispirited, teaching unruly poor kids who were too hungry to study. His father’s noble profession now seemed like an exercise in keeping order in forty-five-minute chunks. In the summer of 1978 he set off for America again on a new student visa, this time for San Francisco.
A friend had a brother on a Gaelic football team there and they were looking for new blood. California. O’Dowd saw it as the most American of all American places. Besides, he was feeling a little like a hippie anyway with his long hair and beard. San Francisco sounded perfect.
After a stint painting California houses and even starting his own little painting business, O’Dowd decided he wanted to try something more cerebral. As a teenager back in Ireland, he had started a school newspaper. In the United States, O’Dowd was struck by the large Irish immigrant communities in Chicago and San Francisco and how hungry they were for information, not just concerning news back home but also about specific issues they, as Irish Americans, cared about. In the pre-Internet era, many would drive miles to get weeks-old Irish newspapers that had been mailed from overseas. O’Dowd saw an opportunity.
Eventually, his visa expired, and he was officially an illegal immigrant. But in the late 1970s, that seemed more like a detail than a serious offense, and he barely gave it a second thought. After nearly falling through scaffolding to his death while painting, O’Dowd decided it was time to start a new career.
He scraped together $952 with the help of a friend, Tom McDonagh, to start a newspaper. He called it the Irishman and launched the twelve-page first edition on September 14, 1979, with an editorial that he wrote: “This newspaper is born out of a hope that we can act as the link between the various strands in the community and strengthen the bond of birth and upbringing that we all can share.”
O’Dowd already had a clear sense of living in two worlds, the land of his birth and the land of his choice. He rejected the notion that immigrants had to pick one or the other, and he argued that one of the great things about the United States was that it allowed him to be thoroughly American while maintaining his Irish identity.
His strategy for his business, and for the way he wanted to position himself as a bridge between two nations and cultures, rested on three pillars:
Be someone people can trust.
Be well informed.
Harness the untapped power of forty million Irish Americans, and urge them to think beyond St. Patrick’s Day parades to work for the betterment of both nations.
He printed five thousand copies of the Irishman and sold them for fifty cents each, mainly at Irish bars. He was nearly broke most of the time, supplementing his income by freelancing for the Irish Press newspaper in Dublin under legendary editor Tim Pat Coogan, who was a mentor to him.
He had read that 90 percent of new publications fail, but a fear of failure, which holds back so many others, didn’t weigh him down. If this venture didn’t work out he would just move on to the next thing.
He interviewed Charles Manson and César Chávez and kept up with the U.S. news but mainly focused on Irish issues—including the immigration status of so many undocumented Irish. They were trapped without any legal protections and feared that if they went back home for funerals and other family milestones they might not be allowed back in the United States. The response from his immigrant readers was immediate and satisfying.
Along the way, he fell in love and moved in with another Tipperary native and immigrant to the United States, Patricia Harty, whom he had hired to work at the Irishman. He had also gotten himself legal. In 1980 the Irish Press sponsored him for a work visa; and in 1984 he was among several thousand Irish who obtained permanent residency—a green card—through the Donnelly visa program. (He became a U.S. citizen in 1989 and still holds both Irish and U.S. passports.)
In April 1985, after five and a half years of publishing the Irishman, O’Dowd, still broke, was ready for a change. He and Harty moved to New York City, married, and—with a $40,000 loan from a wealthy friend and journalistic pioneer, Brendan Mac Lua, founder of the Irish Post newspaper in England—launched Irish America, the first glossy magazine of its kind.
They sent out direct-mail solicitations to 250,000 people using contact lists borrowed from a wide variety of sources: the Irish Tourist Board magazine, companies that sold Waterford crystal and other Irish goods, and Irish groups including the Ancient Order of Hibernians. O’Dowd sensed that many were “tired of the shamrocks and green beer image” of the Irish in America and would subscribe to a smart magazine devoted to Irish events and issues. To their delight, about 10,000 people responded—a high hit rate for a direct-mail solicitation—all willing to pay $19.95 to subscribe to Irish America, which debuted in November 1985.
Harty recalled being amazed as the checks started showing up at their tiny New York office, including one from Los Angeles Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley.
“I thought, ‘Wow, even the Los Angeles Dodgers believe in us,’ ” she said.
Two years later, O’Dowd and Harty started the Irish Voice, a newspaper aimed primarily at younger Irish immigrants. The paper began covering issues like AIDS in the Irish community and practical problems faced by the undocumented Irish, and it soon became a formidable rival to the more established Irish Echo newspaper that had been around since the 1920s.
O’Dowd was on his way to becoming what Bill Clinton later called “the voice of Irish America for this generation.”
BY 1985, AFTER seven years in the States, O’Dowd felt he understood the complications and contradictions of being an Irish immigrant, and with his publications he made it his mission to help his fellow countrymen and women more fully celebrate their roots and their culture while at the same time embracing America.
“I was a man of two countries, one the land of my birth which I still hankered after, and yet somehow rejected,” he wrote in a 2010 autobiography.
The other was my adopted home of the United States where I was happy but never fully a part, forever camped outside the mainstream. An immigrant is a stranger in both cultures.
When I returned to Ireland on vacations it had all changed, still recognizable enough for me to be at home, yet an outsider there. When I returned to the U.S., I was from somewhere else, no matter how much I tried to fit in. Emigration forces you to think about who you are but also to regret who you might have been if you stayed behind.
Because of his own experience, O’Dowd had the ability to understand the new arrivals, but he also proved adept at connecting with the more established community, who had ties to Ireland though their parents and grandparents.
He sought out meetings with influential Irish Americans, including Don Keough, then the president of Coca-Cola, whose great-grandfather had left Wexford in famine times. Keough said to him, “Where have you been all my life? I’ve wanted to talk to you.” Keough, who became a mentor to the much younger O’Dowd, told him people wanted to connect with others with similar backgrounds and with their own family history. Keough urged O’Dowd to keep reaching out to remind people they are Irish American and show them how to celebrate it.
“Everybody wants a touchstone. Everybody wants to be grounded,” O’Dowd said. “Here’s a guy with every success in the world, and what he most wanted was to feel part of something that’s unique. And the Irish heritage is pretty unique.”
Keough, who died in 2015, became so involved that he even brought two of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, to Ireland to try to spur economic development there.
In addition to his newspaper and magazine (and later his website, IrishCentral.com), in 1987 O’Dowd started an innovation for which he would also become well known: lists of prominent and influential Irish Americans.
He started with the “Business 100,” a list of the top one hundred Irish American business leaders in America. It was simple to find them: at the time, he said, almost a third of the Fortune 500 CEOs had some Irish roots. What was harder to find was a sense among many of them that their Irish heritage mattered.
“What I was trying to do was forge this sense of Irish identity, in different groups,” he said.
I took it into the realm of Wall Street, business, places where Irish identity wasn’t previously celebrated. I just said, “Here’s your culture. Here’s your history.”
A lot of people have said to me that business people, particularly on Wall Street, don’t care about their heritage. In fact, I found it quite the opposite, and they were very chuffed and very into it when I approached them about their heritage. You know, when you start an interview with the question, “Tell me about your parents,” or “Tell me about your father,” it has a profound impact on the person.
Robert J. McCann, chairman of UBS Americas, who has been honored on O’Dowd’s lists, including the “Irish America Hall of Fame,” said O’Dowd caused him to reflect on his own background and spurred him to a new activism in Irish causes. McCann grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of Irish immigrants who raised their children to focus on their life going forward in America. They didn’t talk much about being Irish or the country they had left. When, for instance, McCann was invited to attend the American Ireland Fund’s annual dinner in the late 1980s, he went because it was good for business, not because of any particular affection for Ireland.
But his perspective changed as he got to know O’Dowd and other influential Irish American leaders, including Pittsburgh native Dan Rooney, who was chairman of the Pittsburgh Steelers and would become the U.S. ambassador to Ireland. “It made me think differently about what it means to be Irish,” McCann said. “I want to be involved in things now.”
McCann said O’Dowd’s first impression can be misleading.
He always kind of looks like an unmade bed. He’s normally 15 minutes late. He talks in that almost whisper of his, and words run together. It took me a couple of years to kind of figure it out, but then I realized: Niall makes all of us who are Irish American better informed, more aware, more sensitive to what is going on actually in Ireland. He’s an incredibly easy person to underestimate. But anybody that does is really making a mistake and missing out.
The impact of what he knows and how he conveys it to you, it makes you want to be better. It makes you want to represent Ireland and your efforts for Ireland better. There’s nothing wrong with a good parade. There’s nothing wrong with a good party. But we Irish are so much more than that. And we tend to underestimate ourselves or not speak boldly about what we are.
McCann eventually became involved with the American Ireland Fund, and he is now a member of its executive committee. He is a driver behind a new Irish Arts Center being built in New York (as well as supporting the Abbey Theatre in Dublin) and a key backer of Narrative 4, a foundation founded by Irish writer Colum McCann. Rather than passively showing up at a few dinners and donating some money, he’s now actively working on projects that channel the talent of Irish America.
And all that started with one of O’Dowd’s lists.
“At first, I didn’t think the lists were that important. But what I’ve come to realize is, everybody likes recognition,” McCann explains. “And there are a lot of people, if you give them an opportunity to become more aware of Ireland and things Irish, they’re happy to take up that opportunity. But you need something to trigger that. People are busy. I’ve seen Niall use these lists to get people involved, and I think it’s a very clever way to do it.”
Maureen Mitchell, president of global sales and marketing for the asset management arm of General Electric, met O’Dowd through his lists: she has been on the “Business 100,” and in 2016 she was named to the magazine’s inaugural “Top 50 Power Women.” She and Irish ambassador Anne Anderson were the keynote speakers at the luncheon celebrating the power women list. “There is this connective tissue that binds us,” Mitchell said. “So many people have Irish surnames and they think about that on occasion. I think what Niall has done through the magazine, the website, the lists, is that he’s given a very disparate community a voice and a sense of self.”
Mitchell’s parents were immigrants from Ireland, and she grew up in an Irish American enclave in Manhattan. She said her family was more focused on America than Ireland, in contrast to some of her neighbors—second or third generation Irish—who did focus on their Irish roots, but in a sort of “holiday Irish” way.
“What Niall has done is bring me back to that Irish community,” Mitchell said. “Absolutely I see my Irishness differently. I’m once more intrigued with it and its impact on me. I will make sure that my children and my new grandchild will have a sense of that as well.”
And this was the goal. Harty—who still edits Irish America despite splitting from O’Dowd after four years of marriage—says that starting the magazine was a way to create a bridge between the two nations and that remains true. So many people she’d met in America called themselves Irish but had never been to Ireland. “For them Ireland was this mythical place,” she said. “I started to realize that you don’t have to be born on the island of Ireland to be Irish. It’s the same plant, just different soil.”
THE IRISH CONNECTOR is also a crusader. O’Dowd uses his publications and stature to advance key causes. For decades one of his top priorities—along with peace in Northern Ireland—was working to help get legal status for undocumented Irish.
In the 1980s, O’Dowd campaigned in his editorials to pressure Congress to create “Donnelly visas,” named after Representative Brian Donnelly of Massachusetts, which would go on to give many Irish immigrants legal status—including O’Dowd. Later, as the number of undocumented Irish was rising in New York and many U.S cities, due to the fact that Ireland’s economic fortunes were falling, O’Dowd raised the profile of his crusade and became what Bruce Morrison, a former U.S. congressman from Connecticut, called “the trumpet, the mouthpiece,” for the Irish immigration reform movement.
While in office Morrison pushed through an immigration reform bill that led to forty-eight thousand people getting visas—known as “Morrison visas”— in the early 1990s. While he used to say he could get a free drink in any Irish pub in America because of all the undocumented workers who benefited from his help, Morrison also said that O’Dowd played a key role in promoting his bill. In addition to writing about immigration constantly in his newspaper, the Irish Voice, O’Dowd personally lobbied members of Congress, including Senator Kennedy.
The Irish Voice explained the political fight, gave legal advice to the undocumented, listed resources available to them, and editorialized about the need for elected officials to help. The undocumented could pick up a copy of the paper in bars and Irish centers across America. A popular column called the Green Card, written by Debbie McGoldrick, was a must-read for thousands.
McGoldrick, the daughter of Irish immigrants who grew up on Long Island, had gotten her first job out of college at the Irish Echo. She remembered thinking that O’Dowd’s startup newspaper would be a flash in the pan, “a rag that might last three months.” But in 1991, the Irish Voice had only gotten stronger, and she joined. She was passionate about the issues the paper covered and never tired of reporting on them. (In 1996, she married O’Dowd, and three years later they had a daughter, named Alana.)
In December 2005, O’Dowd created the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, an organization that now has twenty-eight chapters across the country. He wanted to stop hiding the fact that there were so many undocumented and put it front and center. He organized hundreds of Irish people from across the country to descend on Capitol Hill, knocking on doors and demanding action from Congress. But the mood of the country was turning, and it was getting harder to push any immigration reform law through Congress.
O’Dowd mobilized Irish Americans behind an immigration reform bill sponsored by Kennedy and Arizona Republican senator John McCain. In 2007, hundreds of people swarmed Capitol Hill wearing “Legalize the Irish” T-shirts. O’Dowd’s publications pushed hard. But in the end, the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill of 2007 faltered. It would mark the beginning of a far more hostile and divisive atmosphere in Washington toward immigrants.
“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 truly 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 the 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.
The contact, following agreed-upon instructions, took the letter and stood on Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge on a damp night. A woman eventually appeared out of the fog. “Do you think Dublin will win the game on Sunday?” That was the signal, and the courier handed over the letter without a word.
O’Dowd quickly received a written response that seemed positive: the group should be prepared to return to Belfast. The timing was unclear, so he made a phone call. “When should I take my holidays?” O’Dowd asked, a coded inquiry about when they needed to be in Belfast. “Why don’t you try the last week in August,” was the reply.
On August 25, the original four—O’Dowd, Morrison, Flynn, and Feeney—arrived back in Ireland, this time joined by labor union executives Joe Jamison and Bill Lenihan. The group’s presence at what seemed likely to be a historic moment was reassuring to IRA leaders, who wanted to know (and wanted the world to know) that Irish America was behind them. “It reinforced the American dimension to those in the IRA army council who were about to make what was to them a momentous decision to call off their war,” wrote Conor O’Clery, an Irish Times journalist and author of Daring Diplomacy: Clinton’s Secret Search for Peace in Ireland.
They met Irish prime minister Reynolds, who was adamant that anything less than a permanent IRA cease-fire would be unacceptable. The group moved to Belfast and met with Adams and other top Sinn Féin leaders, expecting some sort of last-minute complications. That fear disappeared when a relaxed looking Adams breezed into the room and said, “The army is going to call a complete cessation.”
O’Dowd was jubilant but knew that until the IRA said that publicly, the deal could still fall apart. But just before noon on August 31, 1994, as O’Dowd listened to the radio while exercising in a Dublin hotel, a young woman’s voice made the IRA announcement. As of midnight, “there will be a complete cessation of military operations.”
O’Dowd stepped off the treadmill and broke down in tears.
“I had had just a huge amount of personal involvement,” he said. “I had completely dedicated my life to this. I lost the relationship I was in at the time, and there were just an awful lot of things I put to one side for the best part of four years. It was a huge moment.”
A few minutes later, O’Dowd was called to the hotel phone. It was Senator Kennedy. “Ted was like a five year old; he was so happy.” Later that day, as O’Dowd waited at a television station to give an interview, Reynolds “literally bounded in and squeeze my hand so hard I thought he was going to fracture it.”
The following year, Clinton made a triumphant visit to Ireland. O’Dowd trailed the president’s plane on Air Force Two, with the other members of his group and Irish American leaders from across the country. Clinton spoke to more than two hundred thousand people, the crowd chanting his name at Belfast’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony. He received an equally rapturous reception at an outdoor speech in Dublin. Clinton called it the “two best days of my presidency.”
The euphoria did not hold. Nor did the peace. Mistrust and missteps continued, and seventeen months later the IRA resumed bombing, this time at London’s Canary Wharf in 1996. More negotiations and more cease-fires followed and persistent peace talks led by former U.S. senator George Mitchell finally, in April 1998, led to the Good Friday Agreement. That deal created a peace that has held to this day, built largely on a foundation laid by Niall O’Dowd.
Adams, who in 2016 was still the president of Sinn Féin, as well as a member of the Irish Parliament, said O’Dowd’s journalism, and the secret channels that he created to help kick-start the peace process, provided just the right pressure at just the right time. “I have a huge affection for him,” Adams said. “He would be able to feel the pulse of what was happening in the States, and the pulse of what was happening here [in Ireland]. I cannot stress enough the very central role that he played. There probably would have been a peace process, but there certainly wouldn’t have been a peace process at that time, if Niall hadn’t been so centrally involved.” Adams continued:
Sometimes, and I believe this truly, one person can make a difference. It’s the difference between having a good idea, and doing it. You may have a very good idea, and you may be very genuine—as genuine as Niall O’Dowd is about Ireland—but you’re busy and you have responsibilities, and so on. And you might think, “Who am I? How can I do this?” It’s the difference between being a dreamer and being a visionary. The visionaries deliver.
O’Dowd, he said, delivered for Ireland.