March 12, 2005

Now that St. Patrick's Day is almost upon us, this year we find out that not all Irishmen are good guys.
For shame, Gerry!
I'll never deal with Adams again, says Bush

President Bush personally ordered that Gerry Adams be frozen out of official engagements during his visit to America, furious that the Sinn Fein leader had betrayed his efforts to help to re-start the Northern Ireland peace process.
 
Mr Bush now views Mr Adams in the same unfavourable light as he did Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, a senior presidential adviser said last night. "At the White House, Adams is now regarded with the same sort of disdain as Arafat," the adviser told The Telegraph. "The President no longer considers Mr Adams a reliable partner for peace. He doesn't want to meet him."

Mr Bush was enraged to learn that at the same time as he was pressing Mr Adams late last year to relaunch the power-sharing deal, Sinn Fein's armed wing, the IRA, was planning the £26 million Northern Bank raid in Belfast. He had telephoned both Mr Adams and Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionists, in an attempt to persuade Northern Ireland's two biggest parties to resume the stalled peace negotiations.
[Lest we forget, President Bush also made a trip there to meet with Northern Ireland's leaders and Tony Blair.]

Mr Bush's displeasure has forced Mr Adams to abandon plans to raise money while in America. The United States government made it clear that it would not grant him a visa that permits fund-raising, this newspaper has learnt. Sinn Fein had claimed that Mr Adams had chosen not to raise money "to avoid it being made into a contentious issue''. In reality, he was told not even to bother applying for the appropriate paperwork for the week-long visit, which began in Ohio yesterday. American officials are also demanding major concessions from Sinn Fein, most significantly that the IRA be disbanded.

"It's hard to understand how a European country in the year 2005 can have a private army associated with a political party," said Mitchell Reiss, the US envoy for Northern Ireland.

Mr Adams was invited to a St Patrick's Day reception at the White House by President Clinton in 1995 and given permission to start raising funds three years later. While he and other Irish political leaders are not on Mr Bush's guest list for St Patrick's Day celebrations this Thursday, significantly the President will welcome the sisters and fiancée of Robert McCartney, the Catholic man murdered by a gang of IRA thugs in January.

When he visited Northern Ireland in 2003, Mr Bush welcomed the efforts being made by Mr Adams and fellow political leaders. "They've signed on to a process that will yield peace," the President said.

Mr Bush's snub by will be a financial blow to Sinn Fein, as Mr Adams is the party's star turn in America and had been expected to raise large sums on his tour.

For decades, Irish republicanism has been a source of strain in Anglo-American relations as successive British governments have tried to persuade Washington to clamp down on IRA fundraising in the US. As prime minister, John Major was so angry when President Clinton first granted Mr Adams a visa in 1994 that he refused to take his telephone calls.

Ah, Bill Clinton!
Has America's favorite convalescing patient ever met a terrorist he didn't like?
And the scales have certainly fallen from President Bush's eyes (and the rest of ours) if we had any doubts that Sinn Fein's and the IRA's main business was terrorism.
Now there's reason to believe that the IRA is working with Al Queda and from the Colombia Three case, we definitely know that the IRA was working with FARC terrorists in South America, teaching them how to make better bombs.
I predict that relationship will get stronger now that the IRA's goons like Adams are personna non grata in the UK.
But Al Queda ties or no, we should continue to isolate, help prosecute, shut down funding and refuse to legitimize any political group that uses murder and bombings of the innocent to get their political way.
The GWOT's dragnet just expanded to include the Islamists' Celtic cousins.
I won't miss seeing Adams innocuously pinning shamrocks on the leader of the free world to celebrate Saint Paddy's Day and perhaps he won't miss all those American millions since they have those bank robbery proceeds to tide them over.
I appreciate and love President Bush for so many reasons, but his taking a stand against evil men and terror lords like Adams is a biggie.
So, I'll be sending an Irish blessing his way on March 17;
"May the road rise up to meet you..."