U.S. Interest and Involvement in Ireland and Northern Ireland

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In a once in a lifetime ethnic convergence, the strong Irish American leaders of Congress and the White House joined together to cajole, persuade, and lobby the State Department in its formation of Irish foreign policy. But if diplomatic changes in U.S. policy toward Ireland and Northern Ireland were made public after a private struggle between Irish American leaders and the government's advocates of status quo, then the economic changes in U.S. investment have been obscured by the public debate between Irish Americans who seek increased investment and those who seek to limit investment. However, economic factors are not the primary determinant in Irish development as much as the political factors that decide which enterprise is to be established where, how it is to be financed, and when such investment is to be actualized. A case is made that the recent changes in the leadership of the important Irish American groups, which at one point in the 1980s did play a constructive role in forming Irish foreign policy, has now allowed the President to return to a more centrist diplomatic and economic policy.