No doubt he does but who cares now? He's been relegated to the political slag heap.
Despite what the Poms say about the Good Friday agreement and the subsequent abolition of the visible South-North border ,
it was Chuck Feeney ,(by the way a generous donor to Qld Cancer Fund in memory of his Aussie mate Fletch), who instigated it via Bill Clinton. Bill appointed Senator George Mitchell to chair a peace accord committee between the warring factions of which the Poms were merely one.
The idea was to accomplish a truce in Northern Ireland before the Yanks cranked up their war on terror because millions
good US citizens including the Kennedys and Chuck himself did not want the US based supporters of Sinn Fein & the IRA to
be lumped-in with other supporters of terrorism. The result was the Good Friday Agreement which was Chaired by the
US & led by the US and engineered by the US. (thank you Bill, thank you ball boys)
Prior to that the provisional IRA was doing truck with al-Gadaffi and other anti-US regimes in a desperate attempt for
the consistent supply of arms, explosives & know-how and of course Gadaffi was out of favour with the Yanks since the downing of the Pan-Am plane over Lockabee in Scotland.
During my time in the US it was customary at Gaelig football matches and other Irish events for the hat to be passed around for "The Cause" and that tradition still exists except it has been rebranded for "The Victims". During the height of the "Troubles"
tens of millions were collected annually for the "Cause" in the US alone
Ireland owes its origin as a Free State to US support particularly via DeVelara who escaped execution in 1916 because he was
an American citizen. He subsequently financed most of the first Dail (Irish Lower House) in 1919 with US greenbacks.
So in Summary, neither Tony Blair nor the UK parliament can take too much credit for the Good Friday Agreement because it was
laid on all parties by good Old Bill & Co with and his Godfather-like offer they couldn't refuse.
Generally now, the NI conflict is political: The DUP (Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party- a Protestant Pauline Hansen) vs Sinn Fein (The political arm of the IRA-slightly Socialist with a Catholic twist) with Stormount suspended because the DUP is calling the shots from Westminster where it holds the Balance of Power.
