As each year passes, the Cold War – as an immediate fact, a structure of possibilities and dangers, of contingency – recedes into memory, devolving into stock images and simple polarities for popular usage, while evolving, at its best, into the kind of complex, many-sided history captured in Arne Westad's The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, or Piero Gleijeses's Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976. In this context, Ronald Reagan's stop-over in the Republic of Ireland in early June 1984 is one of those bits of historical detritus that older people might remember if prompted but which has no import for their students. It came on the eve of larger events, including an economic summit with the European Economic Community leaders, a stirring address to the House of Commons, and the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” speech in Normandy. Yet, properly unpacked, this brief span of days offers a prism into a set of important issues in Cold War studies. It highlights how the “second” Cold War promoted by the Reagan administration, and its Manichean face-off with a purported Soviet–Cuban threat in Central America, disturbed the US's most important strategic relationship, that with Western Europe.Footnote ¹ It also illuminates Ireland's distinctive relationship with the United States, as a nation both emphatically neutral and instinctively pro-American. Finally, it unlocks the problem of viewing the Cold War, and international relations in general, as entirely the province of Great Powers, a game where small nations like Ireland are no more than pawns, minor exogenous factors.

President Reagan's sojourn in Ireland is barely a blip on the scholarly radar screen. Most biographies, like Edmund Morris's Dutch, do not mention it at all, and those that do, such as Lou Cannon's Role of a Lifetime, provide a cursory treatment, commenting only on the efforts by Michael Deaver, the President's chief aide, to extend Reagan's plebeian roots down into the County Tipperary village of Ballyporeen, where he made a carefully staged inspection of the baptismal record of his long-lost great-grandfather, Michael O'Regan.Footnote ² In Reagan's own words, this was a “pleasant perk” provided by the Irish government, “a warming and emotional experience”; and that was all it was, since Reagan was, as Cannon put it, “an ardent Anglophile,” who “much preferred to be in London” with the queen and Margaret Thatcher, Ireland's nemesis.Footnote ³

In Ireland, the visit is recollected differently. Though too recent to have attracted scholars, it is popularly understood as marking the republic's move away from a filial attachment to the US (symbolized in Irish memory by the awestruck excitement that greeted John F. Kennedy in 1963), part of the ongoing turn towards a European identity. It is also understood as a timely reaffirmation of the republic's neutralist and anti-imperialist traditions, as can be seen in the documentary Failte, Mr. President (Welcome, Mr. President), which played on the state broadcasting network, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) in 2005.

What the Irish remember is the cool reception they gave an American President of Irish extraction (though not a Catholic, as many point out), and how remarkably stage-managed the visit was, their sense of being treated as props in a White House “photo-op,” the sort of faux spectacular frowned upon in Irish politics. Some also remember the demonstrations, which rivaled in size the 1981 funerals of the Provisional Irish Republican Army hunger strikers led by Bobby Sands. These include the “Ring around Reagan,” ten thousand people marching through Dublin on 3 June 1984, the day before he addressed the Irish parliament, and a host of protests: on 2 June, the day after Reagan's arrival, the Irish Times helpfully listed sixteen upcoming events around the island.Footnote ⁴

The casual souvenirs of old mobilizations assume a sentimental aura in hindsight: the much-played record by the balladeer Christy Moore, “Hey Ronnie Reagan” (with the chorus “Hey, Ronnie Reagan, I'm black and I'm pagan. I'm gay and I'm left and I'm free. I'm a non-fundamentalist environmentalist. Please don't bother me”); the walk-out by three deputies from the Irish parliament when the President began his address; the furor over awarding him an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland (NUI), including various eminent honorees returning their degrees, University College Galway lecturers selling diplomas for ten pence at the college gates, and Labour Party Chairman Michael D. Higgins, Galway's Senator (and now President of the Republic), presiding over a “de-conferring” ceremony. While the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald is blamed (incorrectly, he insists) for the proposal to have NUI honor Reagan, he is also remembered fondly for his donnish rebuke of the President at the 4 June state dinner in Dublin Castle, where he stated clearly the Irish people's disagreement with US policies in Central America.Footnote ⁵

Among the strongest memories, now with an odd resonance, are those of Galway's bishop, Eamon Casey, who told the newspapers and American television audiences “that he will not meet Mr Reagan when he visits,” citing “a prior commitment to confirm children,” but adding that he could never explain to the peasants he had met in El Salvador how he could shake Reagan's hand.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, the one thing on which all Irish people agree, from the diplomats who found the protests a nuisance to the ordinary person who remembers them fondly, was that their overwhelming focus was Central America. As FitzGerald noted in his memoirs, the visit was “a difficult occasion … rather nerve-racking,” because of “the extreme unpopularity” of what the US was doing in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.Footnote ⁷ Casey's declaration of a personal boycott generated the perception of a de facto ecclesiastical “snub,” and thus a national repudiation, given the Catholic Church's then enormous prestige.Footnote ⁸ Not one of the island's several dozen bishops found time to meet the President, and the Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, chose that week to leave the country on a retreat. Casey was editorially hailed in the Irish Times (“Bishop Casey, in particular, has driven the message home. Small can be powerful – at a certain juncture”), with the “episcopal boycott of the political leader of the Western world” described as a “sign of Church's shift to left.”Footnote ⁹

It matters little that inside the diplomatic structures both Irish and American policymakers regarded the many demonstrations and the rebuff by the Catholic leadership as minor distractions from the business of state – leveraging for mutual advantage. The key players in Ireland, including FitzGerald, Seán Donlon (the former ambassador to the US and then permanent undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and Peter Barry, the minister of foreign affairs, have all denied that it was possible for the Catholic Church leadership to boycott President Reagan, since they had no role in official state visits.Footnote ¹⁰ Although the major figures on the US side, such as Deaver or former Secretary of State George Schulz, are now either dead or unavailable, the former deputy chief of mission at the Dublin Embassy, John A. Boyle, and another embassy staffer, Mark Linton, similarly dispute any notion that the response either of Irish prelates or of the public figured in their plans.Footnote ¹¹ At the time, American diplomats and Reagan himself referred to the protests in jocular terms, but there is no indication that they shaped the administration's actions in visiting Ireland.Footnote ¹²

However, the organizers of diplomatic relations do not give the sole verdict on what did or did not matter at a given conjuncture. At the time, the fortuitous orchestration of clerical and lay protest by nuns, academics, students, and ordinary people in the thousands registered loudly in the public arena in Ireland and, crucially, in the US itself, a perfect instance of the “echo chamber” by which the press first creates an impression and then magnifies its importance by constant repetition. The negative and even contemptuous treatment of President Reagan in the Irish press was quickly noted by US reporters. Their amplification of Irish concerns further stoked the protests and general mockery within the republic during those June days, until Reagan flew on to a considerably warmer welcome from Mrs. Thatcher.

From early on, the three American television networks and leading US newspapers cast the visit as evidently for domestic campaign purposes, and devoted considerable attention to dissent inside Ireland. The purpose of the trip was to showcase the President's affable leadership on the world stage, and present him as a beloved figure in one of America's sentimentalized ethnic homelands. Coverage in the US press, however, verged on the disastrous. The first major story appeared on the CBS Evening News eleven days before the presidential jet touched down at Shannon. It set the debunking tone maintained by CBS throughout the trip: that Reagan's Central America policy was extremely unpopular (“Almost everyone here thinks it's misguided and wrong”), with the Catholic Church described as “primarily responsible for anti-Reagan sentiment,” followed by a clip of Bishop Casey intoning “how can you justify a government giving military aid to a government [El Salvador's] that is oppressing its own people?”Footnote ¹³

NBC Nightly News picked up these themes ten days later on the eve of Reagan's arrival. By that point Reagan had dismissed a press conference query about demonstrations in Ireland with his trademark quip and grin, “That's just Irish hospitality. I haven't gone anywhere in years that there hasn't been a demonstration and they don't want me to feel that I'm not at home.” NBC froze on his smirk and went to a close-up of Sister Joanna O'Connor, responding with quietly earnest dismay that the President was just “laughing off” Irish concerns. By that point, the report had already shown “a small country church” where Father Pat O'Brien, a missionary returned from El Salvador, declared from the pulpit, “We respect and indeed love the American nation but respect the truth somewhat more and the truth of this situation, I believe, is that American power is oppressing, torturing and destroying the hopes of the poor over much of the earth.” At the end of the story, after footage of large, loud protests, the camera returned to Father O'Brien declaring, “While President Reagan is in Ireland … in some deep way, we are all El Salvadoreans, and I believe that we should say so.” As his parishioners applauded, the correspondent concluded, “And the people of Father Pat O'Brien's parish said yes to that.”Footnote ¹⁴

Reportage stressing Reagan's unpopularity continued for several days, as the President received his honorary degree in Galway on 2 June, attended a state dinner on 3 June, and addressed the Irish parliament on 4 June. The huge marches in Dublin and FitzGerald's public reproof were all covered. For the White House handlers, however, the footage of the 3 June visit to Ballyporeen surely met all expectations: a clearly ebullient Reagan working his way through adoring crowds, fresh-faced schoolchildren dancing for him, a general sense of well-being and welcome that effaced much of the political tension. Footage of the beaming President declaring, “It's like coming home after a long journey,” with the locals “charmed out of their minds,” in the phrasing of ABC's Sam Donaldson, effaced much of the political unpleasantness which he had also reported in detail.Footnote ¹⁵ Even amidst the perfect photo opportunities, however, NBC's correspondent suggested that “with a Republican camera crew filming campaign commercials … it wasn't clear who was using whom” in the mix of “campaigning and commercialism [and] a sense of coming home,” concluding, after reports of thousands marching against Reagan, that “this country has not fully accepted its returning son.”Footnote ¹⁶

What made the networks' coverage doubly negative was the pattern already set by the print press. The New York Times, in its accustomed role of gatekeeper, signaled skepticism in its first story (from United Press International) on 27 May, documenting plans for a “Dublin Protest” led by nuns. Its influential political correspondent, R. W. Apple, weighed in a few days later, stressing Ireland's “Anti-Reagan Mood,” full of “calculated snubs and hostile demonstrations,” and the findings in an Irish Times poll, that 53 percent of Irish people had no confidence in Reagan, 45 percent thought him “a bad President,” and 56 percent wanted him to lose in the coming election. Subsequent coverage in the Times was more restrained, but a tone had been set. Apple's summing up, as the visit ended, left a lasting impression – that FitzGerald had “chided” Reagan in public regarding his Central America policy; that the President had “stirred little public excitement,” given the “almost universal indifference” of the Irish public to his Hollywoodish charm; that “[n]o senior member of the church's hierarchy has met Mr. Reagan during his visit,” with the Primate's absence “widely interpreted in Ireland as a snub to the President.” Peter Kilborn added a final postmortem on 5 June: that “the protests have seemed to upset the White House's plans to make the visit the kind of sentimental tour de force that President Kennedy's visit 21 years ago here was,” quoting ordinary people that “we're not falling in love with his love of the leprechaun nonsense,” and, even more damningly, “We are a Catholic country. What the Americans are doing in El Salvador and Nicaragua is just another form of tyranny.”Footnote ¹⁷

It is striking, given the concerted weight of journalistic attention, how the actual purpose of the trip eluded press and public in both countries. For Irish policymakers, who had carefully engineered the presidential visit by cultivating this unfamiliar Republican since 1980, its politics had nothing to do with Central America or Irish America, but were directed eastward across the Irish Sea at London; as will be discussed below, Reagan's visit was the penultimate step in their long effort to wean the US from its reflexive deference to Great Britain's perceived security needs in Northern Ireland, and instead use American weight as “soft power” to solve the profound crisis in the “Six Counties” a short distance from Dublin. Eighteen months later, Margaret Thatcher finally gave in, under repeated prodding from her closest personal ally, President Reagan, and conceded that the government of the Irish Republic should have a role in negotiating an end to the brutal conflict in Ulster, the first stage of a process which led slowly, with many false steps, to the ceasefire and settlement of 1998.Footnote ¹⁸

Conversely, the President's needs were relatively simple: he wanted a warm emotional bath in Ballyporeen, like so many American prodigals, and a bully pulpit from which to reassure both American and European audiences about America's fundamentally peaceful intentions towards the Soviet Union. His 4 June speech to the two houses of the Irish parliament (the Oireachtas) did that, producing headlines around the world like that in the London Times: “Russians urged by Reagan to resume arms control talks.”Footnote ¹⁹ In addition, his handlers, led by Michael Deaver, the master of the photo opportunity, wanted useful footage to position their candidate as a man of the people, especially for the so-called “Reagan Democrats,” many of them Catholics, and they certainly got that.Footnote ²⁰

The temptation is thus to view this event as a perfect miniature of international relations in which apparent tension over public policies (such as Central America) masks ongoing cooperation between states, in this case the US and Ireland, pursuing their own interests in a “realist” fashion. Such a characterization ignores the deeper historical implications of Reagan's visit, however, and how it fits into an overlapping set of frames, including Ireland's role in the post-World War II world, the Irish link to the United States, and the complex relationship with Ireland's nearest neighbor, the former colonial power. Together these crisscrossing relationships (the global, the Irish American, and the Anglo-Irish) created both a general historical frame, extending from 1922 through the recent past, and also a conjuncture specific to the mid-1980s, when the US intervention in Central America's civil wars coincided with what former foreign minister Peter Barry later described as a full-scale “civil war” less than one hundred miles from Dublin.Footnote ²¹ There was no relation at all between these two wars – the Cold War writ large and bloody in the middle of the Americas, and the small one, equally bloody, in the corner of an island on Europe's edge – but the arrival of an American President brought one to the other, opening possibilities for connection, confrontation, and agency.

An appropriate place to begin is the Irish – American relationship, because there we immediately encounter the problem of conflating Ireland's past with Ireland's present, a disjuncture made evident by Reagan's visit. Like most Americans, US historians tend to view modern Ireland through a nineteenth-century lens, as a country mired in colonialism's backwash and the scars left by John Bull's boot; they are far more likely to know Gerry Adams, and his party's name, and even pronounce it correctly, than to know the names of recent Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil leaders, let alone the provenance and policies of those parties. They rarely write about post-independence Ireland's relationship with Irish America (other than journalistic exposés of the “American connection” to the Provisional IRA), in part because almost all Irish Americans emigrated before 1920. The island is typically explained as the place from which a group of Americans came in the seventy or so years after 1845, rather than as a present-day nation whose history is long removed from the familiar trajectory of famine, mass emigration, and nationalist revolution. Éamon de Valera, surely a bigger figure than Adams, is remembered as merely an insurgent commander played by the actor Alan Rickman in a popular movie, rather than as a global actor over many decades.Footnote ²² Both in popular accounts and in Irish American historiography, the emphasis continues to be on unpacking the sentimental chauvinisms inherited from the distant past.Footnote ²³

Thus it is not surprising that Reagan's biographers would ignore modern Irish politics, since Reagan's handlers ignored them as well. Like most Americans, it meant little to the Reagan team that, from the republic's origins in the free state of 1922–37, it has been emphatically neutralist – as outside the large power blocs as Sweden or Switzerland, though much less well armed than either, and thus more truly neutral if not pacifist. Anyone historically informed about World War II knows of Irish neutrality, the de Valera government's ostentatious refusal to take sides in that conflict, versus the private reality of extensive cooperation between the Irish government and the Allies, as uncovered by scholars decades later; but few Americans know that since 1922 the only call-up of Ireland's young men to face a foreign military threat came in 1944, when the Allies made vague threats about Nazi Germany's continued diplomatic presence in Dublin, and the possible security threat posed by German agents in Ireland prior to D-Day.Footnote ²⁴

Ireland's neutrality was tested again during the Cold War, but ultimately reinforced via a peculiar mix of Catholic nationalism, residual anti-imperialism, and emerging Europhilism, permitting it to operate as simultaneously an anticommunist friend of the West and an anticolonialist friend of the developing Third World. Upon accession to the United Nations in 1955, Irish neutralism briefly, if memorably, took on a distinctly nonaligned flavor. The role played by Fianna Fáil's Minister of External Affairs Frank Aiken in the General Assembly's Twelfth Session in 1957–58, denouncing Europe's continuing colonial wars (particularly France's effort to keep Algeria) and voting to open discussion on the admission of the People's Republic of China, was a major event in the post-Bandung emergence of a “third way” in international relations, outside the US–Soviet conflict.Footnote ²⁵ Aiken believed in the rule of law to defend “small powers” like Tibet, Hungary, Egypt, and Tunisia, all of which felt the hand of Great Power dominance in the late 1950s. In doing so, he drew upon de Valera's bitter experience in the League of Nations Assembly in the late 1930s, when the various powers proved unwilling to sanction Italy for its unprovoked conquest of Ethiopia. Aiken also sought to mediate problems in South Tyrol and Kashmir, and made Ireland the first country in Europe to oppose apartheid in South Africa.

We must be careful here, however. Although Irish leaders like Aiken, the IRA's last chief of staff during the Civil War of 1922–23, might affirm that “we know what imperialism is and what resistance to it involves,” they never suggested any moral equivalence between East and West – neither in 1949, when Aiken's predecessor Seán MacBride, of the left republican Clan Na Gael party, tried to trade Irish membership in NATO for a US intervention against Partition, or later.Footnote ²⁶ However balanced by the desire to stand outside superpower conflicts and their attendant moral taint, solidarity with Western, specifically Christian, democratic values was unequivocally stated by every Taoiseach of the postwar period, including de Valera (1937–48, then 1951–54, finally 1957–59), John Costello (1948–51, 1954–57), and Seán Lemass (1959–66).

For Americans, Ireland's stance as an aspiring “middle power” with no entangling alliances is at best an afterthought. For the Irish, however, it is part of their national identity, as any politician who hints at its abrogation has found out to his or her cost. Over many decades, Irish leaders competed to assert their party's commitment to neutrality, while hinting at the other's secret desire to sell this heritage for a mess of American or British pottage. De Valera continually warned British and US diplomats in the late 1930s and the 1940s, “Any leader who attempted to concede Irish sovereignty would find the Irish people in open rebellion against his action”; indeed, when he struck a bargain with the British in 1938, gaining recognition for the republic as a sovereign state rather than a dominion, the response of the Fine Gael-aligned Irish Independent was to charge him with abandoning the Catholics in the North, saying the Fianna Fáil government had “marched into [the British Empire] on the ruins of Irish agriculture and over the corpse of Irish neutrality.”Footnote ²⁷ The neutralist tradition acquired a life of its own, always available to stir up old animosities in an opportunist fashion. In the immediate build-up to Reagan's visit, Fianna Fáil's chief Charles Haughey gave a keynote address to his party's Ard Fheis evoking Aiken's position, that “the disinterested voice of small nations like ours can make an important and valuable contribution in advancing the cause of world peace,” after which he attacked FitzGerald's Fine Gael/Labour government:

He concluded by deriding the FitzGerald government's “defeatist neo-colonial mentality.”Footnote ²⁸

Neutralism as a popular, indeed populist, discourse built upon independent Ireland's legacy of anti-imperialism. During the twentieth century, anti-imperialism became associated with leftist, often putatively Marxist–Leninist, national liberation movements. In the longer trajectory of empire in the modern world, however, both elites and masses in many countries have been fiercely anti-imperialist while remaining otherwise conservative, if not feudal or reactionary. In Ireland, anti-imperialism spanned the entire political spectrum, and remains, even now, distinctly personal and familial. For several generations, every child in the National Schools learned not just a patriotic but a patriots' history: that from 1932 to 1959 the dominant political figure was the surviving commander of the Easter Rising of 1916, de Valera; that his successor, Seán Lemass, was himself a veteran of that bloody week; that even into the 1980s, the Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, was the son of a man who had been “in the GPO” (the General Post Office, headquarters of the rebels during Easter Week). The most valid comparison here is not with European countries, but with pillars of anticolonial liberation like Cuba, Vietnam, or South Africa, where filial ties to the liberation struggle have been valuable assets in asserting one's political legitimacy. In the Irish case, the open wound of Partition kept the memory of British imperialism relevant throughout the Cold War era. Only since 1998, when the Provisional Republican movement finally “took the gun out of Irish politics,” as one of their military commanders famously put it, in part because they “saw great possibilities of playing the ‘American card’ to accelerate a peace process about which many on the British side had deep reservations,” has the Irish national revolution become simply a historical fact.Footnote ²⁹

Until the end of the last century, however, Ireland's neutralism functioned in a symbiotic tension with the republic's American connection; indeed, the latter made the former possible. With the exception of Jewish Americans in recent decades, and Cuban Americans since 1959, the Irish have been the most effective ethnic voting bloc in American history. After wholesale recruitment into the Democratic Party from the 1830s on, they took over much of its northern wing.Footnote ³⁰ The “Irish Democrat” became such a comfortable cliché in US politics that its larger transnational significance has rarely been considered, since neither scholars or journalists think of Ireland as a global political actor. The impact of Irish American politics on the other side of the Atlantic, during and since the War of Independence in 1918–23, has been to guarantee first the IRA, and then various Irish governments, a direct relationship with the leaders of one of the US's two major parties, and a potentially massive base of support in the American electorate.Footnote ³¹

Minus these connections to the Democratic Party, whose leaders routinely boast of their Hibernian contacts, the US would almost certainly have taken a less benign attitude towards Irish neutrality in 1941–45, and there is extensive documentation of the extent to which concerns about Irish American voters moderated an otherwise reflexively pro-British position.Footnote ³² How would the US have handled a small, defenseless nation located astride the eastern Atlantic sea lanes which insisted on its neutrality and was periodically at odds with the US's most strategic European ally, if it lacked a significant immigrant presence inside America? The stresses and contradictions of this dynamic produced a delicate balance of which Irish leaders have always been aware. Over most of the past century, they have oscillated between the devil of Downing Street's disdain, and the deep blue sea of American patronage; in 1984, between Tip O'Neill and Margaret Thatcher, Reagan was the arbiter in the middle. Focussing on these historic tensions, considerably longer-lasting than the Cold War of 1946–89, is the most useful way of understanding Ireland's role in the world.

And yet, all of the above skates over a basic reality, which is that Ireland's primary external relationship since independence was not with its diaspora, but with its postcolonial dependency upon Great Britain. Acknowledging this tie is distasteful on both sides of the Irish Sea, given its clientelistic character; it reminds the British of how they treated the Irish; it reminds the Irish of the limits on their independence. It rests, however, on demographic and economic facts. Most Irish emigration since independence has been to Britain, returning in effect to the imperial bosom. Similarly, from the 1920s to the 1960s, Ireland's economy was an appendage of Great Britain's, with the nation's principal export live beef cattle shipped to Liverpool for processing and sale.Footnote ³³ From this perspective, it was not the intransigent ex-rebels de Valera, Aiken, or MacBride who made Ireland truly independent, but the low-key Lemass, who initiated the process of Irish accession to the European Economic Community and opened up Irish society to foreign trade, industry, and culture.Footnote ³⁴ Even now, to an extent that surprises the foreigner's eye, while its economy has diversified, Ireland's public and commercial culture is dominated by British products, British films and television, and British sports teams. And in private, despite their political leaders' public protestations of a patriotic neutralism, Irish diplomats and security personnel have always maintained close working relationships with their counterparts in London.

The combination of these factors – a neutralist anti-imperialism in evident contradiction to continuing economic, political, and cultural connections to Great Britain, and close ties with the diaspora in the United States – points to the purpose for Ronald Reagan's visit, as carefully engineered by Irish diplomats beginning before his November 1980 election. Irish policymakers, working behind the scenes with the so-called “Four Horsemen” (House Speaker O'Neill, Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and New York governor Hugh Carey, all Democrats), focussed on using America's relationship with Great Britain to pry open a door in Anglo-Irish relations, so as to resolve the profound crisis in the North.Footnote ³⁵ To a significant degree they succeeded. In September 1984, Reagan made the first of several requests to Thatcher to mute her refusal of any role for the Irish Republic in Northern Irish affairs. Over time the Americans, in particular William Clark, Reagan's first national security adviser, who owned a house in Ireland and whom Donlon had assiduously cultivated, led the British Prime Minister towards an accommodation, culminating in the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement at Hillsborough Castle, the first step in the process that ended the North's civil war.

In that sense, the Reagan visit fits into the most traditional understanding of Ireland's global relations, as focussed with an exclusive determination on the nearest border and nothing else, which imparted a certain predictability to Irish foreign relations from the 1920s on. After 1945, great empires fell, new states arose by the dozen, the October 1962 missile crisis threatened civilization as we know it, but the central foreign-policy issue in the Oireachtas was always how to end Partition. Poor but self-respecting, Irish politicians' extreme parochialism incorporated an oddly Third World-ish distance from the Great Powers, a conviction of self-reliance, “ourselves alone” indeed.Footnote ³⁶ In the early 1980s, however, a distinctly new conjuncture developed, which brought the Irish people close to a particular crisis very far from their island: the escalating revolutionary wars in Central America. The catalyst for this shift in consciousness was a transformation in Irish Catholicism's global perspective.

In the half-century since independence, the intense Catholic nationalism of the Irish state offset the secular anti-imperialist tendencies of “the old revolutionary gunmen group,” as one US ambassador called them.Footnote ³⁷ While London looked west to Washington, Dublin's “special relationship” was to the east, with the Holy See. The Catholic Church always knew what side it took in the Cold War, and its imperatives drove Irish policymaking, producing some startling discordances. We think of the late 1940s as the period when Ireland affirmed its neutrality and independence, by declaring the Republic and leaving the Commonwealth while refusing membership in NATO unless the British left Northern Ireland. But privately, Irish leaders focussed on a different political crisis, as they took urgent steps to raise money for the anticommunist electoral campaign in Italy, while preparing a safe haven for the papacy if the Reds triumphed.Footnote ³⁸

The particular frame for Reagan's visit was that, unlike in the past, the Catholic and anti-imperialist dimensions of Ireland's global stance cohered in certain respects during the 1970s. The fulcrum for this change, as in many countries, was the renovatory currents inside the Church sparked by the papacy of John XXIII and Vatican II, which surged forward under the benevolent sponsorship of Paul VI after that conclave closed in 1965. In Ireland, there were many effects of this risorgimiento, but most relevant here was the 1973 founding of Trócaire as the Irish Church's international development agency. Since Trócaire was a key player in the story of Ronald Reagan in Ireland, we must briefly trace its history.Footnote ³⁹

Trócaire has functioned over the past forty years as, in the words of someone helping to lead it, “a very radical organization inside a very conservative Church.” From its inception, when then-Cardinal William Conway hired Brian McKeown, an Irish aid worker with experience in Africa, to create a new kind of organization, Trócaire avowed its commitment “to make us all more aware of the needs of these [Third World] countries and of our duties towards them. These duties are no longer a matter of charity but of simple justice.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Early on, it developed a base of financial support through annual Lenten campaigns, which reached almost every Irish family, since most Irish children are educated in National Schools run by the Catholic Church. The ubiquitous Trócaire collection boxes became an enduring part of popular memory, as unprecedented sums were raised in one of Europe's poorest countries.Footnote ⁴¹

In 1980, the possibility of active Third World solidarity vaulted into public consciousness via Trócaire's connection to the revolutionary crisis in El Salvador.Footnote ⁴² For many Irish people, the moment of awareness was the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero while saying Mass on 24 March 1980, and his subsequent funeral a few days later, when a vast crowd of mourners (including many international dignitaries) was machine-gunned in San Salvador's central plaza by government security forces, killing dozens. Over the prior three years, Trócaire had built a deep relationship with the Salvadorean Church, responding to Romero's personal appeal for money to rebuild the its radio station after a bombing by rightist death squads. At his funeral, the Church's martyrdom in El Salvador came home to the Irish public through the presence of several key figures, including Bishop Eamon Casey, Trócaire's chairman; the journalist Anne Daly of RTÉ, who provided gripping television coverage; and a young freelance journalist, Dermot Keogh, writing for the Irish Press, who later became a prominent historian.Footnote ⁴³

Over the next three years, Trócaire brought a series of all-party delegations from the Oireachtas to various countries in Central America, and their experiences (including deportation from El Salvador) became regular front-page news.Footnote ⁴⁴ Repeatedly those members, including deputies and senators from Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and Labour, pressed whichever government was in power to speak out against the massive human rights violations carried out by US allies in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the Contra rebels organized by the Central Intelligence Agency to harass the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. Repeatedly both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil governments affirmed their commitment to solidarity with the poor, if not necessarily with the revolutionary movements. In early 1982 the Fine Gael – Labour coalition government officially endorsed the Franco-Mexican Declaration of December 1981, recognizing El Salvador's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) as a representative force and thus entitled to belligerent rights under international law, a significant challenge to US hegemony in Latin America. The more dramatic instances of US intervention in the region, such as the October 1983 invasion of Grenada or the 1984 CIA mining of Nicaragua's harbors, sparked outbreaks of denunciation in both Dáil and Seanad, led by parliamentarians who had visited the region with Trócaire, such as Fianna Fáil's Niall Andrews, Mrs. Katherine Bulbilia of Fine Gael, or the Labour senator (and party chairman) Michael D. Higgins.

This episodic furor, disrupting the normal business at Leinster House every few months with fervid discussions about countries and peoples far from Ireland, was not uncontroversial.Footnote ⁴⁵ Besides ordinary ethnocentrism (that Irish people should be concerned about parity for their milk in the EEC, and maybe the plight of Catholics in the North), there were occasional outbursts of anticommunism, directed at the meddlesome priests of Trócaire. But these attacks had little effect, given the authority that bishops like Casey still enjoyed. Indeed, when a Fine Gael deputy denounced Trócaire for exceeding its religious mission, FitzGerald, the Fine Gael Taoiseach, wrote to Director Brian McKeown the same day, “to express my regret at the remarks made in the Dail about Trócaire by Deputy Patrick Cooney … I can assure you of my own support and that of our Party for the work of your organization, for which I have profound respect.”Footnote ⁴⁶

The culmination of this popular, explicitly Catholic, fraternity with Central America, setting the stage for Reagan's chilly reception, was Trócaire's tenth-anniversary seminar, held at University College Galway in June 1983. Leading prelates and Catholic activists from around the world joined Cardinal Ó Fiaich and government ministers, including FitzGerald, to celebrate the organization's work for justice in the Third World. A high point was the keynote address delivered by the Reverend Xabier Gorostiaga SJ, a key strategist for Nicaragua's ruling Sandinistas. As FitzGerald remembers with amusement, the bishops and government leaders, including himself, gave the revolutionary priest a standing ovation. In sum, solidarity with Central America, a distinctly leftist practice in the international context, took on a highly respectable, institutional aura in Ireland, transcending normal partisan divisions, and that solidarity significantly shaped the constraints within which the Irish government acted: they could bring Reagan to Ireland, but they could not make the Irish welcome him.

The incongruity of the Irish premier joining much of the Republic's leadership in applauding the representative of Nicaragua, a government singled out for destabilization by the United States, and a year later welcoming the Sandinistas' worst enemy, the American President, indicates the indeterminate, multilayered character of even a passing event like President Reagan's visit to Ireland. We elide the causation embedded in these international set pieces if we restrict our discussion to the state actors involved. Even granting that two of those states (Ireland and the United Kingdom) were operating outside the Cold War, pushing back and forth inside their ancient conflict about which the Americans cared little, the Anglo-Irish struggle in 1969–98 is by no means the whole story. Instead, the multiple narratives attached to Reagan-in-Ireland suggest the importance of actors operating entirely outside the state. Most obviously, there were the progressive sectors of Irish society, encompassing a wing of the Catholic Church, much of academia, the Social Christian wing of Fine Gael, the residual Aikenites within Fianna Fáil, and the avowedly socialist left in Labour. In easy harmony, on the streets and inside Parliament at Leinster House, they intervened on behalf of a majority of the Irish public to register their disapproval of Reaganism.Footnote ⁴⁷ In an entirely fortuitous way, they invoked the presumed authority of the Catholic bishops, many of whom had no interest in snubbing President Reagan, but fell in behind the popular Bishop Casey and the less visible but marked abstention of Cardinal Ó Fiaich.Footnote ⁴⁸

It would be a mistake, however, to expand our circle of actors to include only the people of Ireland, and those Americans seeing the visit through the filter of their own jaundiced press. Behind the Irish people as “non-state actors,” there were a group of states with specific interests. Garret FitzGerald did not speak only for his own people when he expressed Ireland's disagreement over Central America to the President. For the premier of one of Europe's minor states to reprimand the leader of the free world would have been an act of lese-majesty, but, as Irish leaders remember, the Americans accepted this reproof because they knew the Irish stance was shared by many Europeans (and that FitzGerald would soon become president of the European Council of Ministers). By 1984, following years of polite diplomatic interventions by both the Socialist and Christian Democratic blocs in the EEC against the counterrevolutionary actions of the US in Central America, Europe had constituted itself as a third force, with its own policy option for the region, the Contadora Initiative. The US needed to manage this disagreement, at a time when it had many urgent tasks in Europe, and Ireland was the least of its problems.

So as we unpack these four days in June 1984, and their before-and-after, all we find in the end is more layers, until we are left with nothing but the separate narratives. What does it mean, if each actor retains its separate identity, its own interest, without any hierarchy of importance in how the event unfolds? Perhaps the voice of nonsectarian, mildly liberal opinion in Ireland, the Irish Times, put it best, summing up what Seán Donlon and Eamon Casey, fiercely opposed in most ways, demonstrated via Reagan's visit to Ireland, “that small can be powerful – at a certain juncture.”Footnote ⁴⁹

What Casey and Donlon and their respective constituencies shared was their Irishness, meaning an easy and unforced lack of concern for the presumptive weight of the Cold War and the great or “super” powers. Donlon, the professional diplomat serving his country with guile and statecraft, did whatever was necessary to end Ireland's own cold war by pushing a sharp stick into the cogs of the Anglo-American alliance, and bending the iron-willed Margaret Thatcher to Ireland's needs. He articulated, at a high and subtle level, Ireland's historic “third force” position, outside the power blocs but close to America's internal power structure.

Casey expressed a different kind of distinctively Irish politics, that of the “church universal,” operating everywhere. That Irish Catholicism had expanded suddenly to include the “preferential option for the poor” expressed by Latin America's bishops was perhaps providential. For many inside Ireland, including FitzGerald and Barry, it was not only that, however. They agreed with Frank Aiken that “we know what imperialism is and what resistance to it involves.” Given the chance, they would operate on that assumption regarding Ireland's role in the world, and, in their way, contribute to confounding what we thought we knew about international relations during the Cold War.Footnote ⁵⁰

This paper's subtitle, “a different Cold War,” is deliberately ambiguous. On one level, it refers to the small, familial, familiarly brutal conflict over one corner of an island falling within the orbit of a onetime world hegemon. On another level, it suggests that the Cold War writ large was often complicated and even undermined by such local conflicts, and that our understanding of the global requires taking the local more seriously than we have done to date. If a country like Ireland, so tied to the US in human and political terms, could so easily detach itself from the “big” Cold War, perhaps we should question the notion of a single global Cold War entirely, or make it provisional and contingent, as much an effort to impose order as an actual reality.