Ben Lowry: Bill Clinton helped to illustrate how the US, EU and Ireland envisage Northern Ireland being run

In eight years of presidency he faced multiple crises and was impeached (before being acquitted in a trial in the US senate) but he always maintained high popularity levels. This was because Mr Clinton always was, and still is, immensely likable. I was in the Whitla Hall on Wednesday for his address near to the end of the three-day Queen’s University celebration of the 1998 Belfast Agreement. I was wondering if he would scold unionists, in a way he has never once scolded Sinn Fein. And then he came on stage and disarmed any sceptics in the audience. Having been in Northern Ireland since at least the weekend, President Clinton said: “I have been here so long that I am reliably informed that I will owe taxes if I'm not gone in 48 hours.” The hall erupted in laughter.

I have seen Mr Clinton speak previously, both in Nl and America, and he projects an air of authority and decency and humour, and that was the case on Wednesday. His speech was punctuated with laughter and applause from the audience. But it was every bit the scolding of the DUP that many of us had been expecting, even if he did not mention the party by name. It was very different to President Joe Biden’s address at the University of Ulster the week before, which only obliquely put pressure on the DUP to return to Stormont.

Delivered in an aw shucks tone as if he was only humbling offering the advice of a benign uncle, there were in fact a number of telling and brutal lines. Mr Clinton said: “ … and we know what the votes were in the last election we can add them up their allocation of seats in the parliamentary body and it's time to get the show on the road ...” The audience roared its approval of this blatant criticism of Stormont being blocked by the unionist ‘minority’, with no hint from Mr Clinton that that minority it is also Stormont’s largest grouping.

Yet Mr Clinton, also to audience laughter and approval, set himself up as having called it right when he gave Gerry Adams a visa to America in early 1994, with – he said – the approval of the then Taoiseach Albert Reynolds. “I said I'll probably get the hell kick out of me he said you will but you should do it.”

You would not have known from this self serving anecdote that the IRA was not yet on ceasefire and that the UK rage over the visa decision came after 25 years of devastating republican-led terrorism – terrorism that, if it had happened on American soil, would not have been treated anywhere near so gently as it was in Britain. Nor would you have known that Sinn Fein typically got around 10% of the vote in NI and around 2% in the Republic until Mr Clinton was at the helm of bringing them in from the cold. So if Mr Clinton is going to talk about us all knowing what the votes were in the last election, then we should remember the vote shares when terror was ongoing in our society.

There was another moment of patent insincerity when Mr Clinton said that “guys like me need to get out of town” having just said “look I know what I would do I think if I had some job in the British government or the Irish government or the Northern Ireland political system tomorrow but that's not nearly as important as you doing it”.

See the subtext? Hey, don’t mind me, I’m just issuing a friendly warning – but listen, London and Dublin will sort the DUP out if need be by bypassing them, and so they should.

Mr Clinton had some nerve to say “ … you still have problems, sure. We need more economic growth we need less inequality, you need you got some health issues you need to resolve …” Yes we do need to resolve health, because Mr Clinton your much loved Stormont failed to do so for 20 years. And please, Mr President, focus on the far greater inequality in the country you used to head.

Mr Clinton’s speech set up some of the subtle scolding in Leo Varadkar’s address, in which he too felt he could comment on internal political issues here – what was once known as a Strand One matter. The Taoiseach also seemed to imply that the UK and Ireland should take key decisions on NI jointly. He also used the term ‘the North’ interchangeably with Northern Ireland.

Rishi Sunak’s address, as we reported on Thursday, was more balanced and he even specifically appealed to unionist concerns. But he did not get the standing ovation that Mr Clinton did. And the very structure of the final QUB anniversary session – two EU leaders, a former American one, an Irish PM, then the UK one – was a clear signal of how a range of influential players see NI as being under a somewhat shared sovereignty.

A close reading of Mr Sunak’s speech showed that London does not accept that. But will it in the coming months and years push back properly against it?

Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editorial