A SPEECHWRITER FOR Hillary Clinton complained that the current Democratic presidential nominee “gave more love to Gerry Adams than I might have liked” in a speech to an Irish-American audience last year.
The phrased was used by Dan Schwerin in an email to fellow Clinton aides in March 2015, in the aftermath of the former Secretary of State’s speech, in New York, to the “Irish America Hall of Fame”.
Schwerin, the director of speechwriting for the Democratic presidential candidate, wrote:
“Irish speech went well but HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] didn’t want to do anything on Iran there and skipped that whole section.
She mostly just riffed about the peace process in Northern Ireland.
She gave more love to Gerry Adams than I might have liked given his recent legal troubles, but it was in the context of WJC [William Jefferson Clinton] granting his visa in 1994, so hopefully okay.
The reference to Adams’s legal problems probably relates to his arrest, at the time, ago by PSNI officers investigating the 1972 abduction and killing of Belfast widow Jean McConville.
The 2015 lunch about the importance of granting the Sinn Féin leader a US visa in 1993.
At the time, some people questioned Clinton’s appearance alongside Adams given recent abuse claims within the Republican movement and a New Yorker profile on his alleged connection with the IRA.
Clinton’s speech, and the emails, came six months before Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service announced that Adams would not face criminal charges over McConville’s death.
Clinton’s speech was made in the context of her being inducted to the Irish-American Hall of Fame. At the event, she sat opposite the Sinn Féin president at the top table at the event hosted by Irish America magazine.
“I remember very well when the request came back in 1993 that my husband approve a visa for Gerry Adams, who is with us today,” Clinton said in the speech.
It was a very difficult decision… And I think it is true that absent that first step, that first risk, we might not have had the momentum to move forward to get to the Good Friday Accords.
Schwerin’s email was published on whistleblowing website WikiLeaks yesterday in the latest posting of emails belonging to Mrs Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.
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