LAST UPDATE | 4 Apr 2023
FORMER US PRESIDENT Bill Clinton has said he believes Brexit “aimed right at the heart” of peace in Northern Ireland, and that it is a “miracle” that the UK’s exit from the EU did not bring down the Good Friday Agreement.
In an interview with RTÉ’s Prime Time, Clinton said he was disappointed but “not surprised” that there were ongoing tensions between unionist and nationalist communities.
He recalled that, before the agreement was struck, he had to work to convince both sides that “the United States was committed to being fair to all of them, and that we had no secret agenda there would never be an underhanded deal.”
He said that in the “eleventh hour, literally” before the deal, “people got cold feet.”
“If you’re deeply programmed to stick up for what you believe in a conflict mode, and somebody says: ‘How about trying a cooperation mode?’, it’s frightening.”
I said, look, it’s your peace, you have to make it. But if you think I can help I will.
While he said he was disappointed that there were ongoing divisions in Northern Ireland, he said: “Disagreements are natural, where there was a long history of conflict.”
Former US Secretary of State and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, who was also interviewed, said: “One always hopes that a peace agreement will be followed not only in the letter of the agreement, but in the spirit of it.
“I do think Northern Ireland is a very different place than it was 25 years ago. Brexit set it back, to be blunt,” she said.
“There’s a lot of work to be done in Northern Ireland, to deal with the continuing challenges that face the people and those who were elected should get about the business of doing that.”
There is currently no government in Northern Ireland as the DUP has boycotted powersharing over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Clinton also said in the interview that he feels a “personal stake” in Ukraine due to his involvement in the country’s decision to destroy its nuclear weapons in exchange for a promise from Russia to respect its territory.
The 76 year old said thst “none of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons”.
In the mid-1990s, Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons that the newly post-Soviet state had taken administrative control of but did not have full operational control over and signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons along with Belarus and Kazakhstan.
In exchange, under the Budapest Memorandum, Russia, the UK and the US agreed not to use military force against any of the three countries unless in self-defence.
Clinton served two terms as US President between 1993 and 2001.
“I knew that President Putin did not support the agreement President Yeltsin [former president of Russia] made never to interfere with Ukraine’s territorial boundaries – an agreement he made because he wanted Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons,” Clinton said.
He said that Ukraine was “afraid to give them up because they thought that’s the only thing that protected them from an expansionist Russia”.
“When it became convenient to him, President Putin broke it and first took Crimea. And I feel terrible about it because Ukraine is a very important country.”
“I think what Mr Putin did was very wrong and I believe Europe and the United States should continue to support Ukraine. There may come a time when the Ukrainian government believes that they can think of a peace agreement they could live with, but I don’t think the rest of us should cut and run on them.”
Additional reporting by Press Association
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