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Extract from pp.8-10
Blair
Lots of phone calls on Northern Ireland. During the course of the Northern Ireland negotiation, he really was a quite important part of it, because during the critical negotiations, the Good Friday Agreement, he basically stayed out all day and night, really, to help us, to be at the end of the phone for counsel and to be on the phone for prodding and pushing the parties to get an agreement. At certain critical points he was very helpful indeed in getting the thing sorted, very helpful.
Strong
Why was he so interested in that issue?
Blair
That’s a good question actually.
Strong
There are risks if it goes badly. I’m not sure there are huge payoffs if it goes well.
Blair
No, I think that’s true for him, and in a sense for me too. I think he was fascinated by it in the same way he was and is by the Middle East issue. He could see this was essentially, in some ways, an old-fashioned dispute. He was, in his soul, a kind of modernizer in his outlook and was thinking, Let’s sort this out and move forward. So he had that about him in a way. I think partly for the reasons to do with the Democrats and the Irish community in the U.S., but I don’t actually—I think it was more to do with the former, really. He didn’t regard it as a political imperative for him, but it was something he was fascinated by and interested in.
You see, this is what is great about President Clinton. I said to someone yesterday, funny enough, one of the really interesting things about Bill Clinton is that in some ways during his Presidency he didn’t have enough crises to deal with. In other words, his was a period of calm and growth and sorting out and doing well and so on. If you really think about it, in the last few years, post-September 11 with security, post-September 2008 with the economic crisis, he never actually had something of that size to deal with, in a funny way. If he had—I think he was a great President, but—I think he would have showcased his talents to an even greater extent.
I mean, on Northern Ireland, it was remarkable how he got the issue. Got it, understood it. When I was talking to him during those three or four days, you really didn’t have to explain it to him very fast. He just got it instinctively and immediately.
Riley
It was his intellectual acuity, or was there something about his background that helped him to understand the conflict?
Blair
Intellect and politics, I think he had the two going together. And I think this is where his own background and his upbringing and everything merged. He had this stellar brain combined with a very ordinary-person outlook, and that’s the greatest combination you can ever have in politics, because it means you’re grounded yet you’re still conceptualizing it and thinking. So he was immensely helpful on that. Then, of course, in Kosovo, I think it was in many ways one of the greatest moments of his Presidency. I think it was incredibly hard for him to do what he did.
3 2007 - 2019
14 2005 - 2011
View on University of Virginia webpage
Interview conducted with Tony Blair as part of the University of Virginia Presidential Oral Histories. Participants: Russell Riley, Robert Strong
Blair only touched on Ireland during the interview. He reflected on the importance of Bill Clinton to the Good Friday Agreement and why it was that the President had such a good understanding of the situation.
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