Business & Politics

By Marion McKeone

Sunday Business Post

March 10, 2019

https://www.businesspost.ie/news/us-adviser-ruffled-irish-americas-feathers-439070

A quarter of a century ago Gerry Adams was banned from the United States. Not only that, but the mere prospect of him receiving a US visa was something the British government was vehemently opposed to, a view their diplomats in Washington made abundantly clear.

Risks had to be taken if a permanent peace was to be achieved, but few in Washington had either the influence or the stomach for a venture that could trigger catastrophic political blowback.

Bill Clinton, America’s newly elected president had little interest in Irish affairs when he won the vote. But Ted Kennedy, America’s most powerful senator, did. And Bill Clinton had a lot of interest in the political dynamics on Capitol Hill.

Kennedy charged Trina Vargo, his young foreign policy adviser, with handling the delicate early stages of the visa negotiations. She liaised with Niall O’Dowd, then the publisher of the New York-based Irish Voice, who acted as an intermediary for Gerry Adams.

To make a long, complex story short, Vargo recommended to Kennedy that they push Clinton to issue a visa for Adams. During Adams’s first trip to New York, he and O’Dowd met Vargo, who reported favourably on her meeting to Kennedy, who urged Clinton onwards.

The first tentative steps were taken, paving the way for what would become the Northern Ireland peace process.

Vargo, who advised Bill Clinton’s 1996 and Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign on Irish issues, had observed the bond between Clinton and then British prime minister Tony Blair, which sprung in part from the fact both had attended Oxford during the 1970s, Blair as a law student and Clinton as a Rhodes scholar.

Kennedy fretted that the US-Ireland relationship was overly dependent on the misty-eyed attachments of ageing Irish-Americans on Capitol Hill. It was past time to sow the seeds for a new bond that treated both countries as equal partners, rather than benefactor and supplicant.

And so Vargo founded the Mitchell scholars programme in 1998, modelled on the Rhodes scholars, the prestigious Oxford scholarship for American graduates that selected scholars based on future leadership potential as well as academic excellence. The logic being that future leaders in business, politics, sciences and the arts, who spent a formative year in Ireland as graduate students, would form a positive affiliation and retain a keen interest in Irish affairs.

Niall O’Dowd joined the Mitchell scholars board and remained on it for a decade.

Explosive book

But all new initiatives are forged in furnaces of resistance and tradition, and Vargo walked into the twin propellers of an Irish old boys’ network and parish pump politics that were loath to entertain the opinions of a forthright American woman.

O’Dowd left the board after Vargo criticised the tactics of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR), an organisation he co-founded to campaign for a special deal for undocumented Irish working in the US. Vargo warned, correctly, that no such deal would be forthcoming.

She advised that a campaign for comprehensive immigration reform, which would include a path to citizenship for illegal Irish along with other illegal immigrants, would be a better route.

Relations between O’Dowd and Vargo have been strained since their differences on immigration reform.

In a new book she claims that O’Dowd went from supporter and board member to actively campaigning to scupper the programme.

The explosive book by Vargo details her experiences and calls out those she regards as obstructionists, naysayers and malign meddlers.

Shenanigans: The US-Ireland Relationship in Uncertain Times slams the sclerotic approach and ham-fisted attempts by some Irish-Americans and Irish civil servants to thwart a more progressive approach to US-Irish relations and their repeated attempts to derail challenges to what she regards as outdated and ineffective approaches to US-Ireland relations.

It also details some colourful disputes with prominent Irish businessmen and successive, ham-fisted attempts to obtain special deals for the several thousand undocumented Irish immigrants in the US.

Some of the incidents detailed by Vargo read like scripts for The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Her account of the Department of Foreign Affairs ‘Certificates of Irishness’ initiative, whereby members of the Irish diaspora could receive a ‘Certificate of Irish Heritage’ from the DFA for €40 is made for satire.

The initiative enjoyed a moment of fame when Graham Norton asked Tom Cruise whether he binned his certificate immediately after his photo op with then Foreign Affairs minister Eamon Gilmore – or if he waited until he got back to his hotel room.

The initiative was abandoned three years later due to lack of interest from the Irish diaspora, despite predictions that “millions of Irish Americans would snap them up”.

Vargo describes former Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s presentation of a ‘certificate of Irishness’ to Barack Obama in 2012 as ‘cringeworthy’.

But she claims a darker side emerged when Fianna Fáil senator Mark Daly was angered by her 2012 dismissal of the initiative as “kitsch” and unlikely to succeed.

Daly had championed the initiative and promoted it on behalf of Fexco, a Kerry-based company, when it was given the licence to produce, market and distribute them.

According to Vargo, Daly called for an end to Irish government support for the Mitchell scholars and demanded an investigation into how Vargo was spending Irish taxpayers’ money. At that point the Mitchell scholars programme was funded by the Department of State and no Irish taxpayers’ funds were being used.

The book claims he also wrote to Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, to complain about Vargo. Eventually the Oireachtas hearing that Daly demanded became a meeting with the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, during which Vargo says the other committee members - TDs Eric Byrne and Bernard Durkan and Fine Gael Senator Michael Mullins – “were overwhelmingly supportive”.

Irish businesses

Prominent Irish businesses are also called out. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks Vargo set up the Inishfree Fund, which brought 500 widows and children of New York police and firemen who were killed during rescue efforts to Ireland for a holiday using funds raised by the Gardaí and the Northern Ireland police.

Vargo invited bids from airlines flying to Dublin or London, since Ryanair had offered to provide connecting flights to Dublin for free. Aer Lingus provided a marginally lower bid than other airlines which Vargo accepted.

However, she claims that afterwards Aer Lingus advised her that the tickets would cost $50,000 more than the submitted bid because airline tax costs hadn’t factored in. Eventually, when she threatened to speak to the media, the company agreed to provide the tickets at the original price.

Vargo also claims she was forced to take a court action against Fintan Drury, founder of the Platinum One sports agency, in a dispute over a €150,000 hospitality suite for the 2006 Ryder Cup.

According to Vargo, Dublin solicitor Ruth Shipsey negotiated with Drury, John Burke and Mark Lee on her behalf for a section of the Liffey Suite on the 17th fairway. The deal was sealed in 2003, but she says days before the tournament started, Platinum One attempted to deliver tickets to Shipsey for an inferior suite on a different fairway. Drury, she says, settled the case in September 2007, paying damages and legal fees.

The Clintons

Nor do the Clintons escape scrutiny. While Vargo acknowledges their historic role in bringing peace to the North, she accuses Hillary Clinton of exaggerating her role in the peace process when she sought the Democratic nomination in 2008.

She claims Clinton, as secretary of state, was a voluble advocate of American students studying aboard, but ended funding for the Mitchell scholars because Vargo became an adviser to Barack Obama during the bitter 2008 primary season.

She also claims that Bill Clinton attempted to influence the Mitchell scholar selection process to ensure a boyfriend of Chelsea Clinton’s secured a scholarship. Spokesmen for the Clintons have dismissed the claims.

However, it hasn’t all been rough sailing. Vargo singles out Martin Mansergh and Sean O’ hUigin as “brilliant architects of the peace process” and praises Bertie Ahern’s “unending commitment” to peace in the North.

She also praises Irish and American individuals who have supported the scholars and the US-Ireland Alliance, from barristers Bill Shipsey and Brian Barrington to Star Wars director and producer JJ Abrams and his wife Katie McGrath.

Twenty years later, the Mitchell scholars programme ranks alongside Rhodes as a prestige scholarship for American graduates. Thirteen of the 19 applicants who were offered places on both the Rhodes and Mitchell scholars programmes opted for the Mitchell scholars over the Rhodes.

This is testament to the reputation the Mitchell scholars programme has acquired in the 20 years since its foundation, since international students tend to select colleges on the basis of their international ranking.

Oxford has been ranked as number one in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and sixth in the QS rankings. Trinity College Dublin, which is the top ranked college in Ireland, is ranked 117th and 104th respectively.

A lean operation

By any standards, Vargo runs a lean operation. The total expenditure for the Mitchell scholars programme is around $600,000 per year, or $50,000 per student. This includes everything from staff salaries and office space to programming, all student-related costs including travel and living stipends and the alum programme.

Vargo negotiates around $500,000 in in-kind donations each year, which keeps the total cash outlay for the Mitchell scholars/US-Ireland Alliance, which includes the annual Oscar Wilde Awards, at under $1 million. While the programme is financially secure for now, she is seeking an endowment that would guarantee its long-term future.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve known Trina Vargo professionally for almost 20 years, since she worked as Ted Kennedy’s foreign policy adviser and she worked as Ireland adviser for the Clinton and Obama campaigns.

She has invited me, along with several other journalists, politicians and academics, to give short, informal talks to the Mitchell scholars as part of their orientation week when they arrive in Ireland.

On Capitol Hill, she was known and respected as a straight shooter who delivers. Democrats and Republicans who have dealt with her on foreign policy and US-Ireland relations hold her in high esteem as a person of integrity whose word you can “take to the bank”.

During various conversations over the past two decades, I recall Tony Lake, Bill Clinton’s foreign policy adviser, former head of the CIA and currently head of Unicef, Denis McDonough, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Republican Congressman Peter King, longtime Kennedy friend Senator Chris Dodd and former vice-president Joe Biden speak of her as a shrewd, clear-eyed adviser, a pragmatist who is not afraid to speak truth to power or ruffle feathers to get things done.

Among Irish-American groups Vargo is less favourably reviewed; the consensus seems to be that she is “undiplomatic”and “can rub people up the wrong way”. Few deny, however, that she is a formidable force. I suggested to Vargo that, like the Clintons, she too could be accused of keeping an ‘enemies list’ and using the book to settle scores?

“My book simply sets the record straight,” she replies. “I’ve remained largely quiet while all of what you read about in the book has gone on for ten and 20 years. I had hoped they would just go away, but I have regular occurrences of people telling me that ‘so-and-so isn’t giving you money because’ . . . people mentioned in this book . . . told them not to’. It’s simply time that those people hear the other side of the story.”

When I point out that the ‘begging bowl’ description of US-Ireland relations seems somewhat obsolete, given the fact that Ireland is currently the ninth largest source of foreign direct investment in the US and Irish companies operating in the US provide more than 100,000 jobs for Americans, she responds: “The begging bowl issue referred to government/state agency issues having nothing to do with businesses. Corporations, both Irish and American, are making decisions on the basis of returns for their shareholders. If it’s more advantageous for them to go elsewhere, they will.”