Hillary Clinton with the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness after their meeting in Washington last year

“I don’t know there was much she did apart from
accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around,” he said. Her recent
statements about being deeply involved were merely “the sort of
thing people put in their canvassing leaflets” during
elections. “She visited when things were happening, saw what
was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I
don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for
something is slightly different from being a principal player.”

Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having
extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack
Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as
being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.

“I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland,” she told
CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped
broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph
that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the
gruelling political talks over the years.

Lord Trimble shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume, leader
of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, in 1998.
Conall McDevitt, an SDLP negotiator and aide to Mr Hume during the
talks, said: “There would have been no contact with her either
in person or on the phone. I was with Hume regularly during calls in
the months leading up to the Good Friday Agreement when he was
taking calls from the White House and they were invariably coming
from the president.”

Central to Mrs Clinton’s claim of an important Northern Ireland
role is a meeting she attended in Belfast in with a group of women
from cross-community groups. “I actually went to Northern
Ireland more than my husband did,” she said in Nashua, New
Hampshire on January 6th.

“I remember a meeting that I pulled together in Belfast, in
the town hall there, bringing together for the first time Catholics
and Protestants from both traditions, having them sitting a room
where they had never been before with each other because they don’t
go to school together, they don’t live together and it was only in
large measure because I really asked them to come that they were there.

“And I wasn’t sure it was going to be very successful and
finally a Catholic woman on one side of the table said, ’You know,
every time my husband leaves for work in the morning I worry he
won’t come home at night.

“And then a Protestant woman on the other side said, ’Every
time my son tries to go out at night I worry he won’t come home
again’. And suddenly instead of seeing each other as caricatures and
stereotypes they saw each other as human beings and the slow, hard
work of peace-making could move forward.”

There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall, though
Mrs Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on the
Christmas tree lights in November 1995. The former First Lady
appears to be referring a 50-minute event the same day, arranged by
the US Consulate, the same day at the Lamp Lighter Café on the
city’s Ormeau Road.

The “Belfast Telegraph” reported the next day that the
café meeting was crammed with reporters, cameramen and Secret
Service agents. Conversation “seemed a little bit stilted, a
little prepared at times” and Mrs Clinton admired a stainless
steel tea pot, which was duly given to her, for keeping the brew
“so nice and hot”.

	Hillary Clinton meeting with Belfast women in 1995 and the teapot she admired

Among those attending were women from groups representing
single parents, relationship counsellors, youth workers and a
cultural society. In her 2003 autobiography “Living
History”, Mrs Clinton wrote about the meeting in some detail
but made no claim that it was significant.

Rather than it being the first time the women had met, Mrs Clinton
wrote: “Because they were willing to work across the religious
divide, they had found common ground.” Mary Fox, the wife of
a former IRA prisoner and one of the seven women at the meeting,
said she had been there on behalf of the Footprints community
centre. “It was quite a political change for the women’s sector
after the visit of Hillary Clinton. We would love to see her as
president. She spoke to each of us and was very interested in our
work. She was lovely.”

Mr McDevitt said: “I’ve always had a theory that these
people were already well networked. Maybe they needed a bit of
bringing together and she [Mrs Clinton] was an ideal focus
point.” Once a peace deal was in place, Mrs Clinton supported
women politicians and was always available if they visited
Washington “to give them a pat on the back, give them moral
support”, he added.

Nobel winner: Hillary Clinton’s ‘silly’ Irish
peace claims

By Toby Harnden in Washington

“So in a classic woman politicky sort of way I think she
was active…She was certainly investing some time, no doubt about
it. Whether she was involved on the issue side I think probably
not.” Some of the people Mrs Clinton met went on to help
found the Women’s Coalition, which took part in the Good Friday
talks. Lord Trimble said: “The Women’s Coalition will think
they were important. Other people beg to differ.”

Steven King, a negotiator with Lord Trimble’s Ulster Unionist
Party, argued that Mrs Clinton might even have helped delay the
chances of peace. “She was invited along to some pre-arranged
meetings but I don’t think she exactly brought anybody together that
hadn’t been brought together already,” he said. Mrs Clinton
was “a cheerleader for the Irish republican side of the
argument”, he added.

“She really lost all credibility when on Bill Clinton’s last
visit to Northern Ireland [in December 2000] when she hugged and
kissed [Sinn Fein leaders] Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.”

Responding to inquiries from this newspaper, Hillary Clinton’s
campaign issued a statement from Mr Hume. “I am quite surprised
that anyone would suggest that Hillary Clinton did not perform
important foreign policy work as First Lady,” the statement said.

“I can state from firsthand experience that she played a
positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to
Northern Ireland. She visited Northern Ireland, met with very many
people and gave very decisive support to the peace process.

“There is no doubt that the people of Northern Ireland
think very positively of Hillary Clinton’s support for our peace
process, due to her visits to Northern Ireland and her meetings with
so many people. In private she made countless calls and contacts,
speaking to leaders and opinion makers on all sides, urging them to
keep moving forward.”