[caption id="attachment_69641" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Newt Gingrich."]
As luck would have it, I was in Greenville for my book-launch the day of the South Carolina primary.
At the same time the media in Ireland, as always over-confident of its expertise regarding American life and culture, was commenting on Newt Gingrich. One writer even described Newt as "nauseating."
Now as Bill Clinton would say, I did not "have a dog in that race." Furthermore, the Irish National Caucus is neither Republican nor Democrat but "dedicated to getting both parties to stand up for justice and peace in Ireland."
But I do have an interest in preserving the historical record regarding the United States and Ireland. It was for that reason I wrote my memoirs which are entitled "My American Struggle for Justice in Northern Ireland."
I tried to inform the media in Ireland that no matter what one thinks of Newt, one must not ignore the historical record. And that record clearly shows, as I document in said memoirs, that without Newt Gingrich there would have been no congressional hearings on British violations of human rights in Northern Ireland, no hearings on the MacBride Principles, the RUC, the Pat Finucane case, collusion and so forth. And, of course, without the MacBride hearings, the MacBride Principles would not have been passed into U.S. law in 1998.
Boston Irish-Catholic Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O'Neill, in a horrible abuse of power and in an inexcusable act of collusion with the British, had banned such hearings and Catholic Speaker Tom Foley continued this institutionalized collusion.
But when the Protestant Newt (as he was then) from Georgia became speaker in 1995, he did not maintain the O'Neill ban. As a consequence, my good friends, the great congressman Ben Gilman (R-NY) and the admirable congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) were able to respectively hold many Hearings before the full House International Relations Committee, and the House Sub-Committee on Human Rights.
Newt had the power, like Tip O'Neill had, to stop those hearings but he did not. Any Irish American interested in Irish rights or Irish history cannot ignore this historical fact.
The establishment in Ireland insists on ignoring this fact because it runs counter to their preferred and ridiculous narrative: Tip O'Neill and Teddy Kennedy got Irish Americans to stop supporting the IRA so making the peace process possible.
Apart from the rest of that nonsense, in forty years of knowing the Irish-American scene intimately, I have never known an Irish American who stopped supporting the IRA because of Tip and Teddy.
Because I love historical irony, here is one delicious tidbit: in the 1700s, the South Carolina legislature passed a law banning the immigration of those "commonly called native Irish, or persons of a scandalous character or Roman Catholics."
And yet the new Catholic convert, Newt, won the primary in a state that is still regarded by some as, "Paisley territory." Indeed, that is exactly how one native of Northern Ireland described it in Greenville.
As I signed my book for her, she asked in her still noticeable Tyrone accent, "Do you realize you are in Paisley territory?"
I was, of course, very familiar with Paisley's connection with Greenville, the site of Bob Jones University, which played a key role in helping the Reverend Paisley get off the ground, both in Northern Ireland and internationally.
Yet South Carolina voted for Newt, whom Paisley (at least at one time) would have regarded the worst type of Catholic of all: the Protestant turned Catholic.
Finally, and this is another irony that will really amaze you, the Bob Jones University has the largest collection of Catholic art in all of America in the form of Renaissance and Baroque-era religious art from Italy.
But how do crucifixes, altarpieces and coronations of the Virgin Mary, etc., fit in at university noted for its fundamentalist anti-Catholic ethos? Talk about cognitive dissonance!
I wonder if the Reverend Paisley ever checked it out on one of his many visits? He must have been tempted to destroy the entire art collection as his hero Cromwell (the Taliban of his time) once did in the "stripping of the altars" in Britain and Ireland.
