Former Vice President Walter Mondale has died at age 93. The man who became the first vice president to be centrally involved in the daily work of the presidency - in Mondale's case alongside President Jimmy Carter - was a trailblazer for Irish American efforts to involve the United States in the search for a settlement in Northern Ireland. Mondale, as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1984, attended the first Irish American Presidential Forum in New York. Mondale was to lose heavily in the '84 election to President Reagan but the forum would continue in 1988 and beyond. In 1992 it secured pledges from future president Bill Clinton that would result in the long hoped for U.S. role.
