Hillary Clinton issued a lot of claims about her “experience”, her ability to “hit the ground running” on “day one”, even at 3 a.m. if necessary. So, let me take a look at experience, more specifically, her claim that her role was instrumental to the Northern Ireland Peace process.

However, she had to go back until 1995 to find footage for a campaign video of her in Ireland that showed her in any official capacity. Look as much as I wanted, I couldn’t find anything more recent either. The transcript of her 1995 speech, however, showed that the words heard in the video were not part of a major speech, but the only 30 seconds or so of her own words, in what actually was the reading of children’s letters.

In the chronology of the peace process listed here, you cannot find a single mention of Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton is mentioned, of course. He did indeed play an important role in the process.

Moreover, the real hot phase was in 1998 only and the Clintons visited Northern Ireland in September, it was their second visit. This visit came during a critical phase in the peace process when the IRA was incooperative in the decomission, and here you can find mention of Hillary Clinton in the President’s speech on September 3, 1998:

Hillary had a wonderful day yesterday at your Vital Voices conference. And as she said, we are pledged to follow up on the partnerships established there.

You can find more on the Vital Voices conference here. The meeting Bill Clinton was talking about saw some 400 women attending and was surely very valuable in laying the basis for a more peaceful society in Northern Ireland, but hardly instrumental in the peace process. The groundwork for that had been laid in the May 22, 1998 referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, some four months earlier.

Hillary Clinton was not mentioned by name or in her capacity as a First Lady in any of the other speeches that day, except when the speaker greeted her and the President.

The British Press, first and foremost The Telegraph was having a field day with Senator Clinton’s claims at being instrumental in bringing about peace in Northern Ireland. Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey (David Trimble), who was himself very much involved in the negotiations as a former Northern Ireland First Minister and winner of the Nobel peace prize, called her claims “a wee bit silly”. He stated:

“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.”

The perception of the role Bill Clinton played, seems to diminish the closer you get to Northern Ireland and Hillary Clintons role along with it. Toby Harnden of The Telegraph provides the links to support this claim in his aforementioned article, here. You can find an opposing statement by Republican Congressman Peter King there, too.

On the whole I ‘d rather think it was the Irish parties, who stubbornly brought about peace. Helped and supported, maybe even a bit blackmailed into it, by the UK and US administrations. But instrumental in bringing peace were the Irish themselves.

As for Hillary Clinton’s claims. Her role is not corroborated by official documents, her schedules as a First Lady nor press websites available to me. Neither her, nor Bill Clinton’s, nor any other memoirs are mentioning such a prominent role either. But maybe there is really more to her claim of experience. By releasing her phone records and her private schedules as a First Lady, Senator Clinton could do something to help her claim along. Her actions must have left documentary footprints somewhere.