BOB GARFIELD:
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, hell froze over – or something once thought just as unlikely.
JIM LEHRER:
Longtime enemies in Northern Ireland joined forces today to form a new unity government. Protestants, led by Reverend Ian Paisley, will run the government jointly with Catholics led by Martin McGuinness, a veteran commander in the Irish Republican Army.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The end of a war without end. The event itself didn't even make the three big newscasts Tuesday. It was, after all, a rather bland ceremony involving white-haired men smiling gamely at each other. But it concluded a nearly 40-year battle for the six counties of Northern Ireland in the hearts and minds of the world.

With over 30 million Irish-Americans, that battle has been fought particularly hard here in the U.S. For much of the '90s, movies alone could have kept Northern Ireland in the public's eye. In the Name of the Father, Some Mother's Son, The Crying Game, The Boxer, The Devil's Own, The Jackal, Blown Away and Patriot Games all used the conflict as a backdrop.

Niall O'Dowd, founder of the New York-based Irish Voice newspaper, helped broker U.S. recognition of Sinn Fein and the Irish-Republican Army in the early '90s. He says the films just echoed a growing public awareness, as the once shadowy sectarian groups moved the struggle from the theater of war to that of politics.
NIALL O'DOWD:
It was very much a public relations war right from the beginning. Clearly, the IRA had a very distinct point of view, that Ireland was unfairly partitioned in 1921, that 600,000 Catholics were corralled into a state that they wanted no part of.

The British, on the other hand, held the very strong view that the partition of Ireland was the only way of stopping an all-out conflict, because the one million Protestants in the North were never going to accept the united Ireland that the rest of Ireland wanted. So you had these two very distinct and polarizing points of view.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Your newspaper was created to appeal to the sizeable Irish-American audience that's interested in Ireland. How did their sympathies wax and wane?
NIALL O'DOWD:
Very much in terms of how bad the violence was. See, in the 1970s that was the key period of the trouble in the sense that the level of violence was very, very high. And in the 1980s, there began the successful politicization, really, of the Republican struggle, and that began with the hunger strikes in 1981, when 10 Irishmen starved to death in British prisons in Northern Ireland.

And, if you remember, the key point in all that was when - the hunger strike of Bobby Sands – he was actually elected to the British Parliament on his deathbed, which is a very dramatic moment, one that was not just about violence. And I think that Irish-Americans came back and took another look at the IRA and Sinn Fein at that point.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So after the hunger strikes, in the early '90s the Clinton White House began to engage the stalemate in Northern Ireland, and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, was allowed a visa to come to the United States. This was a man whose voice couldn't even be broadcast in Britain. Now, how did you help engineer that?
NIALL O'DOWD:
Well, I think the main thing was to change the image of the war in Northern Ireland, that this was a hopeless situation. And it was a time when the world was looking, and the fact that there was new hope in South Africa, that there was new hope in the Middle East.

And I think what we did was bring that home to key people in the Clinton White House. No American President had ever indicated any break between his position and that of the British government on Northern Ireland, because the overall relationship was considered far more important. I think the White House began to see it as something that could be a big victory for them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Who was your contact there?
NIALL O'DOWD:
Initially my contact was through Senator Edward Kennedy, because you understand right away that if you don't get Senator Kennedy on side in an Irish-American perspective [BROOKE LAUGHS] you really have no hope selling anything to the White House.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And as Tony Blair prepares to leave the scene, there's been a lot of reporting this week on his legacy, and there are a number of politicians who would be happy to deny him credit for the current power-sharing government. How much do you think he really changed the narrative about Northern Ireland and how much credit do you think he can claim for what happened this week?
NIALL O'DOWD:
I think he can claim enormous credit. There were three pieces to this whole thing. One was the British government, the other was the Clinton administration and the third was the people in Northern Ireland, like Gerry Adams, and ultimately Ian Paisley. But without a British Prime Minister actively involving himself in the search for peace, it would have been utterly impossible.

Tony Blair for 10 years worked this issue. You know, it would have been so much easier for him to walk away, as so many other British Prime Ministers had, throwing up their hands, and the media would have said, well done, you know, because it's impossible to solve it anyway. He just stuck at it for relatively little political gain.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Well, let me ask you this. When we think about the end of apartheid in South Africa, what we think of is an incredible international public relations campaign that finally changed the politics. And I wonder, in the case of Northern Ireland, do you think the PR followed the politics or the politics followed the changing PR?
NIALL O'DOWD:
I think the PR followed the politics. I think when you take an armed revolutionary movement, whether it's the ANC or the IRA, and you put them on a path to politics, the people who are able to effect that change are extraordinary people, because in Irish history, anyone who ever tried to do what Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness just did have been killed.

The first principle was they had to sell it to their own people. They had to take the IRA and they had to sell them on the basic idea that violence was not going to work. And this is something we've seen in all these conflicts over the years, unless the leaders are strong enough to bring their own people along with them first. No amount of PR, no amount of international cooperation will help, because what will happen is the movement will splinter.

When you sit in Northern Ireland now and you look at the headlines, as I did the week before the resolution of this issue, and the headlines were about water charges and the headlines were about politicians threatening each other about water charges. And you think, my God, we have a functioning boring democracy here. [BROOKE LAUGHS] It's wonderful.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Niall, thank you very much.
NIALL O'DOWD:
Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Niall O'Dowd is the founder of the New York newspaper, The Irish Voice.