By NiallO’Dowd

THE platform statement on Ireland for the Democratic Convention next week is a grave disappointment. Once again it reflects a lack of comprehension on the part of Senator John Kerry’s foreign policy team of the importance of the Northern Irish issue to Irish Americans.

We saw this same anodyne approach earlier this year with the original Kerry statement on Northern Ireland, which seemed to have been drafted by a committee that set out to make the least inoffensive statement imaginable.

The Kerry campaign reversed their position shortly afterwards thanks to a concerted lobbying effort by key Irish Americans who were stunned by the lack of consultation on the original statement.

There was a sense of déjà vu about that because the Gore campaign in 2000 made the exact same mistake with their platform statement, turning off activist Irish Americans in their droves. 

Given that Irish ethnic votes are considered vitally important this year, it seems incredible that the Kerry team has blundered again with their language in the platform statement. 

Do the Democrats really not want to claim credit for the most imaginative foreign policy initiative that either American party has undertaken in the past decade? Somewhere Bill Clinton must be squirming with embarrassment.

The Kerry platform statement says that Democrats are determined to help create a lasting peace in Northern Ireland, and that they stand ready to assist in any way efforts to break the current impasse.

Well wow, that will really get Irish activists from New York to California and every swing state in between charged up, no doubt. The statement means absolutely nothing and could have been drafted by the village idiot. 

Maybe the foreign policy mavens on the Kerry campaign have decided that inoffensive is the way to go. Maybe it is, but it sure doesn’t strike us as good politics.

The Irish issue should belong to the Democratic Party given the Herculean efforts of Clinton and George Mitchell to bring an historic peace to Northern Ireland. Instead we have a distancing, as if the party elders had never really heard about the issue before, and they were discussing Moldavia or maybe one of Saturn’s moons.

There is no mention of the need for demilitarization, for impartial policing, or the issue of ensuring that a strong special envoy to Ireland a la Mitchell will be named. There is no mention either of the deportees issue which the Bush administration failed to act upon despite their platform guarantees. 

There is also no mention of seeking to deal with the issue of undocumented Irish, as raised by Taoiseach (Prime Minster) Bertie Ahern during the recent visit by President George W. Bush to Ireland. The list goes on and on, but suffice it to say that none of the specific salient issues of importance to this community are in any way addressed.

The Kerry people claim that they have shortened the document overall dramatically, and that may well be so. But they could easily have distilled a better Irish platform into the sentence or two they allowed anyway. 

The remarkable thing is that the Democratic Party appears reluctant to take ownership of an issue that is theirs for the taking and is central to Irish American activists, the very people they are seeking to turn out in large numbers in key states this November. To say it is disappointing is an understatement.