July 5, 2023

- Hello, everyone, amd welcome to Amanpour & Company.

Here's what's coming up.

- Well, I think we were all privileged to be where we were when we were and privileged to do our part to get this done.

- [Christiane] An historic reunion to celebrate an historic peace agreement.

My exclusive interview with the 1998 Northern Ireland peacemakers, U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.

Then... - My children have never grown up in a normal society.

- [Christiane] Why the people chose peace by a historic margin.

From the archive, my report on the families who decided 1/4 of a century ago.

Also ahead... - Parenthood is this thing that shows you the parts of yourself that you are proud of, and also the thing that shows you the parts of yourself that you're not so proud of.

- [Christiane] The poetry of parenthood.

Writer, Clint Smith, talks to Michelle Martin about his new collection of works inspired by his children.

- [Narrator] Amanpour & Company is made possible by the Anderson Family Fund, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim, III, Candace King Weir, Jim Atwood, and Leslie Williams, The Family Foundation of Leila and Mickey Straus.

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Barbara Hope Zuckerberg.

We try to live in the moment, to not miss what's right in front of us.

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Additional support provided by these funders and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Welcome to the program everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour at Queens University in Belfast, where the principle peacemakers have come here to celebrate and remember the Northern Ireland peace that took place 25 years ago.

During the so-called troubles, more than 3,500 people were killed, most of them civilians.

50,000 were injured as acts of terror traumatized generations.

Ultimately, it was a clutch of leaders, local and global, who took a chance and risked it all on peace.

Catholic nationalist leader John Hume and the Protestant Union's, David Trimble, crossed that bridge together, and in time, they shared a Nobel Peace Prize.

Now, despite serious flaws, the enduring success has made the agreement a bit of a model for peace negotiations around the world.

And the peacebrokers, Bill Clinton, President of the United States, the Irish Premier, Bertie Ahern, and Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, joined me here for their first joint interview on what it took and the hard choices for peace all those years ago.

And here is that exclusive conversation.

Welcome, President Clinton, Prime Minister Blair, Prime Minister Ahern.

We're calling this the reunion of the peacemakers.

And I just wonder, just to start with reflections, first with you, Mr. President, of just what it means for you to be together, to be here 25 years later with all the principles.

- Well, I think we were all privileged to be where we were when we were and privileged to do our part to get this done.

They actually had to sign the agreement.

I was just the cheerleader, sort of, and gave them George Mitchell, which was the gift of a generation.

So I think we're proud.

I hope we are.

- Prime Minister Blair, this was something that wrecked many British governments before yours.

- Yeah, but I was lucky in having a group of people in Northern Ireland, leaders who were prepared to lead and do difficult things.

I had an Irish Taoiseach, an Irish Prime Minister, that had a... We were coming to the end of the 20th century and you needed people with a kind of 21st century mentality of the world, and Bertie had that.

And then, I mean, President Clinton was saying that he was a cheerleader, but he was actually much more than that.

He was also an intervener at crucial points in the negotiation.

So we were lucky.

It was one of these things, I think it was a combination of circumstances, but the individual leadership of people at that particular moment was crucial in delivering it.

- And Prime Minister Ahern wasn't that mostly the alignment of the stars, so to speak, in terms of leadership?

Was it also about the people on the ground?

- Yeah, the parties of people on the ground.

But I think from our point of view, and to have the President of the United States being genuinely interested, and Bill to give time and to stay up at night.

I mean, we are a small country and those things you don't expect.

And I was just so lucky that Tony and I got on so well.

He gave us an enormous amount of time.

I know he had 100 other items on his list.

And I realize every prime minister is busy, but when I looked at my agenda against his agenda, and he was prepared to come here, spend days here, weeks here, hours.

And time and time again, people talk about 1998, but we went on to 2007, and the same commitment you gave, Tony, and that was an extraordinary commitment.

- Can I ask the origin story?

So President Clinton, even in your campaign, before the the '92 election, you talked about this.

To Irish-Americans, you said you would put all your abilities behind trying to get peace.

Why did it matter so much, even in '92?

- Well, first of all, I was a student at Oxford when the troubles began.

I remember what a big story it was when Bernadette Devlin was elected to parliament.

And I went to Ireland a couple of times while I was a student, and I saw both the happiness and the sorrow.

And I always felt, when I started talking to Irish-Americans, when I was running for president, that we could make a positive difference if we were fair to both sides.

And I knew that to do that, we'd have to do something that the the side that was then prevailing would think was unfair, which was to get involved, because our whole diplomacy was built around our special relationship with the UK, which included staying away from Ireland.

And even when President Kennedy came here, he didn't talk about Northern Ireland.

No president had ever spent the night in Northern Ireland until I did, I stayed in The Europa on purpose because they had been bombed so much.

And so I give a lot of credit to the Irish-Americans that urged me to do it and to the people in my National Security Council, especially Nancy Soderberg, who's here today, and who worked this issue for me, who said, "You may not have a lot of experience in foreign policy, but your instincts were right on this.

Stay."

And so we took the heat.

And even the British ambassador, then, Admiral Crowe had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan, and stunned the world, including me, when he endorsed me for president.

And he called me, and he said, "You gave me this great job and now you're making it impossible for me to do."

I said, "No, admiral, you're gonna be more important than ever.

This is a good thing."

- So your U.S. ambassador had his marching orders from you.

Prime Minister Blair, here you are.

You have come in as a labor prime minister for the first time in a generation, and you have an overwhelming mandate.

And you start by doing this.

I mean, you were elected in '97, the negotiations started in '97.

Why, why was it so important to you to put that much political capital?

- I mean, there was a personal reason, actually, to a degree, rather like the president.

I mean, my family, on my mother's side, had come from Donegal.

I'd grown up with a very clear understanding of the troubles.

You would wait, literally, every morning in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s to news on the UK media of acts of terrorism, of destruction, death, tragic stories of the families of the victims, of the troubles.

So it was part of my own personal history, but I also thought, John Major, who'd been my predecessor as Prime Minister, had tried and had got somewhere.

There was some stirring, you could see, some possibility, even though the thing had broken down by the time we came to office.

I mean, I've often wondered whether it was just, 'cause you were straight into government, and you had this feeling that everything was possible and so you were prepared to hit what most people have thought was impossible to go.

So for all of those reasons.

The first speech I made as prime minister was here in Northern Ireland.

And then, once we decided to work on it, we put a lot into it.

- And Prime Minister Ahern, you also became prime minister the same year as Prime Minister Blair.

And I mean, did you feel that there was a fatigue?

I mean, it said that the IRA were either persuaded or figured out that they could no longer kill, maim, and terrorize their way to a united Ireland.

What do you think, and made you put all your chips on the table as well?

- Well, I think the conflict would've went on, and if we didn't put in the effort, the IRA were not gonna be beaten and we're not going to win.

But that had been clear for a long way back, and I think the British Army... At one stage, it was 80,000.

Northern Ireland's a small place, but we're an 80,000 security between army, police, and reserves.

So it was an enormous security operation.

So everyone was just taken on.

But I think, there did come an opportunity, two new governments coming in, support of the presidents, the parties beginning to listen.

I think when Tony Blair, as prime minister, went to [indistinct] show and set out his position, that gave us an opportunity to get the IRA to go back into a ceasefire again.

And then, I mean, the big risk, I think, we took was to start the talks with the paramilitaries, or those that represented them.

Because just quickly, the history of it, the trouble started in the '60s.

There was one effort in '74.

The next effort wasn't until '85.

The next effort wasn't until '98.

And if we failed, it was another decade.

So I think there was that opportunity.

And if we did not do what we did in '98, the vines would've continued.

So I think we realized we had to give it a go.

And lucky enough, we had the British Prime Minister, for the first time, in decades, was prepared to put huge political capital.

- Mr. President, I'm really interested in what Prime Minister Ahern says about the paramilitaries in the IRA.

Prime minister's Chief Negotiator, Jonathan Powell, and others have said that, for a long time, the Americans played a very destructive role.

They gave visas to Irish fundraisers for the IRA, they allowed weapons to be sent to the IRA, your courts provided safe haven to IRA people who were fleeing the law over here.

So comment on that.

And I guess, did that then give you credibility with them?

We've helped you for so long, now we can ask you to come to the peace table.

- Yes, but only because I also took on some very strong people in the Irish-American community who were convinced that terror was basically the end of those who were engaging in it and were also more tolerant of the unionist paramilitary groups.

So the fact that there was all this turmoil, I think, gave us a chance.

And we started with the visa for Adams.

- Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein.

- But it was organized.

There were seven Irish-American groups that were very interested and they were mostly pro-Republican.

But they were anti-violence.

So one of them, we arranged to ask Gerry to come give a speech, and the visa I gave him was for two days on the promise that not one penny would be raised, even for Sinn Fein.

No money.

And it was seen as a balanced move to break the ice.

And I think, frankly, we all have to give a lot of credit to the people here, 'cause they were sick of it.

They were tired of dying, they were tired of the uncertainty, they were tired of the poverty that attended constant violence.

They were tired of it all.

And it created an opportunity for these two guys, who were willing to take the risks, to move us toward where we went.

And the fact that all the parties were included in the negotiations, which was quite taxing on both of them, I can tell you, from time to time, in different ways.

That made a difference.

And I think George Mitchell made a difference.

- Well, George Mitchell has said, I can't remember the figures, but it was, I know hundreds and hundreds of hours and days of negotiations that finally led to yes, but it may have gone the other way.

Can you recount and reflect on how difficult, actually...

I mean, it sounds like everybody's ready to do it, but it actually was very difficult to get the "Good Friday Agreement".

- Yeah, it was very difficult.

But one vital thing that I think helped was not just things we've been talking about in the last few minutes, but also, if you're gonna make a peace process where you've gotta be prepared to talk to everyone, right?

And I remember, when I became the first British Prime Minister, actually, to sit down with the people and this was horribly controversial at the time, when people thought...

I mean, Gerry Adams had been prevented.

There was a law in the UK that prevented him appearing on UK television.

- Even his voice.

- Even his voice, right.

- Even his voice.

- And I don't think we could have got this off the ground if we hadn't been prepared to talk to everyone.

And then, there really is this thing about people being prepared to act in a way that isn't politically conventional.

So Bertie is the Irish Taoiseach.

I mean, he could have stuck in a fairly traditional Irish position on everything, but he didn't.

We each kind of liberated each other.

And then, when it comes back to what you and President Clinton were just talking about, it became easier for him to intervene constructively when it looked like everyone was being involved and there was a seat at the table for everyone.

And then, Mo Mowlam, who was, at that time, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, actually visited loyalist prisoners who were from the other side, who engaged in terrorist activity.

And that, again, was something that a lot of people, they really recoiled from.

But I tell you, the whole point about a peace process, you're never gonna get anywhere unless everyone's prepared to take risks for peace.

And you either spend your political capital or you hoard it.

And for all sorts of various reasons, people decided to spend it.

And I think, for those politicians in Northern Ireland, who, after all, were the ones that had to take the most difficult decisions, those are the people here, I think they were exhausted.

But there was something about the moment and the circumstances that made everyone think, "Okay, come on.

We're approaching a new millennium.

We're really gonna carry on with people killing and fighting each other in a European country in the 21st century?

There was that as well, that kind of feeling, that change had to come, and then with the people who were prepared to be agents of that change.

- So 25 years later, indisputably, this is a success, which everybody involved is so happy about and you're celebrating and it's an amazing thing.

The war is over.

But again, your negotiator, Johnson Powell said, that, like many have observed, that the problem with peace agreements is that it stops the war, but sometimes it doesn't deal with all the other problems.

So problems that people want health, education, poverty, employment, all of that.

I wonder if you can reflect on the fact that there's not even a functioning parliament assembly here right now.

It's gone back and forth, back and forth.

And many of the new politicians say it's not fit for purpose anymore, because the "Good Friday Agreement" baked in that it had to be nationalists and unionists who shared power, and not what seems to have grown up in the middle, which is more moderate, neither one nor the other.

- No, I don't think there's anything wrong with the fundamentals of the agreement.

It was based on an inclusive process, as Tony has just explained, of bringing every party in, and it was based on a comprehensive list of items.

So everything was included, all the issues that haven't been resolved.

When it came to the institution setting up the executive, the only way you could do that was giving everybody a say, because otherwise it wasn't going to work.

Now, 25 years on, you can argue, I think fairly, that there some should be some changes in the mechanisms of that, and that's not a problem.

I mean, we had a review.

We had to sit down in 2006.

We've only had one review in 25 years, which is amazing, and that was in St. Andrew's, and we successfully got in the DUP at that stage.

They weren't in at the start.

So I think, maybe there's some changes that are needed, but first of all, we need to get the institutions up now, and then have a look to see if there's something, but not change in fundamentals.

- No, no, but the institutions at Nostromo.

I think you've said that, they need to come to their senses, the parties.

We need to stop this, stop-start stuff the whole time.

Each side can torpedo it.

I mean, for almost half of the time, it's been British rule here and not local rule.

- And in fairness to the British rule, the civil servants have done a very good job keeping it going.

It's not the right way of doing it.

But I think what's important now is that the local politicians listen to their own people, who are saying, "We have health issues, we have infrastructural issues, we have education issues."

They have issues of integrated education, all kind of problems, and there's nobody dealing with it.

So I think it's really the local politicians to resolve this.

But I should say, there's only one party outside of that, and we're not trying to force them.

We're trying to encourage them to join and to change position, and hopefully, they'll do that shortly.

- And I wanna ask you also about another thing, because again, many have commented that the, "Political vandalism of Brexit has brought the back, the poison of identity, into politics here," to the, not the exclusion, but to the diminishment of other issues.

Are you worried, President Clinton, that identity will put its horrible roots back in amongst the parties in the system here?

- Worried, I think would be the wrong word, but I think we have to face the fact that, even with the government going down, Northern Ireland looks pretty good compared to a lot of other formerly purely democratic countries in the world.

I mean, this identity thing swept the world at the end of the Cold War.

It took a few years to get going.

It's selfish, but I think, Tony, and Bertie, and I, and a lot of others, we did a pretty good job with the whole European continent, trying to keep people working together at the end of the Cold War.

But it did strip the sort of veneer off of longstanding differences, racial, religious, ethnic, cultural differences that other people could exploit.

And so, the Brexit phenomenon has been all through present all over the world, including in the United States, where you cannot run a successful democracy in an interdependent world, if it is dominated by people that think the only thing that matters is our differences.

But when the Northern Ireland government has worked, and it worked... Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, the odd couple in politics, produced a few years of on-time budgets, agreed upon help.

When Martin McGuinness, in the first Stormont government, where Seamus Mallon represented the totally non-violent, Republican side, Martin McGuinness was the education minister and stunned them by first recommending increased funding for the poor schools in the unionist community, and he proved that he would be fair.

And I think that that triggered something in everybody else, including, eventually, in Ian Paisley, and they wound up just working things out.

Look, I don't know any government where everybody agrees on everything, but if you can take these big divides, and say, "We agree on 70%, 80% of the things, and we're gonna do those things," I think that made a huge difference.

So that's why all of us hope the government will come up again, because it has worked when it's been up.

- Prime Minister Blair, Martin McGuinness, obviously, Sinn Fein, negotiator, previously IRA, had said, there is something like, the statistics, is like 90% housing segregation still in Northern Ireland, education segregation still exists, poverty in many pockets, although a lot of opportunity as well in other pockets.

How do you think this province, this place, is going to emerge from that kind of existing segregation 25 years on?

- Okay, so I think the important thing is to say, "What have we gained?

We've gained peace for 25 years.

As a result of that, the economy here has doubled.

Belfast is a thriving European city today."

You can understand why that there's some hope and opportunity.

So that's on the one side.

On the other side, you've got institutions that are unstable and you've still got real pockets of deprivation.

Now, the only way you're going to make sense of that is to pursue political stability, because political stability gives you the space in which you can deal with these problems.

And what's interesting, if you look at conflicts around the world, and Northern Ireland was just an example of this, whilst there's violence, or whilst, as President Clinton was saying, the differences of what matters, it's very hard to create that space for advance and for progress.

It's only when people are prepared to take the difficult decisions to put stability in place, that you can then deal with these social and economic problems, and you give people a sense that they can plan for the future.

By the way, the other interesting thing about Northern Ireland is the emergence, as you've just been saying, of this middle ground, where a generation, I think, probably under 45s, some of whom have grown up remembering the troubles, some of whom have no idea about the troubles at all, they're not interest in the sectarian future, right?

They want a Northern Ireland that's connected to the world.

Let's go ahead, and so on.

Brexit, of course, is a problem 'cause it put a border down the north and south, which we've had to deal with.

But in the end, we've got to get over that, and then we've got to create the circumstances in which there is the political bandwidth and focus then to deal with the underlying problems, which are the ones that really matter.

And that's possible to do.

And I think, if you look 25 years ahead, hopefully, you'll have, probably, an amended form of "Good Friday Agreement", because there will be a different way of doing things, but we will have kept that essential political stability that allows progress to happen.

- So you've all talked about expanding this model around the world, and there have been so many, enough successful diplomatic achievements that have lasted.

Bosnia, although that froze the conflict and the aggressors seek to gain what they wanted to in the beginning by other means.

Kosovo, you intervened in, and to this day, it's peaceful and independent and democratic.

Unfortunately, the Middle East, which you definitely all have had a lot to do with.

I read that David Trimble.

Obviously, the unionist leader at the time, his deputy said that he took this "Good Friday Agreement" to Ramallah, showed it to Yasser Arafat, who was the head of the Palestinian Authority, and said, "This is your blueprint for success."

And we know that it happened in Columbia.

We saw the government of Columbia make peace with their militants and militias, the FARC.

President Clinton, right now, the people who cheered on the death of the peacemaker, Yitzhak Rabin, are in government, and it seems like there's nowhere to go.

What do you think?

I mean, when you look at this blueprint, why do you think it hasn't worked elsewhere, for instance, let's just take the Middle East?

- Well, the difference is, let's just start with the Middle East.

Tony spent years working on this.

But they started with a different model.

I mean, when we signed the "Middle East Peace Agreement" in '93.

- The "Oslo Accords".

- On the south lawn of the White House, everyone's assumption was that they had to work for a two-state solution, and they would argue for a few years about what to do with the unresolved issues and what to do with the line drawing.

But that the Israelis wished to remain a majority Jewish state, but to be at peace with their Palestinian neighbors who would have their own state if we could work out the myriad questions that had to be worked out.

So we started with a different model.

They started with a model here that they could share the future, and that they had not enough land to fight over and they had to work together.

So I think the real question is, the Middle East is now waiting for somebody to answer the now-what question.

Because I still believe that people everywhere would prefer to work together than be at war.

There are very few places where... We had a special problem in Bosnia because we couldn't make the peace without the Bosnian Serbs.

And then, from the beginning, either a hardline Serbian government or their Russian sponsors were always pushing for paralysis, paralysis, paralysis.

They're still way better off than they were when they were slaughtering each other in massive numbers.

But I hope that'll be resolved someday.

But this is different because they decided to share the future from the beginning and to guarantee everybody a role in it.

- So you've talked about war, the current war in Europe, which threatens us all, is happening because of Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Do you see the possibility of any kind of negotiation, anything even based on this kind of thing, or any other kind of thing, right now?

How do you see that ending?

- It's extremely difficult and it's a whole other subject.

And the difference between the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and Israel-Palestine, or what happened in Northern Ireland, is that, in the case of Israel and Palestine, in the case of Northern Ireland, you have two sides in conflict.

But both of whom have a cause that is, you could say, is reasonable.

United Kingdom on one side, united Ireland on the other, okay.

The trouble is, I'm afraid, there's no justification for what has happened in Ukraine.

So I think it's a different category of conflict.

But one principle is the same, which is, once you determine what is the right outcome, and in my view, the right outcome is that the aggression in Ukraine does not succeed, then you don't give up.

I mean, the one thing I think that was very clear about the Northern Ireland peace process, for whatever reasons, is that none of us were prepared to give up on it at any point in time.

We never really resiled, even though it points, it did look absolutely impossible.

And so I think, if you want to resolve anything, you've got to decide, first of all, what is the just and the fair outcome, and then you've got keep committed, no matter what the obstacles.

- If I could just say one thing.

I think one of the things that everyone needs to understand, trying to make sense of Ukraine and comparing it to what happened here, none of us thought we would stay for life.

We all believed in democracy within our own jurisdictions.

I mean, I love being president.

If we didn't have the term limit, they would've had to take me out in a pine box or beat me.

But I believed in it, because I don't think anybody should stay in power for life.

If you determine to stay for life, then the only thing you really care about is breaking the opposition, and it's very hard to get a good outcome.

And you see that now in Mr. Putin's Russia.

He never agreed with Boris Yeltsin when Yeltsin promised me, and actually signed an agreement, that he would, with John Major, your predecessor, and with NATO, that he would respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

- After you urged them to give up their nuclear weapons?

- I did.

That was the right decision at the time.

They were the 3rd biggest nuclear power in the world.

Brazil had an active nuclear program.

India had an active nuclear program, still does, Pakistan did.

But South Africa and Brazil were about to join, and they totally gave up their programs because of what we were doing.

So Ukraine played a very positive role there.

And we tried, in turn, to guarantee their territorial integrity.

But I will give this to Mr. Putin.

He was totally honest with me.

He told me, three years before the invasion of Crimea, that he did not agree with Yeltsin, and Yeltsin never got this adopted by the Duma.

It was not a treaty.

He wasn't bound by it and he didn't agree with it, but he always wanted to reconstitute, in some form or fashion, the Soviet Union, or a capitalist version of it.

And so we can't forget that the fight for democracy goes on, even as we tried to use democracy here by giving everybody a say and making sure everybody was represented to make a better future.

- In retrospect, do you regret having persuaded them to give up their nuclear weapons?

- No.

Because at the time I had reasons to believe that we could build a world with fewer nuclear weapons, and I knew Boris Yeltsin would keep his word.

He wasn't an imperialist.

But I regret what happened.

- And Prime Minister Ahern, finally, Gerry Adams, when this was signed, said that it's just a bridge towards a united Ireland.

Is that what it is?

Is that's what's gonna happen?

Do you see that happening in your lifetime?

- I think what will continue on, it's the balance between union with the UK and unity within the Ireland, and those two separate traditions will continue to peacefully put forward their case.

And Brexit, I think, has heightened the debate.

There's far more debate.

You can't go to a university now anywhere in the Ireland where they're not debating something about unification one way or the other.

But it's been done peacefully and it's been done open.

I think it's still a long way off.

There's a clause in the agreement that says there can be plebiscite every so often.

We haven't had one in 25 years because we haven't got stability of the institutions.

My view is, simple enough, until there's stability of the institutions, it's stupid to have a referendum, and secondly, the proprietary work is only starting.

It's only starting in academic life at the moment.

So it's a long way off, but the aspiration will continue.

But there's two separates aspirations to stay close to a part of the UK and aspiration for a united Ireland.

So I think those two issues are really identity issues.

But the "Good Friday Agreement", remember, is that you can be British, you can be Irish, you can be both.

I think that served as well for now, but it will continue to be challenged.

- President Clinton, Prime Minister Blair, Prime Minister Ahern, thank you all very much indeed.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- And a month after that "Good Friday Agreement" was signed 25 years ago, signed by the leaders, it was put to the people of Northern Ireland and to the Irish Republic.

In Northern Ireland, the deal passed a referendum by whopping three-to-one.

And I was here, in May of 1998, covering that referendum.

I visited two families, Catholic and Protestant.

They were both wary but determined to give peace a chance.

[traditional Irish music] Paul McCabe and his daughter, Una, play traditional Irish music.

[traditional Irish music] In the kitchen, son, Finbar, helps his mother, Ailish, get ready for dinner before going out for a game of Gaelic football.

A normal, happy family, right?

Wrong.

The McCabes are Catholics living in, predominantly Protestant, Northern Ireland.

- My children have never grown up in a normal society.

Vivienne and Finbar don't know what it's like to experience normality.

They don't know what it's like to go out, go to a disco, go out at night, and come back and not find any security forces on the street.

- On their street, in [indistinct], soldiers aren't looking for anything special.

This is just routine.

- You always kind of feel alienated in your own society because you can't walk down the streets without there being heavy security forces and army walking down with their guns and everything, and you feel like you've done something wrong.

- Missing out and knowing other half of the time.

You don't get to know everybody.

- [Christiane] Because Catholic and Protestant youths go to different schools and even play different games.

Finbar and his friends play Gaelic football.

Only the rare Protestant joins them.

Adults go to separate pubs.

Catholics drink at the Rossmore.

Protestants down the street.

In Northern Ireland, division is a birthright.

The McCabes will vote yes on the peace referendum because they want equality and police reform.

They want to feel at home in their own land.

Like almost every family, the McCabes have lost someone they loved.

Parents now want a different future for their children.

Children simply want a chance.

Waiting for the "Good Friday Peace Accord" had the McCabes biting their nails.

- I was really, really nervous the first few days coming up to it.

Really, really nervous.

And I said, "God, I want it to go back now."

You fear for your own life and you fear for your parents' lives.

That's what happens if it goes back.

it was definitely, it was very emotional.

- [Christiane] This is a Protestant household.

- Lord, bless this food to our bodies and our bodies to Your service now.

In Jesus' name... - Alex and Kathy Callwood, like many in their Belfast community, don't trust the peace agreement and they'll vote no in the referendum.

But they too want a different future for 16-month-old, Mary Ellen.

- I don't want her to be brought up with hate.

I don't want her to be brought up with a stereotypical view.

- [Christiane] This family knows all about hate and stereotypes.

Alex was a paramilitary at 16, did 13 years in jail for killing a Catholic.

- Because of the hatred that I had for Catholics.

I wanted to take action against, people from that community.

And yes, I wanted to kill people from that community, simply because of the way that I grew up as a child.

- [Christiane] But in jail he got religion and repentance.

Now, he's determined that these vulnerable youngsters don't give in to the culture of violence that envelops them.

It's not easy, of course.

These are high-risk youth and poorly educated, with little hope of getting good jobs.

Alex's message of bridge-building and respect gets through slowly, if at all.

Wayne is 15.

He actually attends an integrated school and has Catholic friends there.

So you have a lot of friends who are Catholics, but if they came through the wrong road, through your road, you would have tried to hurt them?

- Yeah.

- [Christiane] Is that normal?

- Yes, over here, it's normal.

In Northern Ireland, it's normal.

- [Christiane] Do you think that it will change in the future?

- No.

- [Christiane] How do you feel about Catholics?

- Don't like them.

- [Christiane] You don't like them, because?

- You don't know why you hate someone from the other community.

You simply hate them because that's the way that you're brought up and that's the way that you're programmed.

But that's the thing that needs to change.

- I think people have to recognize that we are different and that we have to accommodate that different, not to amalgamate and make some idealistic and new community here.

We are different, and that's it.

That's a fact we have to recognize and we have to accommodate that difference.

- Words that are as true today as they were 25 years ago.

But it is a lot more normal than it was then.

Perhaps, it'll be another next 25 years, another generation that will truly seal the Good Friday deal.

As we've just seen, one of the driving forces behind the support of the "Good Friday Agreement" was parents wanting a better life for their children.

Parenthood evokes powerful emotions, from fear to joy.

It can be a tricky experience to navigate.

The writer.

Clint Smith, took these overflowing feelings and channeled them into poetry.

The poignant pieces he's done are all in his new book "Above Ground".

And here he is, talking about it with Michel Martin.

- Clint Smith, thanks so much for talking with us once again.

It's so fun to see you.

- It's so good to be back with you.

- A lot of people, I think, know your work from your essays, your journalism, your reported work.

I know your recent book was about the importance of memory.

What would you say this book does, this particular book?

As a parent myself, there are times that it just broke me.

I was just devastated by it, thinking about the beauty, the terror, the bigness, all the feelings about being a parent.

But there are also a lot of ideas about history and how all that fits together.

What do you think this book does?

How did it come to you?

- I think you described it perfectly.

'Cause part of what's trying to describe is the messiness and the inconsistency and the complexity of parenthood, how parenthood is this thing that is filled with so much love and levity and silliness and joy and is also incredibly scary.

It is also incredibly difficult.

It's also incredibly anxiety-inducing.

And I'm interested in how we hold all of those realities together, how parenthood is this thing that shows you the parts of yourself that you are proud of, and also the thing that shows you the parts of yourself that you're not so proud of, the parts of yourself that, frankly, you might be ashamed of, that hadn't been revealed to you until you became a parent.

And so, this book is really thinking about the simultaneity of the human experience, holding the love and the joy and the sense of wonder alongside the sense of despair and fear and what it means to be human amid the backdrop of ecological, social, and political catastrophe.

- I get the sense that you started this book when you first learned that your wife was pregnant.

Is that right?

- Yeah, that's absolutely right.

As I write about in the book, it was not guaranteed that my wife and I would be able to have children.

We were given a less than 1% chance by my doctors.

And so, we had an emotionally rocky fertility journey and we did conceive.

When my wife did conceive, it felt so miraculous, but also so fragile.

So amazing, and also so precarious.

And so, part of what I wanted to do is use poems as a way to mark moments in time to track how I was experiencing and how I was processing within myself these moments that felt, again, both exciting and scary all at once.

And I just kind of kept going as my child went from being an embryo to being a baby, to being a toddler, to being this little human that runs around and bumps their head on the walls everywhere.

And so, for me, poetry is the act of paying attention, and part of what I think it does is allow me to pay attention to my children, to pay attention to the world around my children, pay attention to the way that I've changed as my children have come into the world, how they've recalibrated my sense of the world.

And I think, for me, that poetry is a really helpful means of creating time capsules within your life, almost sort of archiving the different parts of your life so that you have these breadcrumbs that you can use to trace who you've been and how you've thought about your life at different periods of time.

- So I would love it if you would read a poem that speaks to kind of that early part of hoping and just the idea that this person might not get here.

I loved "By Chance".

Do you wanna read that one?

- I'd be happy to.

"By Chance".

"If the doctor said you were impossible and you arrived anyway, does it mean they were wrong?

Or does it mean you defied science?

What is the difference between science and a miracle other than discovering new language for something we don't understand?

Today we brought you home.

I stayed up all night and watched you sleep in your bassinet because I was afraid if I closed my eyes, you'd vanish.

Once a long time ago, your grandmother escaped a war and your great grandfather fought in one.

You come from good fortune, you come from a history that is arbitrary and cloaked in luck, you come from a landmine that was two feet to left, you come from children who shared their bread when they didn't have to, you come from the parachute that didn't open, then, did.

- When I say that you broke me, this is one of the ones that broke me.

I thought, "You're so right."

I mean, I'm not trying to sort of turn your art into journalism, but your experience describes that of so many people, the all the what-ifs, all the what-ifs.

But it also does something else, which is, you're talking about things that some people experience and other people, frankly, don't have to.

And I'm thinking here about, "It's All in Your Head".

If you could talk about, a little bit of it, like your wife's experience, your experience as a family in an emergency room when she was pregnant with your son and had a health complication.

Her feet were burning.

So you wound up going to the emergency room.

Doctor kind of said, kind of was dismissive.

You went home.

The pain increased.

And then, she wasn't having it.

So if I could get you to pick up where he walked out of the room and told the nurse to send us home.

Can I get you to pick up there?

- He walked out of the room and told the nurse to send us home.

But the next day, the heat in your mother's legs grew into a blaze.

We drove to the hospital and asked to see a different doctor.

The nurse said that wouldn't be possible.

Your mother's restraint fractured.

She has never allowed someone to tell her the ground isn't there when she feels its soil beneath her feet.

She leaned over the desk.

I'm not asking you, I am telling you.

I need to see a different doctor.

The nurse, now anxious, disappeared into the hall.

We were called to see a different doctor and that doctor ran the test that your mother asked for.

What they found occurs in 1 out of 1,000 pregnancies.

She told us you needed to be delivered early, that waiting too long might mean you extinguish in a womb of poisoned blood.

I keep thinking of what could have happened, of what almost did.

- It was remarkable to me to read this because I, obviously, didn't know this story.

And here again, not to turn your art into journalism, but I think people now have become aware that the maternal mortality rate for black women is many times that of white women.

The death rate of black infants is many times that of white infants.

And frankly, it doesn't really matter if you have insurance or don't, if you are of means or not.

And I was just wondering, how all that came into play when you were thinking about this, or did it?

Or was it this moment with your wife, trying to save her life and your child's, or did all that kind of history come back in?

- You keep saying you don't wanna turn the poems into journalism, but I think what is the common denominator between the two is that both are the process of documentation.

Both the journalism and the poem are the process of paying attention to a moment, to a feeling, to an idea, to a phenomenon, and marking it and naming it and excavating it.

And so, in this sense, it's a sort of personal journalism, a sort of personal excavation because it felt really...

This was written in the midst of, as you've alluded to, this moment where we have many black women who are coming to the fore.

Serena Williams, perhaps most notably, talking about their experience of the difficulties of their experience in childbirth and the way that they weren't believed when they talked about what was happening to their own bodies during their pregnancy from medical authorities.

And then, we have all of this research that comes out in PR and New York Times so many different places that demonstrates the way that, no matter what your socioeconomic status is, no matter what your educational status is, black women consistently are not believed by doctors and nurses and other parts of the medical infrastructure when it comes to naming and talking about what they are experiencing, what they feel like they need, and what sort of medical interventions are necessary in order to prevent something from happening to the mother or happening to the baby.

And so, I was reading all of this in the news and then also watching it happen to the person I love most in the world, and it felt important to write a poem from the perspective of the partner, as well, to describe the sense of anger, the sense of anxiety, the sense of helplessness, that one feels when you see this person that you care so much about, and you know that they're carrying your child, and you see them dismissed over and over and over again, knowing that this isn't something that they were making up, right?

This isn't something that was, as the doctor would say, psychosomatic.

This was something that, my wife knows her body, knows what's going on, and I think this is an experience that black women, over the course of generations and still today, experience over and over and over again.

And so, I wanted to sort of dig into that moment, to explore it, to excavate it, and to name what was an experience that wasn't simply an abstraction, wasn't something that exists in the context of medical journals, but was something that was happening right in front of me.

- Do you think that poetry allows you to say things that your journalism, your other writing, does not?

- I think what poetry does is, poetry allows you to wrestle with a question and not have to come up with an answer.

It is something that... And you can begin the poem with one question and end the poem with a handful of new questions.

And I think that it is this space that's different than writing an op-ed or writing an essay, or sometimes, when I'm trying to make an argument, or when I'm trying to make an assertion, I think that sometimes, in poetry, it is simply the act of reflection, the act of meditation, the act of asking questions, of a world that's full of them.

And I appreciate the space to wrestle with these questions and not feel pressure to opine, not feel a need to present myself as an authority figure or as if I have a specific set of ideas or opinions, when really the poem is the space where I'm trying to make sense of those ideas and questions for myself.

- I think your children are four and five now, if I have that right.

When they read this book 20 years from now, what do you hope they'll take from it?

- I hope they know how much I love them.

I hope they know that I think that they were hilarious, that they were fun, and that it was scary and it was hard and it was exhausting.

I think I want my kids to understand the fullness and complexity of the world and I want them to understand the fullness and complexity of their parents.

That we are two humans, we're doing our best, and we want them to be safe and to be loved and to be cherished.

And that we are also imperfect people in an imperfect world.

And I hope that they both feel loved and also feel generous and extend us the sort of grace that we try to extend to others.

- Clint Smith, your latest book is "Above Ground".

Clint, thanks so much for talking with us once again.

- Thank you.

It's always a pleasure.

- It is all for the children.

And finally, from here, in Belfast, therefore, an important message for the future from a lion of today.

Just hours after our conversation, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Bertie Ahern all went to pay tribute to George Mitchell.

He's the former Senate majority leader in the United States, famed for reaching out across the aisle, the man that President Clinton deployed to get this piece of accord across the line.

The indefatigable negotiator who shepherded the "Good Friday Agreement" through to completion.

Mitchell, at 89 years old, is battling leukemia, but he returned here to Belfast to offer a message of hope and resilience and a warning to the world.

- We need your ongoing patience, stamina, and perseverance.

We need people who believe, who know that the possible does exist within the impossible.

Don't let it slip away.

- That is it for our program tonight.

If you wanna find out what's coming up on the show every night, sign up for our newsletter at pbs.org/amanpour.

Thanks for watching, and join us again tomorrow night.