During a brief visit to Northern Ireland last week U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrongly claimed that the hotel in which she stayed during a visit to the country in 1995 was bombed shortly before or whilst she was actually there.
In 1995 Bill Clinton was President of the United States and Hillary Clinton was First Lady. And what was perhaps the beginning of the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the signing of the
Good Friday agreement, was still three years away when the Clintons first visited the part of Ireland that remains within the United Kingdom.
According to the
London Times the hotel at which the Clintons stayed during their 1995 visit was the Europa, a place known to many as “the Hardboard Hotel” because of the number of times it had been targeted by terrorist bombs. It was at one time allegedly the most bombed hotel in Europe, if not the world.
It was a visit that Mrs Clinton seemingly remembers well. Or so her speech last week to the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont appeared to indicate as she told her audience:
When Bill and I first came to Belfast we stayed at the Europa Hotel ... even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs
However since Mrs Clinton recalled her "experience" at the Europa it has come to light that the last time the hotel was hit by a bomb, which the
Belfast Telegraph reports was a skip lorry loaded with 500-1,000 lb of explosives which also destroyed part of the nearby Grand Opera House, was in 1993.
Acquired by the Hastings Group in August 1993, by January 1994 renovations to the Europa had been completed, 22 months before Mrs Clinton arrived.
Martin Mulholland was concierge at the Europa when the Clintons visited for one night in November 1995, he was pictured shaking the hand of then President Clinton, and he has confirmed that there was no visible evidence of bomb damage to the hotel during the stay of the U.S.'s First Couple. Mr Mulholland is quoted by the
Belfast Telegraph as saying:
The hotel was spotless. There had been no bombs and there was no scaffolds or wooden boards or anything like that when they came. The place was spotless. The only security or boards that went up were the ones put up by Bill Clinton’s secret service team
Comparisons between the erroneous claim made just days ago by Mrs Clinton, in Northern Ireland to encourage the country's politicians to complete the peace process her husband helped begin, and the one she made regarding her visit as First Lady to Bosnia in 1996 have unsurprisingly been made.
In March 2008, whilst still campaigning to be selected as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency, Mrs Clinton gave a speech in which she said of her experience in Bosnia:
I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get in the vehicles to get to our base
TV archives debunked that claim when they showed Mrs Clinton walking away from the plane with her daughter Chelsea, in a perfectly calm state and clearly not under fire. Mrs Clinton subsequently confessed that she had "misspoken".
From Washington Ian Kelly, a spokesman for the Secretary of State, has dismissed the comparisons with the Bosnia incident, stating:
I think what Secretary Clinton was trying to do was draw contrasts between contemporary Belfast, which I know has changed hugely from the Belfast of 1995. We not talking about the same thing [as ‘mis-speaking’ in Bosnia]. Secretary Clinton was simply contrasting. The place she had in her mind still had quite a bit of tension. That was what she was trying to note — that there has been a real change since 1995 when there was real desire for change among mothers, fathers and children
