Sir Edward Kennedy

During his speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass)* would receive an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II:

"Northern Ireland today is at peace, more Americans have healthcare, children around the world are going to school and for all those things we owe a great debt to the life and courage of Senator Edward Kennedy."

I don’t know whether Senator Kennedy deserves an honorary knighthood from the United Kingdom because more Americans have healthcare or children around the world are going to school, but to honor him for his contributions to peace in Northern Ireland is like giving Mrs. O’Leary’s cow an award for fire prevention.

In trying to explain the honorary knighthood, the BBC said that Kennedy "famously snubbed [Sinn Finn leader Gerry] Adams during the latter's St Patrick's Day trip to the US in 2005 following the brutal killing of Robert McCartney. The IRA, closely allied to Sinn Fein, was accused of involvement in his murder." Of course, the reason Senator Kennedy’s snub was such a big deal in 2005 was because he had always been such a friend of Mr. Adams before that.

As Andrew Pierce pointed out in the Telegraph, "[w]asn’t it Kennedy who cosied up to Gerry Adams at the height of the IRA’s murderous campaign? Kennedy, that champion of nationalism, who declared in 1971 that the Protestants of Ulster ‘should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain’?"

In fact, honoring Senator Kennedy for his contributions to peace in Northern Ireland ignores the people who really did help end the IRA’s reign of terror: the almost 3000 people who died at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and while fighting back on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. It was the terrorist attacks on the United States that day that finally made American supporters of the Irish Republican Army understand the IRA was nothing more than a bunch of terrorists itself.

It was 9/11 that dried up the flow of money from the United States to the IRA. People like Senator Kennedy and Republican Representative Peter King of New York could no longer ignore what the money they were helping to raise here was doing there. And without the money their supporters were able to raise in the United States, the IRA had to give up its terrorist activities in Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. It is just sad it took some people over here so very long to figure it out.

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* Or, as John Kass of the Chicago Tribune might say, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Chappaquiddick).