Comment: Senator Mitchell and Liverpool in true harmony

Apr 24 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

GEORGE MITCHELL is the rarest of human beings – someone who can lay claim to having helped make the world a better place.

The former US senator is the statesman who played a key role in delivering peace in Northern Ireland.

Through his part in the Good Friday Agreement, he was instrumental in creating something many felt was all-but-impossible.

So it is fitting that tonight he will deliver the Roscoe Lecture at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall.

The Roscoe Lecture – named in memory of William Roscoe, the leading 19th-century campaigner against slavery – exists to give a platform to people’s opinions and some leading modern thinkers have helped shape these debates.

But George Mitchell is also a realist.

It is interesting to note that, while on a recent trip to Northern Ireland, he observed a positive, forward-looking attitude, but tempered this view with a caution that what he describes as “genuine reconciliation” will take generations to achieve.

Now he is locked in another seemingly conflict – that of the Middle East.

It is interesting that, while he refrains from criticising President Carter’s meeting with Hamas this week, he has openly spoken about the damaging distraction and “serious mistakes” of President Bush’s policy in Iraq.

The Democrat, who first visited the city at the request of Liverpool University shortly after the historic agreement was signed, was invited back by John Moores University to give the Roscoe Lecture.

And it is heartening to hear his own view of how Liverpool has changed in a few years alone.

He describes the changes Liverpool has undergone as a city since his last visit as “remarkable”.

For many people, it is an epithet that could just as easily be ascribed to George Mitchell.