George J. Mitchell

Senator George Mitchell chaired the talks that produced the Good Friday Agreement, and the patience he brought to them is the reason they worked. He was born in Waterville, Maine, to a Lebanese-American mother and an Irish-American father, practised law, became a federal judge, and was appointed to the Senate in 1980, where he served as majority leader from 1989 to 1995. He declined a Supreme Court nomination to stay with the health care bill, which then failed. President Clinton sent him to Northern Ireland in 1995. He spent nearly three years in the chair of multi-party negotiations that most participants expected to collapse, wrote the Mitchell Principles committing every party to exclusively peaceful means, and imposed the deadline of Good Friday 1998 that forced the agreement out. He was trusted by all sides largely because he had no stake in the quarrel and did not lecture. He later chaired an international inquiry into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, served as Middle East envoy under Obama, and investigated the use of performance-enhancing drugs in American baseball. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and an honorary knighthood. He was raised Maronite Catholic and has said the Northern Ireland talks taught him that the hardest part of any settlement is persuading people to stop arguing about the past. The agreement he chaired was approved by referendums on both sides of the Irish border in May 1998 and has held for more than a quarter of a century, through repeated suspensions of the institutions it created. He also served as chancellor of Queen's University Belfast.

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