Graduating alongside Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham in Yale Law School's class of 1973, Bruce Morrison was part of a class that also featured future Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Nearly a decade after graduating with his Juris Doctor, Morrison was elected to Congress for Connecticut's 3rd district. He served on the House Banking Committee and the House Judiciary Committee before coauthoring the Immigration Act of 1990. This bill included a provision that permitted increased migration from countries such as Ireland which were considered to have lost out thanks to per-country limits to migration in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The 1965 bill had received support from Ted Kennedy, despite its impact on Ireland, and Kennedy's involvement as the Senate author of the 1990 act would go some way to rectifying this. Morrison went on to run for Governor of Connecticut but finished behind third party candidate Lowell Weicker and Republican John Rowland. Disillusioned with politics, and the divided Connecticut Democrats, Morrison returned to legal practice and set up his own firm, returning to politics to support Clinton's bid for the Presidency.

Morrison was also familiar with Ireland and Irish issues, having visited Derry in August 1987 where he found himself held at gunpoint by the RUC. Six years on, Morrison and his Irish-Americans for Clinton–Gore co-chair, Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn, issued the organisation's statement of purpose. It cited the Clinton letter of 23 October and the five steps that he pledged to make to assist with the resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict: the appointment of a special envoy, attention to human rights abuses in Northern Ireland, continuing visa opportunities for Irish citizens, supporting the MacBride Principles, and eliminating foreign interference in the US Judicial system.

On Saturday, 1 January 1977, Graeme Dougan was sat on his mother's knee in his family car, ready to evacuate his home in Harmin Park, Glengormley, on the northern outskirts of Belfast. A car bomb alert had been raised for the area and the Royal Ulster Constabulary were going door to door to warn residents to leave until the alert was over. The bomb exploded nearby, and debris struck and killed the fifteen-monthold child who became one of the youngest victims of the troubles. A little over a year later, in May of 1978, John Bateson, Rory O’Connor, and John Watson were sentenced for the murder. Bateson received six life sentences, whilst O’Connor and Watson received sixteen years for manslaughter.

Dougan may not have been the target of the IRA's bomb but one must question who, in a residential area of Belfast, really was. Dougan is listed in Lost Lives, the most authoritative account of the victims of the Northern Ireland troubles, as the 1,867th victim. He was, according to the Sutton Index of Deaths, the 1,030th civilian victim. The criminal indifference to the lives of innocent civilians, a mark of all sides throughout the Northern Ireland troubles, was heavily present on New Year's Day 1977 in North Belfast.

On 20 January 1977, James Earl Carter, Jr., the former Governor of Georgia, was inaugurated as the 39th President of the United States. Carter's election brought another President to the White House with Irish roots; in his case, Scots-Irish. During his Presidency, the United States would take great steps towards formalising its role as a partner in the Northern Irish peace process. The changing patterns of the conflict in the mid-1970s facilitated what became a significant, if often overlooked, intervention from an American President. The mid to late 1970s, in particular 1976, was a pivotal time in the Northern Irish conflict. Police primacy was reintroduced as the British government attempted to redefine the dynamics of their security operation in Northern Ireland. Special Category Status for paramilitary prisoners was abolished as part of a normalisation strategy, a move which would provoke a protest within the prisons of the province that would culminate in the 1981 hunger strike.

The 1988 Democratic National Convention saw Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton deliver the nomination speech for Michael Dukakis, the party's candidate for the 1988 Presidential election. The speech was not well received; accounts from the time recorded the highlight of the speech being when Clinton said, ‘in closing …’. Clinton would, only four years later, offer a strong line on Ireland as part of his Presidential campaign but Irish issues lacked resonance in national affairs and consequently played little role in the 1988 Presidential election. Where both the Italian-American Foundation and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League could secure both Presidential candidates at events, only Dukakis attended the Irish American Presidential Forum in New York in April. Dukakis pledged to press for Irish issues and offered his support to the International Fund for Ireland and the MacBride Principles.

The issue of the MacBride Principles had featured during campaigning ahead of the election. These were nine fair employment principles devised by the former Irish Minister for External Affairs, and a veteran republican, Sean MacBride, in 1984, and proposed as the corporate code of conduct for US companies doing business in Northern Ireland. During the 1988 Presidential election, both candidates supported the principles. Bush argued that: ‘I believe that job discrimination must cease. I do not think that they alone will solve the problem … if the Irish can bring about certainty, predictability and safety to themselves, then the climate for investment both foreign and domestic will be greatly improved’. Dukakis also stated his support, though not going as far as Reverend Jesse Jackson, another contender for the Democratic Party nomination, who pledged to sign them into law.

Bush's victory in the 1988 Presidential election was well received in Downing Street, understandably so given that it provided continuity with the Reagan administration and predictability to Anglo-American relations for the subsequent four years. Robin Renwick reported that the Prime Minister had ‘breathed a sigh of relief’ when Bush was elected, even though Bush, along with his Secretary of State James Baker, tended to view Germany as the key US partner in Europe.

American political figures were intrigued by the newly partitioned Ireland from the earliest years of the two new states. In 1925, shortly before the Irish Boundary Commission concluded its work on the redrawing of the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, Senator Joe Robinson, an Arkansas Democrat, visited the two new states as part of a European tour. The previous decade had seen significant unrest across Ireland, not least two major internal conflicts in the form of the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War. Robinson was one of the earliest international visitors to newly partitioned Ireland and his extensive articles, published on consecutive Sundays in the New York Times, drew attention to the political stability that began to develop there following the end of violence and alluded to the economic opportunities for industrialists:

He continued, at length, to extoll the virtues of post-conflict Ireland, though he was critical of the effort to restore the Irish language to Ireland: ‘Inevitably it will widen the breach between Northern Ireland and the Free State and tend to perpetuate the present separation. Gaelic cannot be made the language of the new Ireland, and the sooner this is recognized the better it will be for the cause of Irish progress’.

The second instalment of his report focused on Ulster. Robinson suggested that partition was ‘the outgrowth of conditions that render quite improbably, in the near future, the reunion of Ireland under a single Dominion Government. The rivalry between Northern Ireland and the Free State is notable, and indicates antagonism so distinct as to seem at present irreconcilable’.

On 25 August 2009, Senator Ted Kennedy passed away after fighting a brain tumour for over a year. Kennedy had made his final visit to Ireland in May 2007 to mark the restoration of Stormont, the culmination of forty-five years of engagement with Irish issues. His long-standing efforts against violence in Northern Ireland were recognised by the United Kingdom in March 2009 when Kennedy was awarded an honorary knighthood for his contribution to US–UK relations, as recommended by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown announced the honour during a speech to Congress, in which he stated that ‘Northern Ireland is today at peace, more Americans have health care, more 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’.

For many who served in the British government during the late twentieth century, Edward Kennedy personified what they perceived to be the unhelpful role of US figures in the Northern Ireland conflict. The United States, under President Nixon, had defined the conflict as a matter internal to the United Kingdom, a decision that would undoubtedly have been welcomed by those in London but one that met with resistance from figures in Congress. Kennedy was one of the earliest and most prominent figures to speak out against Britain's Northern Irish policies. Despite the considerable work he did later in his career to undermine American support networks for Irish republicans, work that most would consider to have been beneficial to British interests in Northern Ireland, he was unable to change the minds of many British politicians. Lord Tebbit, former Chairman of the Conservative Party, was highly critical of the decision to award Kennedy an honorary knighthood:

On 14 January 1989, as Ronald Reagan prepared to leave office, the Irish Times carried an article by the former Ambassador of the Republic of Ireland to the United States, Sean Donlon, entitled ‘Reagan's Irish Connection’. This article chronicled the relationship that outgoing President Ronald Reagan had with Ireland. This relationship stretched back to the 1940s when Reagan, in his capacity as a Hollywood representative, first visited Ireland. Later, as Governor of California in the 1970s, Reagan visited Ireland on behalf of President Nixon and travelled the south and west of the country, stopping at the Rock of Cashel. Donlon suggested that Reagan's ‘interest in Ireland went deeper than sentiment and story. The challenge for Ireland was to channel that interest to advantage, knowing that there was likely to be an especially close relationship with his ideological soul-mate at No 10 Downing Street’. Later, Donlon recalled his own role in Reagan's relationship with Ireland: ‘During the campaign I went to see Reagan to ask him what part of Ireland he came from, where his family came from. ‘No, no’, he said, ‘my people were not Irish, we’re English’. He believed it and he was absolutely right, he got his brother, who was a doctor, to give me copies of family papers and, right enough, it showed, as far back as they were able to go was to the UK’.

Bill Clinton left office as Northern Ireland began to emerge from three decades of conflict. The Good Friday Agreement, which Clinton had been heavily invested in achieving, had provided the framework for peace but its full implementation would require continued and significant investment from political actors on either side of the Atlantic.

George W. Bush, the son of the forty-first President and a former Governor of Texas, narrowly won the 2000 Presidential election. Both parties had referred to Northern Ireland in their election platforms, but it was significant that the Republican Party made more of ‘the historic reconciliation’ there. Vice-President Al Gore had sought to distance himself from Clinton during his campaign and had been marginal to Clinton's efforts in Northern Ireland in any case.

Bush's election restored a more historically familiar pattern to US– NI relations. The most significant move was the transferral of the special envoy position from the White House, where Clinton had established it, to the State Department. Bush appointed Richard Haass, a career civil servant, to the role in early 2001. The work of the envoy shifted from creating and maintaining cessations of violence and encouraging political agreement to the equally tricky task of accomplishing decommissioning. The leading scholar of the George W. Bush administration's relationship with Northern Ireland, Mary Alice Clancy, has noted that ‘the Bush administration has had a significant impact upon the politics of post-Agreement Northern Ireland, and … this is due to the autonomy that the White House grants to its special envoys to Northern Ireland’.

Arriving in Belfast, one is met with the iconic image of the Harland and Wolff cranes, known locally as David and Goliath, which tower over the eastern bank of the River Lagan. Edward Harland purchased the Belfast shipyard, which was later responsible for the construction of the Titanic, in 1859. Two years later, Harland took Gustav Wolff on as a partner and by the turn of the century Harland and Wolff employed some 9,000 people. As was the case in other cities throughout the United Kingdom, shipbuilding was very much the iconic industry in early twentieth-century Belfast, but it was not the largest employer; that title belonged to the linen industry.

Linen was synonymous with Belfast at the start of the twentieth century; mid-way through the nineteenth century, Belfast had accounted for half the linen output for all of Ireland and there were twenty-eight linen mills in the city. Just over a third of these were located on the Falls Road, which runs south-west from the city centre towards Andersonstown along the foot of the Black Mountain. Sectarian divisions in Belfast were pronounced in its two main industries: while the shipyards were the preserve of the Protestant working classes, the linen mills provided a steady source of employment to Catholics, many of whom ended up living in houses built and owned by mill owners.

President Nixon appointed Henry Kissinger as his National Security Advisor in January 1969. Part of his remit in this role was to keep the President informed on events in Northern Ireland. Working alongside Kissinger were a number of senior officials who followed the developing conflict and offered insight as to how it might impact the United States and its relations with the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Kissinger was later appointed as Secretary of State by Nixon in 1973.

The eight years between the election of Richard Nixon and that of Jimmy Carter bore witness to the worst years of the Northern Ireland conflict. By the time of Carter's election on 2 November 1976, 1,831 people had been killed in Northern Ireland. Yet eight years previously only small signs of the trouble that lay ahead for Northern Ireland were evident. Three Ulster Volunteer Force murders in mid-1966 had been the only significant violence until the emergence of, and particularly the violent resistance that met, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association two years later. The situation escalated rapidly, however, to the extent that by the mid-point of Nixon's first term in office Northern Ireland sat on the brink of a bloody sectarian civil war.

Throughout Nixon's time in office, there were repeated attempts on the part of political figures both internationally, from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, and domestically, in the form of members of Congress, to engage his administration in the conflict. Nixon considered that any official intervention would be a violation of UK sovereignty and was determined that this would not happen, and the US position was consistently that a solution could only come through the engagement of all domestic parties. This did not stop figures such as Senator Edward Kennedy and Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill, Jr. from taking a keen interest in both the conflict and the US response to it. O’Neill began the Nixon Administration as a Representative and served as House Majority Whip and House Majority Leader before becoming the Speaker of the House in January 1977. Kennedy and O’Neill would lead Congressional efforts to engage the United States in the Northern Ireland conflict that endured far longer than either Nixon or Ford.

This is a unique piece of research. John Kendall is the first person to have made a systematic study of custody visiting. He started by working as a volunteer visitor without any plan to write about it. But he found the experience frustrating and wondered if he was actually doing any good. So he decided to find out, by analysing the scheme in the course of a PhD thesis. He looks at the origins of the custody visiting system and how it works in reality, interpreting his findings through the lens of theories of power, policing and regulation. This fascinating book is the result. His findings are insightful and sometimes shocking. But he shows that they should not be surprising if we see them in the context of modern scholarship into police practices and the insufficient regulation of the police. John remains an optimist, however, and believes that the visiting scheme can be reformed so that it can, at least in part, achieve its original aim of holding the police to account. If this could be done, we would see fewer suspects mistreated – because some still are – and perhaps fewer deaths in custody. But we need policy makers and politicians to listen, and the police to acknowledge that they still exercise almost total control over not just suspects, but everyone else, including lawyers and visitors, who enter those ‘total institutions’ that we call police stations. It's a tall order, but it's not impossible. Read this book, and join John in calling for change.