A photo of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Gerry Adams during a historic trip to Ireland in 1995 would never have happened if the White House had got its way, documents have revealed. 

The photo of President Clinton warmly receiving Adams before a Belfast reception made headlines around the world but almost never existed due to US officials wanting to carefully manage his interactions with political figures.

The annual release of documents from the National Archives in Dublin showed the extensive engagements between Irish and US officials to co-ordinate the Clintons’ visit to the island of Ireland.

During the two-day trip to northern Ireland a reception was organised at Whitla Hall at Queens University in Belfast for November 30. 

Greeting Adams outside in front of crowds of wellwishers and the media, Clinton embraced the then-Sinn Fein leader, creating the first photograph of the pair shaking hands in what the President called a ‘big deal’.

Yet the archived documents show that just two days before the trip, UK government official Peter Bell told an Irish counterpart that ‘the Americans would prefer to avoid a handshake photograph between the president and Adams’. 

Also included in the release are papers disclosing discussions on whether the Clintons should stay in Northern Ireland as part of the visit.

A report from a genealogy expert researching Mr Clinton’s ancestry has also been published – it concludes that the suggestion his ancestors were from Co Fermanagh was based ‘on fantasy’ – although they may have come from a separate part of Ulster.

President Bill Clinton was photographed shaking hands with then-Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams for the first time in Belfast on November 30, 1995

Clinton is pictured greeting crowds in Belfast on November 29 on the same trip, which saw him visit both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland

The Clintons made the trip to Northern Ireland in 1995 before travelling to Dublin.

Clinton and Adams shook hands for the first time in March of that year at the White House, as part of events held to mark St Patrick’s Day – but after photographers had left the room.

Clinton was reportedly put under pressure at the time from then-British prime minister John Major not to give Adams a warm embrace at the luncheon, according to the New York Times.

Then, on the morning of November 30, before the reception in Belfast that evening, Clinton met Adams on the Falls Road in Belfast.

As he left his car he paused to shake Mr Adams’s hand – a moment captured by an official White House photographer.

Clinton would later say of the handshake that it was a ‘big deal’ and it felt at the time as though ‘the pavement was about to crack open’.

The handshake was a huge moment following decades of violence in Northern Ireland and was a significant step towards the final peace plan, which led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. 

A letter from the Irish joint secretary of the Anglo-Irish Secretariat, David Donoghue, sent to Sean O hUiginn at the Anglo-Irish Division, said that ‘the Americans’ originally wanted to hold the Belfast reception and ‘confine’ it to 120 people.

Bill Clinton is greeted with large crowds waving American flags during a speech in Dublin on December 1, 1995

Adams and Clinton would go on to be photographed meeting warmly on many occasions, including on a separate trip made by the President to Dublin in 2000 (pictured)

He said the British side ‘insisted’ that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Patrick Mayhew, should host it, which was agreed, and the guest list was expanded to 300 people.

‘The ostensible intention is to enable the president to meet a wider range of people in Northern Ireland’ he wrote on November 28 1995.

‘The real purpose, of course, is to de-emphasise the political nature of the occasion and to create a broader ‘community’ event which, the British calculate, will make it easier for unionists to attend alongside Sinn Fein.’

Mr Donoghue said that the representatives would form ‘pods’ at the reception – ‘a UUP pod, an Alliance pod etc’ – determined on a ‘pro rata basis in light of respective electoral strengths’.

‘In other words, each will form a distinct cluster of people to whom the president will be introduced in turn (on the lines of Buckingham Palace receptions).’

He also said that Peter Bell, from the Northern Ireland Office, had indicated ‘the Americans would prefer to avoid a handshake photograph between the president and Adams’.

He also said that while one-on-one meetings had been planned with John Hume in Derry and David Trimble in a car journey after the reception at Queens, there was a ‘general US reluctance’ to meet one-on-one with Adams, Ian Paisley, or John Alderdice.

Plans for the Clintons visit to Dublin, from December 1-2 1995, show that a US embassy official estimated that there was a ’50/50′ chance the visit would go ahead.

An Irish genealogy expert also said claims that Clinton had Cassidy ancestors, who were from Co Fermanagh, were ‘based largely on fantasy’ – but the White House still wanted Cassidy aspects added to the visit.

It had been claimed that Clinton had Irish ancestry through his mother, Virginia Cassidy.

Genealogist Sean Murphy, from Bray, Co Wicklow, undertook the task of tracing Bill Clinton’s Irish ancestry after ‘media dissemination of claims concerning the president’s Irish ancestry which proved to be baseless, yet were left uncontradicted by any authoritative source’.

He told the taoiseach’s office that the earliest trace of the president’s maternal ancestors of this line is ‘probably’ Zachariah Cassidy, born in about 1750-60 in South Carolina, and his son Levi.

‘The Cassidy “clan” claim that the earliest ancestor was a Luke or Lucas Cassidy of Roslea, Co Fermanagh, appears to be based largely on fantasy,’ he wrote on October 16.

‘The biblical forenames Zachariah and Levi suggest a Protestant, and probably Presbyterian or Dissenter, as opposed to Catholic origin, and it is reasonable to speculate that the Cassidys would have been most likely to have emigrated to America from an Ulster county.’

In notes of a meeting with the US embassy held three days later, Irish officials said that a planned stop off in Lismore, Co Fermanagh, was being dropped, but the White House was ‘still interested in using the Cassidy connection in a low-key way’.

They said this could mean ‘”casually” passing a Cassidy premises’.

Clinton would go on to visit Cassidy’s Bar in Dublin for an hour during the 1995 trip.