Clinton still box office material

IT says a lot about Bill Clinton that, four years after leaving office, he still commands the type of adulation that his successor can only dream of.

William Jefferson Clinton is still box office. He may be more gaunt since his bypass operation. But with the instincts of the born politician, with his shock of grey hair, with his bright emerald tie, he still cuts an extraordinary dash.

More than 1,000 people attended City West last night to hear former President Clinton speak at the 500 RehabCare gala banquet which Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, FG leader Enda Kenny and former SDLP leader John Hume attended that raised €500,000 towards RehabCare's suicide prevention programme for young people.

The occasion was solemn. Consciously so because of the difficult and personal theme on which Mr Clinton spoke.

By happenstance, also, because news had filtered through of the awful bus tragedy in Co Meath.

It was a measure of Mr Clinton's power as a communicator that he was able to leaven the serious subject with subtle humour, that he drew into the well of his own experience to talk about the phenomenon.

The former president spoke of two close friends of his who had committed suicide, one a fellow Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the late 1960s, who killed himself shortly after returning to the US; another a lifelong friend and political associate who committed suicide shortly after Mr Clinton became president.

"For years afterward I thought was there something that I could have and should have done to stop it," he said of his young roommate at Oxford.

He recalled how when he was Governor of Arkansas, there had been a whole rash of child suicides in his state.

Widening his theme, Mr Clinton said that three major developments had changed the world in the past 10 years: the end of the Cold War; the growth of the internet; and the emergence of NGOs such as Rehab as world players.

Widening his theme, Mr Clinton said that three major developments had changed the world in the past 10 years: the end of the Cold War; the growth of the internet; and the emergence of NGOs such as Rehab as world players.

Turning briefly to the North, he said that he hoped that Ian Paisley was wrong and that the Good Friday Agreement was not dead.

"Nobody has come up with a better alternative," he said.