THE WHITE HOUSE wanted to avoid a photo of Bill Clinton shaking Gerry Adams’ hand at a Belfast reception held as part of the US president’s historic visit in 1995.

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.

The Clintons visited Northern Ireland in 1995 before travelling to Dublin.

A reception was organised at Whitla Hall at Queens University in Belfast for 30 November.

A letter from the Irish joint secretary of the Anglo-Irish Secretariat, David Donoghue, sent to Seán Ó hUiginn at the Anglo-Irish Division, said that “the Americans” originally wanted to hold the reception and “confine” it to 120 people.

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 28 November 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.”

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.

“The general assumption, however, is that the president will take relevant individuals aside for separate private conversations on the margins of the reception.”

The two men 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.

On the morning of 30 November, 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 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”.

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