Ireland, if you haven’t noticed, has not exactly been a big issue on this year’s remarkable presidential campaign. And that’s a good thing. It means that Ireland is at peace, it is prosperous and it isn’t bothering anybody.

Just as it ought to be.

Hard it is to believe, we are 16 years removed from former president Bill Clinton’s promise to send an envoy to the troubled North, and 20 years removed from a presidential candidates’ forum in New York that focused on violence in the North and the flow of young, jobless Irish into the United States.

Back then, candidates were expected to have positions on Irish and Irish-American issues, at least when they were campaigning in historically Irish states.

Now, in the third election of the 21st century, candidates feel no obligation to talk about American-Irish affairs, except to praise the peace process.

Immigration obviously could be construed as an Irish issue, one that affects thousands of Irish who are in the States without papers. But with John McCain as the Republican nominee presumptive, illegal immigration – which few Americans associate with the Irish anyway – doesn’t figure to be a flashpoint in the fall.

McCain is a strong supporter of immigration reform, as are the two Democratic candidates.

What’s an Irish-American voter to do? Enjoy it. Many of the issues that were so important two decades ago – the conflict in the North, the Republic’s ailing economy – have been resolved, happily. That doesn’t happen very often.

To be sure, the question of immigration remains unresolved, and therefore so does the plight of undocumented Irish, but unless the hard right pushes McCain to renounce his record in immigration reform, the issue simply won’t command much attention in the national campaign.

Perhaps, then, this is the moment to reflect on the issues of campaigns past and to ascertain, if possible, just how important they really were for the bulk of Irish-American voters. I’ve always maintained – based on extreme anecdotal evidence – that the so-called Irish-American vote was far less powerful and cohesive than politicians and the press seemed to believe.

Two decades ago, when Irish-Americans were quizzing the likes of Michael Dukakis, Jerry Brown and Al Gore about the MacBride Principles and the fate of Joe Doherty, I wrote that any discussions of issues close to Irish-American hearts ought to include tuition tax credits, abortion, capital punishment, and the slow death of the great American job. Those issues, I argued then, and argue again today, were more important to many if not most Irish-American voters than even the plight of the North.

Of course, issues like abortion and the disappearance of decent working-class jobs concerned (and continue to concern) all Americans, not just Irish-Americans. So quizzing past candidates about such issues at an Irish-American forum would have seemed redundant, while asking for their views on issues like MacBride and the plight of Catholics in the North forced them to think about specifically Irish issues.

A fair point! Still, I always thought that efforts to raise the profile of Irish issues on national campaigns should have included a greater diversity of issues, like vouchers for private school parents or any number of life-and-death concerns.

Without those broader issues, Irish-American activists seemed, I thought, earnest but just a little too narrow. No different from any other ethnic or racial voting bloc, I suppose, but narrow all the same.

What’s more, these well-meaning activists played into British stereotypes of the Irish-American voter as somebody who was thinking about the Falls Road rather than Main Street when he or she voted for a presidential candidate.

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s (not to mention the 1870s and ‘80s), the British press was convinced that the Irish vote always went to the candidate who tugged hardest on the lion’s tale. If that truly were the case, why did so many Irish-Americans vote for Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher’s buddy and ally? Indeed, if that were the case, why in the world was a guy named Ronald Reagan cozying up to Thatcher at all?

Assumptions about group identities and voting patterns can be a dangerous business, as Hillary Clinton discovered a few weeks ago when her husband suggested that Hispanics would not vote for an African-American candidate. Some Hispanics were furious, and rightly so.

Bill Clinton unwittingly portrayed Hispanics as a monolith that cast its votes, not on the issues but on ethnic rivalry or grievance. In other words, Clinton made precisely the kind of assumption so many people made about Irish-American voters 20 years ago, 80 years age, 150 years ago.

Is there an “Irish” vote in the United States anymore? It would take a brave pundit indeed to insist that there is, and a braver one still who would attempt to identify the issues that motivate a hypothetical “Irish voter” especially now, with the North at peace and the Republic prosperous and confident. Is there an issue that could unite, say, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan?

Perhaps now, with the so-called Irish issues no longer as pressing as they once were, we can retire the very notion of an “Irish vote” – if, indeed, there ever was one.

Let’s not forget that when John F. Kennedy became the first (and still only) Irish-Catholic to become president in 1961, the head of the Communist Party in the United States was an Irish-American named Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. It should have been clear even that anybody who thought of Irish America as a monolith was delusional at best, ignorant at worst.

Diversity is more than a matter a skin color, after all. It’s about points of view. Irish-America, as Walt Whitman would have said, contains multitudes. That’s a good thing.