The university says it is no longer appropriate to be associated with Mitchell
Mitchell was a key figure in the Northern Ireland peace deal
The American-Irish Alliance withdrew his name from the scholarship program
By Amanda Cooper and Muvija M
BELFAST, – Queen’s University Belfast cut ties with former US senator George Mitchell on Monday over his links to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, saying it was no longer appropriate to remain associated with a key figure in the Northern Ireland peace deal.
The university said its decision followed new information about Mitchell released last Friday by the US Department of Justice in the latest of millions of files linked to the late convicted sex offender Epstein.
The university plans to remove Mitchell’s name from the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and remove a bust commemorating him from its campus, it said in a statement.
“While no findings of wrongdoing have been made by Senator Mitchell, the university has concluded that in light of this material and in light of the experiences of victims and survivors, it is no longer appropriate for its institutional spaces and entities to continue to bear his name,” the university said.
Reuters could not immediately reach Mitchell for comment, and his namesake, the Maine-based Mitchell Institute, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
References to “George Mitchell” in the Justice Department’s Epstein Library included a 2013 email titled “Appt w/Senator George Mitchell” and another from 2010 with the message “George Mitchell returned your call.”
The emails were sent after Epstein was jailed in 2008 for soliciting paid sex from a minor. He died by suicide in 2019 in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
BBC News quoted a spokesman for Mitchell, 92, as saying he had never met, spoken to or had any contact with Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre or any minor woman. A British television station said the statement was issued ahead of the university’s move.
Separately, the nonprofit American-Irish Alliance said its board of trustees unanimously agreed that its George J. Mitchell Scholarship Program — which sends American students to Ireland and Northern Ireland for a year of graduate study — should no longer bear his name, also citing the newly released Epstein files.
In 1998, Mitchell chaired talks between Irish nationalists seeking a united Ireland and pro-British unionists that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement, which largely ended 30 years of sectarian conflict in which 3,600 people died.
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