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BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) -- Hillary Rodham Clinton cites her role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland as one of the top foreign policy credentials of her presidential bid.

Her critics point to an empty, wind-swept Belfast park -- which Clinton a decade ago proclaimed would become Northern Ireland's first Catholic-Protestant playground -- as evidence that her contribution as peacemaker was more symbolic than substantive.

''She was in charge of christening this wee corner (of the park) as some kind of peace playground. It never made any sense then, and there's nothing there today,'' said Brian Feeney, a Belfast political analyst, author and teacher. ''Everything she did was for the optics.''

Critics say the playground-that-never-was illustrates the wider lack of accomplishment from Clinton's half-dozen visits to Northern Ireland -- that they emphasized speechmaking, chiefly to women's groups, leaving no lasting mark.

Clinton twice addressed audiences of schoolchildren at Belfast's Musgrave Park, in September 1998 and May 1999. She declared that Protestant and Catholic youths must learn to play together but needed a safe place to do it -- and helped plant a tree on the spot where a special cross-community playground would be created. Belfast did have other parks.

Nearly a decade later, Musgrave Park remains as it was: a well-groomed, rather lonely place sandwiched between a hospital and a highway, where adults jog and walk their dogs amid birdsong and spring flowers. The Belfast group touting the ''Play for Peace Fund'' silently shelved the idea within months although Clinton often referred to the project as an inspiration to a divided world.

Clinton and her campaign aides say her championship of a greater role in the peace process for women on both sides in Northern Ireland's conservative, male-dominated politics made a substantial contribution to the result.

''Women ... were persistent in the process ... (Clinton) came back to Ireland time and time again to be with them, to hear them out, to hear about the progress they were making,'' said Melanne Verveer, a Clinton aide who now works on the campaign.

That's a view supported by the recollections of some U.S. officials involved in the peace process at the time.

Former Democratic Sen. George Mitchell, who brokered the peace accord, recalled Clinton as having ''a sustained interest over a long period of time'' in Northern Ireland's troubles and that she ''became very knowledgeable about the issues and the participants.''

''By virtue of her position, her stature, I think she made a real contribution to encouraging and supporting that phase of the process and the entire process itself,'' said Mitchell, who has remained neutral in the drawn-out struggle between Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination.

Clinton has described herself as a catalyst for bringing Catholics and Protestants together, even though these activists regularly were meeting each other at many forums by the mid-1990s.

In 1997 she delivered a speech to the University of Ulster that was supposed to inaugurate an annual lecture series honoring a Belfast peace activist, the late Joyce McCartan, whom Clinton briefly met in 1995 during her husband's first of three whirlwind tours of Northern Ireland. The university hosted one more such speech, in 2000, none since.

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