Exiled Children

Noraid came into existence with the eruption of conflict in the North of Ireland from 1969 onward, after nearly half a century when the IRA was a marginal force that attracted little attention from the outside world. As the conflict intensified, Irish Americans witnessed the violence via nightly TV news segments. Some of them decided that they wanted to help the Irish republican movement from the other side of the Atlantic.

Founded in 1969, Noraid became the most important US fundraising operation for Irish republicans during the Troubles. Its mission statement described it as “an American-based membership organization that supports, through peaceful means, the establishment of a socialist and democratic 32-county Ireland.”

As historian Brian Hanley notes, the 1970s was a period that saw a general rise in ethnic awareness in the United States, and Noraid positioned itself as the defender of an Irish identity under siege. The group grew to include branches in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Hartford. However, as John McDonagh remarks in the documentary, New York City had “always been the cockpit for Irish Republicanism. . . . [During the Easter Rising], it was a great honor when they read the [1916] proclamation at the [General Post Office] and it said ‘her exiled children in America.’ You’re looking at them.”

Noraid volunteers canvassed NYC bars with inky copies of the Irish People newspaper, asking for donations, or for patrons to buy tickets to dances or banquets. “In later years,” Hanley writes, “Noraid claimed its role was primarily as a support group for prisoners’ families; but in the heady atmosphere of 1970–71 it more or less openly canvassed for funds for arms.”

Pub socials, boat rides, and card drives became staples of Noraid’s fundraising, as well as a wide variety of merchandise, including T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers with the formula “26 + 6 = 1,” meaning that all thirty-two counties of Ireland should be united. While opponents of the IRA in Ireland itself often spoke as if Noraid was composed of misguided Americans, its core membership was in fact dominated by Irish-born republicans, at least in its early years.

Throughout the 1970s, the United States was the most important source of weapons for the IRA, including the ArmaLite rifle that became a symbol of the entire campaign. The most prolific gunrunner by far was George Harrison, who had been active in the IRA during the 1930s before emigrating to the United States.

Harrison was eventually put on trial in 1980, but he and his codefendants were acquitted after their attorney persuaded the jury that the CIA knew all about their operation. With Watergate and other scandals still fresh in people’s memories, it wasn’t hard to sow doubts in the minds of the jury about what the agency might have been up to.

While yearly Noraid testimonial dinners honored politicians and journalists for covering the conflict in Northern Ireland, Noraid could also be critical of Irish Americans, accusing them of apathy. As Hanley puts it:

Noraid felt that the majority of Irish Americans themselves refused to assert their heritage and instead sought bland assimilation into American life. The language Noraid used to express these views was that of an earlier era in Irish American politics, drawing on the history of nativist hostility to the Irish and on class division among Irish Americans.

The republican hunger strikes of 1980–81 changed the dynamic, attracting much greater attention to what was happening in Ireland. In 1976, the British government abolished “special category” (political) status for those convicted of paramilitary offences, most of whom belonged to the IRA or a smaller republican group, the Irish National Liberation Army. From now on, they would be treated as criminals instead of de facto prisoners of war.

IRA prisoners refused to wear prison uniform, clothing themselves in blankets and covering the walls of their cells with feces as a “dirty protest.” Frustrated with the refusal of the prison authorities to compromise, they embarked on a hunger strike in 1980. When that ended inconclusively, a second hunger strike began the following year, and ten men starved to death in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, including Bobby Sands, who had recently been elected as a Westminster MP in a by-election.

Sands became a world-famous figure who is widely remembered to this day. In the immediate aftermath of his death, there were protests all over the world, including in New York, where a march proceeded from the British consulate to the United Nations building and an effigy of Margaret Thatcher was set on fire.

Noraid women carried white crosses bearing the names of the hunger strikers, and British representatives, including members of the royal family like Prince Charles, were publicly berated and picketed. Charles complained to NYC mayor Ed Koch about the hostile reception — Koch responded by telling him that Britain should get out of Ireland.

Martin Galvin and the Noraid Tours

In the wake of the hunger strikes, Noraid expanded, with charismatic Irish American activist Martin Galvin at the helm. Galvin, who is interviewed extensively in the RTÉ documentary, helped raise millions of dollars.

He rejected constant accusations that the money went to pay for guns, while declaring that his group supported the IRA campaign politically. As he declared in a 1984 article for the New York Times, “Not one penny has ever gone to armaments, although Irish Northern Aid does morally support the Irish Republican Army’s struggle against British Army terrorism.”

As Galvin recalls, Thatcher pressured Ronald Reagan to crack down on IRA activity in the United States, and the FBI kept careful watch over Noraid. “There were people who wanted us to do something else,” Gavin told the filmmakers. “They wanted to send weapons back, but I’m telling you, that was separate and distinct from Irish Northern Aid, and if it wasn’t, the American government would have put us out of business.”

Avowed IRA gunrunners who are interviewed in the documentary confirm that they were told not to go near Noraid. There were other, safer ways of transferring money and weapons for the IRA, and if the US authorities focused on Noraid, that distracted from the real networks. In the words of IRA member Gabriel Megahey, who was eventually arrested by the FBI while trying to purchase surface-to-air missiles, “The more heat on Noraid, the better for me.”

In 1983, Noraid organized its first tours bringing Americans to Northern Ireland, which made Galvin an even bigger enemy of Downing Street. Galvin and Gerry Adams brought a group around Belfast; they were also taken to the sites of atrocities carried out by Oliver Cromwell’s army in the seventeenth century and by the Black and Tans in the twentieth. The goal of the tour was to lift Irish Americans out of their romantic vision of Ireland and give them a taste of reality. As one visitor, Kathleen Savage, put it, “I wanted to see how people lived under those conditions.”

The British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary hassled the tour buses, with helicopters tracking them from above. Critics of the Noraid tours in the South of Ireland accused Americans of meddling in Irish politics, especially at a moment when race relations in the United States were contentious, violent, and unjust. Still, Irish American visitors, who often enjoyed a level of material comfort unknown to many Belfast Catholics, witnessed the social conditions firsthand and wanted to do something about them.

In 1984, Galvin defied a British government ban on his entry into the North of Ireland, crossing the border in secret to speak at a republican rally in West Belfast. When he took the microphone to deliver a speech, police officers charged into the crowd and started firing rubber bullets. Dozens of people were injured, and one of the rubber bullets killed a marcher named Sean Downes. Whisked away from the scene, Galvin later said that he regretted the death of Downes, but he would defy British orders again.

Irish American Anti-Imperialism

The Northern Irish conflict turns a lot of standard American political ideas about “terrorism” on their heads. The RTÉ documentary captures some of the strange reversals, with figures like Donald Trump attending Sinn Féin banquets and shaking hands with Gerry Adams as early as 1995, at a time when the IRA was on a cease-fire but long before it decommissioned its weapons.

George Harrison, the primary gunrunner for the IRA, was a US army veteran from World War II. He was also an avowed socialist. After his acquittal in 1981, he became involved in supporting various left-wing causes, including the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and the fight of the African National Congress against apartheid in South Africa.

There was always a divide between those who wanted to focus on Ireland alone and those who wanted to link the Irish struggle with what was happening in countries like Vietnam, South Africa, and Palestine — not to mention the fight against racism in the United States itself. Left-wing Irish activists like Bernadette Devlin McAliskey drew parallels between the Irish and American civil rights movements and forged links with African American radicals, much to the discomfort of conservative elements in the Irish American community.

Brian Hanley notes a perception that Noraid wanted to downplay the role of socialist ideas in the Irish republican movement for fear of alienating potential supporters. On occasion, the Irish People declined to reproduce statements from Gerry Adams and other republican leaders that expressed support for left-wing guerrillas in Central America. However, as Hanley points out, it’s too simplistic to present Noraid as a right-wing group: Noraid supported the candidacy of Jesse Jackson in the 1984 and 1988 Democratic primaries and also backed the election campaigns of David Dinkins for New York mayor.

In Dogtown, St Louis, four-leaf clovers are painted on the sidewalks year-round, with the Dogtown St Patrick’s Parade one of the biggest civic celebrations in the city. At an Irish shop on the other side of town, I once purchased a black T-shirt for a friend’s birthday. The shirt had two ArmaLite rifles crossed over the Irish flag. I was sixteen and had no idea what the IRA was, but I happily awarded it to another Irish American buddy, who happened to be fond of guns.

Discovering the IRA and learning about James Connolly, the socialist leader of Irish independence, influenced my political path. If you are Irish — even a little — you’ve been affected by British imperialism, probably through a famine that happened a very long time ago. That history has everything to do with imperial capitalism and a eugenics-fueled class war that starved your ancestors and oppressed them in much the same way that the Palestinian people in Gaza are currently being starved, imprisoned, bombed, and driven from their homeland. That same struggle is an echo of events in Korea, Vietnam, South Africa, Nicaragua, Watts, and so on.

A sense of Irish American identity is strongly felt in the United States because at its center, surrounded by a cheap schlock and leprechauns, there’s a sense of historical importance — something we’re supposed to remember. There’s tremendous energy to be unlocked in locating oneself in a liberatory tradition. From Connolly to Mother Jones, there’s a distinctly Irish struggle against capitalism that can open the door to many Irish Americans, inviting them to see their history as something that is in concert with anti-colonial movements around the world. Noraid: Irish America and the IRA would be a good place for them to start.