During the Troubles, there was a recurring southern Irish stereotype about supporters of Irish Northern Aid, or Noraid as it was better known. The long-distance American Provo was supposedly someone of distant Irish ancestry, raised on tales of famine and exile, steeped in embarrassing, shamrock-soaked sentimentality and spectacularly ill-informed. They had probably never set foot in Ireland but were prepared not only to cheer on, but fund the IRA’s armed struggle.
The reality was always more complex. Most of Noraid’s key activists were Irish, with a significant number from Northern Ireland. Some, at least, had more personal experience of the conflict than many of their critics in the Republic. One such person was Vincent Conlon from Armagh, a veteran of the IRA’s 1950s Border campaign.
Ali Watkins’s book looks closely at Conlon and Noraid in Philadelphia during the early 1970s. That city was an important destination for northern emigrants; and Cork man Daniel Cahalane, who became active alongside Conlon, was probably more likely to meet northern nationalists there than in his native county.
This book, along with a forthcoming RTÉ documentary on Noraid by Kevin Brannigan, will hopefully lead to a more nuanced understanding of how Irish Americans engaged with the conflict. Among the strengths of Watkins’s account is how grassroots Noraid activity is reconstructed. Most fundraising came through endless rounds of dinner dances, socials and sports days. Noraid’s membership was largely blue-collar and trade unions with Irish memberships forming a key part of their base.
As in Ireland, support peaked during the early years of the conflict, particularly after internment and Bloody Sunday. Again, as in Ireland, IRA atrocities dampened enthusiasm and made raising funds more difficult.
Although the book’s focus is on Philadelphia, attention is also given to activists elsewhere, such as New York’s Martin Lyons. Originally from Galway, Lyons was a key figure in what he described as the “inner circle” of Noraid. While the wider organisation concerned itself with aiding the families of republican prisoners (its official purpose), from the beginning this “inner circle” was primarily engaged in arming the Provisional IRA.
There is no doubt how important these networks were to the early Provos, but they soon drew the attention of American law enforcement. By the mid-1970s Conlon and four of his comrades would face gunrunning charges, the background to which case forms a large part of the book.
In general, Watkins tells the American side of this story well, if at times in an unnecessarily over-written style. But the narrative often grates, especially when describing Ireland and Irish republican politics more generally. There are also too many avoidable errors or misinterpretations. Vincent Conlon’s election to Monaghan County Council in the mid-1970s had nothing to do with a strategy devised by Gerry Adams; Sinn Féin had routinely contested local elections for decades.
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The IRA were forbidden to take action against the Garda by a general order, not through a “gentleman’s agreement”. Bernadette Devlin would have been at pains to point out she was anything but a “staunch Irish nationalist” in 1969. “Provisional adjacent” is not an adequate description of the politics of the Irish Republican Socialist Party. The UDR was a regiment of the British army, not a paramilitary group. The paper sold by the Provisionals in Belfast was Republican News, not An Phoblacht.
Though the discussion of how the Official/Provisional split played out in the United States is welcome, the politics around it are continually muddled. The Officials are described as “conservatives” but Noraid in its early years made much of the fact that the Provos were a “wedge against communism”.
There is more confusion when the events in Belfast itself are described. Contrary to Watkins’s account, IRA men were active there during August 1969, and most of those engaged in armed action stayed with the Officials when the split occurred. The description of the IRA convention that year is wrong on every level; there was nobody from Belfast there, let alone Gerry Adams.
The role of the Official IRA during the Falls curfew is elided, yet every account of the fighting notes their centrality to it. That the Officials were never “absorbed” into the Provisionals is evident from the fact that 50 years ago both organisations engaged in what The Irish Times described as the “worst fighting between republicans since the Civil War”. Ironically both sides used weaponry supplied by their respective American supporters, including the Armalite rifle, a weapon which features heavily in this story.
At its best, this book shines a light on an under-explored aspect of the conflict, but too often it reads like the author wanted it to be far more than just a story about Irish America and gun running.
- Dr Brian Hanley is assistant professor in the History of Northern Ireland at Trinity College Dublin
