Molotov cocktails being thrown in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. GETTY
Robert Collins’ book acts as a starting point for research into Irish Northern Aid and its role in fundraising and publicizing the republican struggle in the United States.
I became interested in researching Irish America and Northern Ireland through a class at the University of Limerick with Dr. Ruan O’Donnell about The Troubles.
Focusing originally on the tragic events of Bloody Sunday in Derry on January 30, 1972, I began researching Irish America and came across the name Irish Northern Aid (INA) as a support group for the families of republican prisoners.
In its aftermath, INA held protest marches and fundraising events that stretched for blocks in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and as far west as San Francisco. As I delved further into the topic, it became clear to me that this was a significant organization that supported the Republican movement in Ireland, both financially and through a sustained publicity campaign.
However, no serious academic examination had ever been done on the organization, outside of some mention in books and often derisory accounts of its activities.
On Tuesday, October 18, my book, Noraid and the Northern Irish Troubles, 1970-1994, was launched in Belfast at the James Connolly Visitor Center on the Falls Road. The Q&A was chaired by political commentator Andrée Murphy and featured long-term INA activist and current Ancient Order of Hibernians Freedom for All Ireland National Chairperson Martin Galvin via Zoom. It also featured important contributions from Fra McCann, Tom Hartley and Ciaran Cunningham about how much the support from America meant to nationalist families in the six counties.
Hearing first-hand accounts of the impact of these encounters was a humbling experience and reminded me that sometimes just researching a topic is not enough to get a full grasp of the gravity or importance of these relationships. You must hear it from the people involved.
All those in attendance including, most of all, myself, were treated to some excellent commentary and anecdotes on the trans-Atlantic nature of the conflict and the awareness of the Irish American community to events in Northern Ireland.
A week later on October 25, the Teacher’s Club in Dublin was the location for a second book launch, with O’Donnell, senior lecturer in history at the Department of Limerick as the special guest.
Looking for Irish book recommendations or to meet with others who share your love for Irish literature? Join IrishCentral’s Book Club on Facebook and enjoy our book-loving community.
In launching the book, he spoke of the special relationship between America and Ireland, dating as far back as the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion. Situating Irish Northern Aid within this tradition was a central theme of the book, as was outlining the role of Irish America in legitimizing the struggle for full national sovereignty on the island of Ireland.
The launch also contained valuable contributions from the audience, including former Lord Mayor of Dublin Mícheál Mac Donncha and lifelong Irish republican Jim Monaghan. Also in attendance at the launch was Sinn Fein representative for North America Ciaran Quinn, who recently returned from a 10-day trip to Canada alongside John Finucane MP.
My book acts as a starting point for research into INA and its role in fundraising and publicizing the republican struggle in the United States. As such, there are inevitably people both in Ireland and America who played a greater role than portrayed.
Invariably, there are also likely people to whom this research has given too much credit. Nonetheless, the goal was to provide a serious academic examination of the role that sections of the Irish American community played in both sustaining and ultimately ending the armed conflict of the Provisional IRA.
But after hearing the stories from interviewees and those in attendance in Belfast and Dublin, this author was humbled and is even more determined to further research Irish America and the people who shaped its direction for a quarter of a century.
* The book, “Noraid and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1970-1994” is now available to order online.
Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill speaking at her party’s ard fheis. Picture by Damien Storan/PA Wire
John Manley
07 November, 2022 02:00
DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson. Picture by Liam McBurney/PA Wire
THE DUP is using the protocol as an excuse for not sharing power with nationalists, Sinn Féin deputy leader Michelle O’Neill has said.
The first minister designate accused her party’s former partner in government of refusing to accept the outcome of May’s Stormont election, which saw Sinn Féin emerge with the largest number of seats.
In an address to her party’s ard fheis, the Mid Ulster MLA said Sinn Féin “stood ready to form a power-sharing government” but that the institutions lay dormant due to the DUP’s boycott.
She said it was wrong that progress on the issues affecting people’s daily lives were “being put on hold”.
“At any time, this would be unacceptable but in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis it is utterly disgraceful,” Ms O’Neill said.
The Sinn Féin vice-president said the DUP was using the protocol as “cover not to enter power-sharing”.
“And the real reason is because as an Irish nationalist, I will be at the helm as first minister – and everybody knows it,” she said.
Ms O’Neill accused Sir Jeffrey Donaldson of “scaremongering” over the impact of the post-Brexit trade arrangements on healthcare provision, a reference to the DUP leader’s recent claims about the protocol leading to delays in life-saving heart surgery, which were subsequently refuted by two separate health trusts.
She said it was an “irrefutable fact” that the protocol was working and that Sir Jeffrey had been “rebuffed on numerous occasions in the past week about his misleading claims”, including “scaremongering about vital medical care”.
“Jeffrey doesn’t just need a fact-check – he needs a reality check,” she said.
The Sinn Féin deputy leader welcomed recent engagement between British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen.
“What we all want to see is a deal done to make the protocol work better but for the avoidance of doubt, neither the Assembly or the Executive has any mandate or role in these negotiations,” she said.
“So holding back powersharing in the meantime is simply to punish the public – this is reckless and it needlessly polarises our society and politics.”
She called for London and Brussels to “propel” the talks to resolve the outstanding issues around the protocol.
Can there be a united Ireland without a united Northern Ireland?
David Bell
Oct 29
Despite the current turmoil at Westminster or even the more mundane matter of the not unrelated cost-of-living crisis, the constitutional question is never far from being the main concern of many in Northern Ireland. But for at least the immediate future, would it not be better to reflect more on social cohesion than on geographic unity?
Geopolitical regions are of course social constructs. They reflect certain perspectives and judgments in making particular groupings and, like every modern region, the social complexion of Ireland, both north and south, is a product of its past. Invading Anglo-Normans would become Hiberno-Normans, eventually assimilating into the larger Gaelic society to become even ‘more Irish than the Irish’. Some would become Protestant, but most remained Catholic and would chafe under Anglo-British rule. Yet in the north, the Anglo-Irish and staunchly Protestant Scotch-Irish would eschew all things Gaelic and become Ulster Unionists.
Perhaps the most obvious historic difference between Ulster Unionists and Irish Republicans, the other main socio-political group in Northern Ireland, is religion. Indeed, this carefully delineated region was established to provide the larger of these two groups with what has been described as “a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people”. While the creation of this six-county state is frequently cited as a textbook example of sectarian gerrymandering, its consequences are seldom considered purely in terms of social health. Indeed, the creation of Northern Ireland might represent the antithesis of ‘social cohesion’, which the Council of Europe defines as “the capacity of a society to ensure the welfare of all its members, minimising disparities and avoiding polarisation”. Or more plainly, the opposite of equality and inclusion.
Social equality was the theme of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s 2009 book ‘The Spirit Level’, which has the self-explanatory subtitle of ‘Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better’. As the authors note, “the relationships between inequality and poor health and social problems are too strong to be attributable to chance”. Although not as extreme as the United States, the world ‘leader’ in inequality among developed nations, the United Kingdom is shown to have the highest indicators of social dysfunctionality of any of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Sweden almost always does best.
Early Scandinavians were also among the pre-Norman invaders of Ireland. Between the 8th and 10th centuries, Viking raiders began to settle around several Irish ports. Dublin, or Dubh Linn, Old Norse for ‘black pool’, would become one of the most important centres in the Viking world. Recent DNA analysis has shown that Ireland’s Vikings mostly originated in the region we now know as Norway, whereas those of the Anglo-Saxon era Danelaw tended to be of Danish extraction. It is not clear what this meant in practice, however, both came from a radically different, non-Christian tradition to others who would colonise medieval Hibernia. Nevertheless, all of Ireland’s pagan Vikings would eventually become Christian Norse-Gaels.
From their earliest raids in AD 795 until the Battle of Clontarf in AD 1014, Norsemen played a significant part in the formation of Ireland north and south. Beginning in the 830s, a notable transformation in Viking behaviour becomes increasingly evident. Rather than just transitory raids, evidence of organised Scandinavian settlement begins to emerge. In AD 840, a Viking fleet over-wintering at Lough Neagh, establishing a longphort from where they pillaged and slew or enslaved bishops, priests, and scholars. In AD 841, the Annals of Ulster record that “the heathens were still on Loch nEchach”. The precise location of the Viking stronghold is unknown, but ‘Oxford Island’ is a reminder of their presence, a name derived from the Norse ‘Ost-Fjord’ or East inlet. Nordic placenames have an added importance as, apart from their genetic material, little physical evidence remains of the Viking’s two century sojourn in Ireland.
Viking placenames are mainly on Ireland’s east or south coasts:
The Skellig Islands off the coast of Kerry
Wicklow on the east coast of Ireland
Howth on the north side of Dublin Bay
Dalkey on the coast, south of Dublin
Leixlip on the river Liffey, west of Dublin
Lambay, a small island off the coast of Dublin
The Saltee Islands off the south coast of Wexford
Smerwick on the Dingle peninsula in west Kerry
Dursey Island off the coast of Cork
Strangford on the northeast coast near Belfast
Carlingford on the Irish Sea north of Dundalk
Wexford at the southeast corner of Ireland
Waterford on the south coast of Ireland
The Irish language has borrowed heavily for words relating to commerce and seafaring, two of the more peaceable activities associated with Vikings. The Irish words for ‘peddler’, ‘tax’ and ‘market’, for example, all come from Old Norse. It is the same for such nautical items as ‘rudder’, ‘anchor’ and ‘rowlock’ while the Irish words for ‘fishing-line’ and ‘cod’ have a similar provenance.
English Old Norse Irish
anchor akkeri ancaire
boat bátr bád
sheet/sail skaut scod
rudder stýri stiúir
thwart popta tochta
fishing-line dorga dorú (dorgha)
ling (fish) langa langa
cod (fish) porskr trosc
market markadhr margadh
penny penninger pinginn
button knappr cnaipe
shoe brók bróg
beans baunir pónair
enclosed plot/yard gardhr garrdha
Table 1. Irish loan-words words borrowed from Old Norse
Uí Ímair is Old Irish for ‘descendants of Ivar’, the legendary Ivar the Boneless in this case, also known as Ivar Ragnarsson. From the mid-9th century, a Norse-Gael dynasty of this name were centred in the Kingdom of Dublin from where they reigned over much of the Irish Sea region from the Hebrides to Northern England, stretching as far south as York. Ivar the Boneless was reputedly head of the ‘Great Heathen Army’ that invaded England in AD 865. Silkenbeard, also known as Sigtrygg Olafsson, a descendant of Ivar the Boneless, was head of the Uí Ímair between AD 995 and AD 1036 and son-in-law to Brian Boru, King of Munster.
By the end of the 9th century, the descendants of Vikings were established as Kings and Queens in several regions across Ireland and some of these, including Silkenbeard, clashed with Brian as he sought to become the first High King of all Ireland. The battle that took place at Clontarf on Good Friday AD 1014 was described in the Irish annals as the “slaughter of the Foreigners of the Western World” by the Christian Irish and has passed into folk lore as the birth of a nation. As with most origin myths, however, the facts, like the outcome of the battle itself, are a little less clear cut.
Clontarf was, at best, a pyrrhic victory. Nevertheless, unlike Ethelred the Unready the previous year, defeated by Sweyn Forkbeard, the Irish did not collapse in the face of “the Norse tyranny”. However, far from being eradicated, the decedents of the Hiberno-Norse founders of Dublin and other towns across Ireland remained a significant presence long after AD 1014. Indeed, their influence was felt as far afield as Iceland where a new Norse-Irish identity emerged. But it would be the descendants of a different branch of Norsemen who would dictate the next chapter in Ireland’s history.
The arrival of the Anglo-Normans during the late 12th century set the country down a meandering path leading to where it is today. Ireland, both north and south, evolved under the sway of what would eventually become Britain. Now, almost 1000 years later and in light of the latest Northern Ireland census statistics, there can be little doubt that the people of Ireland once again stand at a crossroads. On this occasion, however, they are better placed to be the masters of their own destiny.
In the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, the British and Irish Governments acknowledged that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland turned on the consent of a majority of its people. The 1998 Belfast Agreement enshrined the duty of the Secretary of State in this process, to call a border poll when it was judged likely that a majority would be supportive of Northern Ireland forming part of a united Ireland. However, it is difficult to imagine how a chronically divided Northern Ireland would happily form part of a united Ireland.
We could, perhaps, do worse than get in touch with our inner Viking! Not so much dwelling on the traditional propensity towards rapine, pillage and plunder but more on the Nordic package of social welfare and economic systems. This combines features of capitalism, such as a market economy and fiscal efficiency, with generous social welfare in areas such as state pensions and medical care. This ‘Nordic model’ contrasts with the winner-take-all ‘American model’ of capitalism, which has been so enthusiastically, and disastrously, embraced by the current British government. There would, however, be one major stumbling block to Northern Ireland’s adoption of the Scandinavian paradigm. As discussed above, social cohesion, is pivotal.
An engagement with politics is considered an important factor for social cohesion. Voter turnout in Scandinavian has traditionally been high, figures over 85% are not unusual. In the United States, on the other hand, turnout rarely exceeds 60% of the electorate. And these electorates expect very different thing of their representatives. While Trumpian razzamatazz might be acceptable in the United States, Scandinavian politicians are required to behave like ordinary citizens and have interests beyond politics, what Denis Healey’s wife Edna described as his “hinterland”. In Northern Ireland, overall turnout for the 2022 Assembly election was 64%, a figure more in line with the United States than with Scandinavia. There was, however, a distinct east west divide. Fermanagh South Tyrone, at 69%, had the highest average turnout while North Down had the lowest at 48%. Turnout for Local Government is even worse, sitting in the low 40s in some District Electoral Areas of Belfast.
Another indicator of social cohesion is the amount of social capital a community possesses. This has been defined as “the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively”. An example of this might be hearing of a job opportunity through a friend-of-a-friend. In Northern Ireland, however, there are two distant and largely separate communities. A teacher working in Wheatfield Primary School in West Belfast, for example, would be unlikely to hear of a vacancy at Holy Cross Girls’ Primary School by word of mouth, or vice versa, despite being geographically adjacent to each other.
On the world stage, interest in the concept of social cohesion has waxed and waned. However, if Northern Ireland is indeed at a constitutional crossroads, it might now be time to consider what benefits its application might offer this beleaguered state. The present choice is between a dysfunctional Northern Ireland within a United Kingdom and a dysfunctional north within a United Ireland. Clearly, despite some thinking on this matter that ranges from wishful to magical, neither option is good. As any poll on a united Ireland looks to be some years off, perhaps we could best spend this time focused on “minimising disparities and avoiding polarisation”.
We look at the stories that were making the headlines this week in the Andersonstown News in 1980
SAS in Twinbrook
THE large number of SAS personnel involved in last Sunday’s abortive raid in Twinbrook, may quite well herald a new phase in the British government’s policy of oppression against the Nationalist community.
The raid was, to our knowledge, the first time that the force have been used in such great numbers, although they have been deployed here since the early seventies (despite British Government denials).
They usually act in small undercover groups and are known to have great difficulty co-ordinating when acting in large numbers. In the Belfast area they have been mainly used for assassinations and as agent provocateurs with no more than four men being used in any one assignment.
The large number of men used in the Twinbrook raid would suggest that their ‘success’ in ending the Iranian Embassy siege in London has prompted the British Government to use them here on a large scale.
Most informed commentators suggest that this highlights the British Government’s utter frustration with their continual failure to solve the problem here, and also a definite abandoning of their policy to have the RUC accepted as a credible force in the Catholic community. The RUC admitted that some of their personnel were involved in the abortive raid, and the fact that SAS men in the past have often been called Army Liaison Officers with the RUC suggests that the Catholic community will have to steel itself for another period of harsh treatment from the forces of ‘law and order’.
The degree of alarm expressed by the Catholic community as a whole, ranging from the Bishop of Down and Connor William Philbin, to Provisional Sinn Féin, could quite well make this new British policy unworkable.
Support for H-Block hunger strikers
THE statement from the men ‘on the blanket’ on Friday 10th October, although simple in its content, was chilling in its implications. The statement said the men would be commencing a phased hunger strike from Monday 27th October.
In view of the fact that these men have endured the horrors and degradation of the H-Blocks for the last four years, their determination to carry their proposed hunger strike through to the bitter end cannot be doubted.
Equally the British Government will allow them to die, but only if public opinion fails to react. The power of public opinion and its effects on the British government was one of the factors, indeed the principal factor, which resulted in the British recognising the hunger strikers of 1972 as political prisoners.
Today’s prisoners are no different from those of ’72, they are members of the same organisation, imbued of the same ideals. Indeed, when you consider the methods employed to secure evidence, the severity of the sentences and the conditions under which they are confined, there can be no doubt that the men ‘on the blanket’ are truly special prisoners
If tragedy is to be averted, not only inside the H-Blocks but outside as well, then it behoves all of us to support all and every peaceful means to bring pressure to bear on the British to restore political status to the prisoners. Apart from massive street demonstrations, I would urge those who are planning to support the campaign to give serious consideration to an economic campaign however limited.
Finally, and as always in our hour of need, let us not overlook the power of prayer. Even those who do not agree with the blanket men will at least pray for them and we who support them, must redouble our efforts, A lighted candle in the window to symbolise the light of hope would not be out of place. L Wilson Belfast 11
Editorial
THE assault on H-Block campaigners and the destruction of property in Twinbrook last Sunday, show us exactly what law and order, British-style, means.
And, following as it does the murder of two other H-Block campaigners last week, it must make people realise just who the real terrorists are and how swiftly, and with what impunity, they can strike at law-abiding citizens.
“They remind me, and others, of the Black and Tans,” said Dungannon man Jack Hassard, interviewed on Downtown Radio; and Nationalists, event those too young to remember, will know that these were the methods, and the type of people, used, two generations ago, by the British to stifle any form of protest, however, peaceful, and to terrorise people into submission.
Local politicians and public people have condemned the gangsterism; but it’s easy to have a go at the SAS, a gang of hooded thugs, regarded by many as not being an ‘official’ part of the ‘security forces’. But the SAS is as official as is the UDR, the RUC, the Green Howards, or any other section of the British military machine. And it has been admitted, officially, that Sunday’s action was a joint RUC/British Army action.
Paddy Devlin was among those who condemned what happened; but just a short time ago he was advising local people to give their full support to the RUC. How can people support a group who are part of the criminal conspiracy that sanctioned and carried out last Sunday’s lawlessness? Remember: ‘the primacy of the police’ has been British policy for some time now; and it was just this type of joint RUC/SAS action that resulted in the death of an innocent 16-year-old, John Boyle, in Dunloy last year.
The SAS is above and beyond the law – even some Alliance people admit it. But, so also are the British Army and the RUC above and beyond the law. An investigation published in book form today by Penguin, and previewed elsewhere in this newspaper, shows, in great detail, how the ‘highest in the land’ conspired to place RUC lawbreakers outside the law they were supposed to uphold.
Everyone should support law and order; and everyone would like to. But what are we to do when we see that the law-makers and enforcers themselves don’t believe in the rule of law?
No one in the community is safe from these people.
In just 44 days, this talentless PM has crushed the living standards of tens of millions of people – yet still wallowed in self-pity
Backed by the DUP, Liz Truss was a truly dreadful Prime Minister who has done incalculable damage to the Union
October 20 2022 04:57 PM
Liz Truss departed Downing Street as she had inhabited it: Weakly, woodenly, arrogantly, haplessly, incoherently, unrepentantly, reeking of incompetence and without an ounce of personal insight.
This disgraceful chapter in British political history will serve some purpose if it demonstrates to future generations the peril of pig-headed political zealotry – whether from left or right. But even if that is so, it will have come at a terrible price for tens of millions of people.
In a pathetically deluded 90-second statement outside Number 10, Truss’s stated reason for quitting wasn’t that she had belatedly realised what she was trying to do was daft, but that she realised she would no longer be permitted by Tory MPs to deliver that reckless agenda.
It is to the credit of the many Tories who saw how thoroughly unsuited Ms Truss was for the job of Prime Minister and distanced themselves from her as she became increasingly wild, just as it is to the shame of those Conservatives who, unable to see past their partisan blinkers, kept lauding her as she destroyed Britain’s reputation and saddled tens of millions of people with financial hardship.
These calamitous few weeks will mean years of higher taxes, cuts to public services and massively higher debt repayments – both for individuals, and for the UK.
Truss’s resignation statement managed to blame Vladimir Putin, the economic problems she inherited and structural difficulties in the UK economy – but avoided any remorse for her own inescapable and inexcusable failures.
Liz Truss making a speech outside 10 Downing Street, London (PA)
Instead, trying to fashion some coherent positive narrative from the rubble in which she stood, she boasted: “We delivered on cutting energy bills and on national insurance” – the first, a policy which every western democracy has delivered and the second a pitiful consolation for the people whose outgoings will now soar by vastly more than the small cut in one form of taxation due to her inability to manage the public finances.
Preposterously, she talked about “maintaining our country’s economic stability”, and lamented how “our country has been held back for too long by low economic growth”, without any acknowledgment that her contribution to this was to take gradual decline and spectacularly accelerate it.
Politics is not a game; putting oneself forward to lead a nation is not to be done lightly because it involves people’s lives and people’s wellbeing. Truss’s talents were too limited to realise that she was unsuited to such a task. Her party was too willing to look past her obvious failings, but has also simply exhausted itself after too long in power – she won in large part because her rival was an untested relatively new MP whose eye-watering wealth would hardly have been well received by voters struggling to heat their homes.
Truss also demonstrates the short-sightedness of those who worship at the altar of quotas in politics, believing there should be percentages reserved for woman or other groups insufficiently represented in Parliament. Some Tories trumpeted her modest background and the fact that she was the third female Tory leader. But while there is a need for more women in politics and more people from humble backgrounds, just because she ticked both of those boxes did not mean she was good.
Many people disliked Margaret Thatcher or were appalled at her policies. But she was demonstrably up to the job intellectually and had a coherent vision of where she wanted to take the UK.
Thatcher, who Truss haplessly sought to emulate, once said that “being powerful is like being a lady; if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t”. Just 44 days after entering Downing Street, and after burning much of what was within her reach, the Downing Street arsonist’s only real power was over the timing of her self-immolation.
There is a final lesson from this tragedy. The DUP has now backed three successive Prime Ministers. In each case, it has seen the candidate it wanted triumph and in each case that individual has been disastrous. Indeed, each of those individuals has been more shockingly incapable of delivering either good government, or the DUP’s own narrower priorities, than their predecessor.
Sammy Wilson praised Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous budget as something which would “increase living standards, boost employment and raise revenue for public services”. It did none of those things, and instead saw a currency crisis, increased inflation, and increased poverty.
In backing Truss, just as the DUP had lauded Theresa May and Boris Johnson, they have not only made it harder to remove the Irish Sea border, but have weakened the Union itself – literally in a financial sense, and figuratively in the eyes of those undecided voters in Northern Ireland on whose votes the future of the Union will someday depend.
Just as Sinn Féin is the worst possible advocate for Irish unity among those undecided on the issue, so the DUP has been actively driving people away from unionism for years – and in more recent times has been enabling wanton damage of the Union itself.
The UK has survived civil war, a mad monarch, the rise and fall of empire, Hitler’s onslaught, financial crises, separatist movements and terrorism. But seldom have those who cherish the Union unthinkingly brought down such destruction on that which they love.
