The politics of noraid

Abstract

This article examines the political thinking of the most important American support organisation for the Irish republican movement during the course of the Northern Ireland conflict. Noraid's primary function was fund raising and in general terms its propaganda differed little from that of the Provisonal Republican movement in Ireland. However it was also an organisation founded and rooted in a section of Irish America, subject to quite different political and cultural pressures than the republican movement in Ireland. Using the organisation's newspaper the Irish People, the article explains how Noraid promoted an Irish ethnic identity based on a history of nativist discrimination against, and class division among, Irish Americans. Furthermore it appealed to the Irish to emulate the perceived success of other American ethnic groups. The article concludes that it is too simplistic to consider Noraid a ‘right wing’ or ‘conservative’ organisation as its politics could appeal to diverse constituencies.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Professor Kevin Kenny and Dr Anna Bryson for their comments on an earlier version of this article and to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Notes

Along with fellow founder Matt Higgins, Flannery, McGowan and McCarthy were emblematic of the early Noraid. All were Irish‐born veterans of the revolutionary period, all anti‐treatyites, all emigrated during the 1920s and all were prominent in the New York GAA and Irish County Associations (Irish Echo, 13 January 1973).

Such as the ‘Fort Worth Five’ in 1972 and the ‘Baltimore Four’ in 1973.

Indeed, the conflict over busing in Boston helped identify the Irish in the popular mind with ‘backlash’. However, Italians in New Jersey, Slavs and Poles in Chicago and Jews and Italians in New York were all just as likely to embrace ‘reactionary populism’ during the 1970s (Rieder, 1985).

Despite the efforts of Martin Galvin, who believed Noraid should have been able to accommodate both supporters of Peter King and Paul O'Dwyer (Galvin, 2003).

Significantly however, Frank Durkan, the chair of Irish Americans for Dinkins, noted how, despite the fact that few Irish Americans would vote for Dinkins he did not inspire the same hostility that an African American politician would have done in the 1970s (Durkan, 2003).

Which made a major effort to neutralise a split in the organisation during 1989 when a number of Noraid members left to form the Friends of Irish Freedom (Wilson, 1994).