The makers of Noraid: Irish America and the IRA, RTÉ’s flashy new two-part documentary about the Provisionals’ support base in North America, say they want to “tell a story that is misunderstood or not known at all”.
But of course, anyone who was alive during the Troubles will remember only too well how elements within Irish America helped fund the IRA’s campaign and, in so doing, contributed to the bombings of civilians, the kneecappings, the murder of gardaí and the sectarian campaign against Protestant farmers along the Border. How shocking to think this part of history might be in danger of slipping between the cracks of popular recollection.
The film (RTÉ One. 9.35pm) doesn’t quite paint Noraid – a contraction of “Irish Northern Aid Committee” – as misunderstood heroes. However, it might have gone further in making explicit what they were supporting. That is, the slaughter of pensioners on Remembrance Sunday, the kidnapping and murder of businessmen, industrial-scale bank robbery.
That isn’t to absolve the British state of its sins in the North, its backing of loyalist death squads or the stain of colonialism, as dark as not-quite-dried blood. But the documentary does not convey, or even really acknowledge, the horror the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland felt at the time towards the Provos. And that is relevant to the story, as it also explains the widespread revulsion towards Noraid. If anything, the first of two episodes leans ever so subtly towards the Che Guevara version of history – never mind the body count; look at the cool poster we got out of it.
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Hipster touches abound as the producers play up the New York element of the story. The Beastie Boys feature on the soundtrack, and the title cards are modelled on old cop shows. These are flourishes that do not always sit well with the grim subject matter.
Still, there are flashes of humour, too – such as when activists recall arranging for senior members of the republican movement in Belfast to be interviewed by one of America’s most widely-read journals, Playboy. Meanwhile, taxi driver John McDonagh remembers booking an ad in Times Square supporting the IRA – it finished with the initials “UTP”. This spelt “Up the Provos”, though the company that took the booking thought it meant “Up the pope”.
“They never asked me what type of charity,” McDonagh says. “I said I wanted to send season’s greetings to the Irish people. They never asked what type of Irish people. I didn’t offer what type.”
If the film doesn’t take a strong enough stand on the Provos, it does give a voice to senior Noraid figures and allows them to communicate their views uncritically. It introduces Martin Galvin, a lawyer and leading figure in Noraid.
He was banned from entering Northern Ireland but went anyway in 1984. In the riot that followed his appearance at a rally in West Belfast, British security forces shot dead a protester with a rubber bullet. Galvin obviously wasn’t to blame for the bloody excesses of the British security establishment. However, the violence would not have broken out had he not been there.
“We support Irish freedom ... the only way the British are going to leave Ireland is for the fight to be successful,” Galvin says – seemingly cleaving to the old republican shibboleth as seeing the British as an entirely external force and ignoring the inconvenient presence of a million unionists.
Still, it is revealing to learn that Galvin and other Noraid members are far removed from the misty-eyed Irish-American stereotype. Noraid was largely based in New York, and its members have the hard-bitten qualities of characters from a Scorsese movie.
That said, modern Sinn Féin’s hipster-Marxist axis won’t be thrilled to learn that Noraid expunged any hint of socialism from imported copies of An Phoblacht because that sort of thing would not have gone down well with Irish Americans. Nor do the producers address the uncomfortable fact that Irish America – so keen on the physical force of republicanism – would go on to become a power base for Donald Trump and, thus, of 21st-century neofascism.
Interviewed today, Galvin is unapologetic and still retains some of the firebrand qualities that are a feature of his archive appearances. The documentary is also careful to point out that while Noraid organised fundraisers for Sinn Féin, it never supplied arms to the Provos. The task of smuggling guns across the Atlantic fell to organised criminals. That story will be told in part two and will touch on the role of Whitey Bulger (as later played on screen by Johnny Depp).
But part one provides a fascinating portrait of a crucial element of the struggles – of true believers from across the sea who seemed to fancy themselves more Irish than those in the 26 counties who didn’t much care about the constitutional status of the North, only that people stopped dying.
“What I’ve found is the diaspora make a serious attempt to understand the Irish culture, whereas a lot of people that are actually from the island of Ireland have never made an attempt to understand the diaspora culture,” says Chris Byrne, a former New York cop and republican sympathiser. Sometimes it really can seem as if few are as committed to the spilling of blood in Ireland as those who never set foot here.
