Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, met US supporters in New York yesterday for an annual $500-a-plate dinner which should add more than half a million dollars to his party's coffers, writes Patrick Markey.
The US-based group "Friends of Sinn Fein" has collected nearly $4 million in the last five years in party fundraisers. More than a thousand guests, many from the city's construction business, were expected at Manhattan's Sheraton Hotel.
As the guests dined inside the hotel's imperial ballroom, a stark reminder of Belfast's bleaker realities stood outside. The mother of a leading dissident republican killed in Belfast last month joined a group of Irish-Americans to picket the fundraiser.
Mrs Margaret O'Connor, whose son Joseph was shot dead in Ballymurphy in October, protested outside the hotel, asking Mr Adams to support an independent inquiry into her son's death.