The Americans Who Ran Guns for the I.R.A.

New York Times

11-03-2025

When it comes to understanding the Irish, it helps to take the long view.
The Ulster Plantation of 1609, intended to replace native Catholic Irish residents with Protestant settlers from Scotland and England, initiated a conflict that has never quite ended. And in 1690, the British won a decisive victory over Irish Catholics that Ulster's unionists still celebrate annually as if they've just won the World Cup.
More recent divisions in Northern Ireland date to the 1921 treaty that ended the Irish war of independence and granted Ireland status as a 'free state,' rather than a republic — allowing Britain to retain six of Ulster's nine counties.
In 'The Next One Is for You,' an informative and well-researched account of the Troubles — the lenient name attached to a bitter internecine struggle — and their reverberations in America, the New York Times reporter Ali Watkins describes the treaty as a 'devil's bargain.' Whether it was demonic or all that was possible at the time, the treaty triggered a brief, brutal civil war that scared Ireland for generations and sent many of the defeated Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) fighters to the United States.
One-party rule by Ulster unionists, Watkins writes, left Catholics with 'few jobs, poor housing and threadbare resources.' In 1968, inspired in part by the American civil rights movement, Catholics initiated nonviolent protests to end discrimination and to put a stop to disenfranchising gerrymandering.
The reaction was swift. The local police force stood by while protesters were assaulted and beaten by unionist mobs, who carried out violent attacks against Belfast's Catholic neighborhoods. A radical faction of the I.R.A. known as the Provos dedicated themselves to expelling the British through armed struggle.
These events stirred a segment of Irish Americans to take more than a sentimental interest in post-treaty Ireland. The feeling was especially strong in working-class neighborhoods in New York and Philadelphia. In the United States at large, Watkins writes, 'the steady flight of I.R.A. veterans to America had effectively created a shadowy, satellite brigade of Irish Republicans within the country's sprawling Irish diaspora.'
Watkins does a thorough job of pulling back the curtain on the principals behind a pro-I.R.A. group called the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), figures like Daniel Duffy, a mechanic, and Hughie Breen, a Philadelphia bar owner. Ostensibly intended to raise money to support families in the North, NORAID instead largely spent the funds arming the I.R.A.
Sympathetic longshoremen and customs officials saw to it that NORAID was able to smuggle semiautomatics into Ulster. The guns triggered a 'ballistic escalation' so potent that the Armalite became the Provos' symbol.
Instead of peacekeeping, the British Army devoted itself to crushing the I.R.A. On Jan. 30, 1972, British paratroopers in Derry killed 14 unarmed Catholic protesters, intensifying the conflict exponentially.
For the I.R.A., this 'Bloody Sunday' rallied support. 'The surge of interest that followed,' Watkins posits, 'would pay dividends to NORAID for years to come.'
In a meeting with President Richard Nixon in 1971, the British prime minister Edward Heath raised the issue of American support for the I.R.A. NORAID could no longer be ignored, and the U.S. Department of Justice pursued a full-scale investigation.
Watkins follows in great detail the cat-and-mouse game that ensued between the feds and NORAID. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the F.B.I. were 'stacked with Irish American agents,' but it did the conspirators little good. A sting by an undercover agent was a severe blow. Faced with the 1976 conviction of its operatives in federal court, NORAID faded into the background, 'an obsolete ghost.'
At times, in her thorough account of the grass-roots support for the I.R.A., Watkins strays into the weeds. She also offers a separate narrative of women volunteers in the organization, a change in focus only sometimes consequential to the fate of NORAID — and, at other times, a jarring diversion.
Watkins credits NORAID as a 'cultural center for huge swaths of Irish America.' In New York and Philadelphia, 'it became a ubiquitous part of daily life' and 'a household name at most Irish American dinner tables.'
This inflation of NORAID's prominence is misleading. Support for NORAID from the 30 million Americans claiming Irish ancestry was puny. Watkins argues that 'while they may have been proportionally modest, NORAID members made up for it in enthusiasm.'
But in fact NORAID was never a household word. And if 'huge swaths' had actually contributed, NORAID could have raised the I.R.A. from a small guerrilla force to a military powerhouse.
When peace came, it wasn't at the barrel of a gun. The main architect was John Hume, a schoolteacher from Derry and founder of the Social Democratic and Labour Party whose commitment to nonviolence was unwavering over decades.
Undeterred by threats from extremists, Hume pursued American involvement in reaching a peaceful solution. From the late 1970s, he cultivated a close relationship with Irish America's quartet of political heavyweights, the 'Four Horsemen': New York Gov. Hugh Carey, Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Ted Kennedy, and Speaker Tip O'Neill.
Eventually, President Bill Clinton broke with the State Department's traditional loyalty to the British and appointed a special envoy, who in 1998 brokered the Good Friday agreement that ended the fighting.
By the time the Troubles ended, more than 3,500 people had been killed — a significant portion of them innocent civilians. Thousands more were physically or psychologically wounded. 'The long war had taken its toll,' Watkins observes in her well-told account, and the effects were suffered 'by ordinary people.'
For now, peace holds in Northern Ireland. Britain's decision to leave the E.U. added an unexpected complication, but the empire's sway over Ireland is a thing of the past. In some quarters, there is gathering momentum for reunification. To quote Seamus Heaney, it seems possible that this time 'hope and history rhyme.'