Roger Franklin: Dollars dry up for IRA

As Irish-Americans like everyone to know, they love having something to celebrate - one reason why, when New York's sons of Erin marched up Fifth Avenue to mark St Patrick's Day, it was just possible to wander through the crowd and believe that the merrymakers were aware that this year, for the first time in a long time, there was something truly worth toasting.

It wasn't the lapel pins urging strangers to "Kiss Me, I'm Oirish" that brought a hopeful smile. And certainly not the spirit of a tribal get-together that manifests itself, year after year, in the plastic ectoplasm of souvenir dealers' hearts and shamrocks.

Not the green beer, either, nor even the red-haired toddlers, all freckles and snub noses, done up as leprechauns - although as the upcoming generation of Irish-Americans, those kids perhaps stand to gain the most from the watershed change of heart that the past few months have witnessed.

Finally, after at least a century and a half of revering half-truths and starry-eyed lies about brave rebels and perfidious Albion, Irish-Americans may just be prepared to acknowledge that the murderous realities of the land their forefathers fled demand a little more insight than can be gleaned from romantic tunes about the men behind the wire.

And more importantly, to admitting the role Americans have played in making sure Belfast's body count continued to grow.

Actually, the most encouraging indication of a break with the past was to be found not in New York, but in an empty chair in Senator Teddy Kennedy's office in Boston, a few hundred kilometres to the north. That was where, up until this year, visiting Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams could count on holding court as an honoured guest.

But not this week. This time Senator Ted slammed the door in Adams' face, told him to take a hike and not to return until the IRA, of which Sinn Fein is the political arm, honoured its 1998 promise to lay down the guns.

It is almost unthinkable that it could have happened, that the Democrat elder who represents the largest and most assertive Irish-American constituency in the country, should side with bitter enemy George W. Bush, who cancelled Adams' customary invitation to the White House.

But happen it did, and the consequences of both men's decisions could help to liberate Northern Ireland from its addiction to violence - and Irish-Americans from the curse and corruption of their own sympathetic myths, for it has long been a basic truth that Irish Catholics fire the bullets Americans pay for.

The classic example: at the turn of the last century, the world's first practical submarine was designed and built in New York by a former Christian Brother from Galway, John Phillip Holland, who wanted it shipped across the Atlantic and unleashed against the Royal Navy.

The vessel never left the States because of feuding among the emigre leaders, who fell out over control of the nickel-and-dime donations of "gullible scullery maids", as one contemporary commentator put it. But the audacity of the ambition that inspired Holland's "Fenian Ram" still testifies to America's enduring role as the IRA's most lucrative source of financial and moral support.

They still raise money today at Irish bars and shindigs, although only a portion of it actually reaches its destination, according to the FBI.

The G-men should know, since for almost 20 years their Boston office turned a blind eye to the scams of Irish mob boss, serial killer and confidential informant "Whitey" Bulger.

As a series of court cases and congressional hearings have revealed, South Boston's now-fugitive crime tsar would collect millions, load a few cases of old guns on a trawler and send them off to Ireland - but only after telling the coastguard where to intercept it. The donations Bulger didn't spend vanished into his own pocket.

A lot of those American dollars do get through, of course. But now, thanks to Kennedy's political bravery in rejecting Adams, the killers' cash flow may become just a little harder to sustain.

As New York's pro-Adams Irish Echo lamented in an editorial, "American officialdom and significant sections of Irish-America, outraged at recent developments, have been abandoning the republican movement."

A Pittsburg newspaper explained why: Irish-Americans, some at any rate, are finally recognising the IRA as "a Hibernian Hezbollah run by godfathers in green".

Chief among those "recent developments" was the January slaying in a Belfast bar of Robert McCartney, and the stink over the cover-up that his sisters and fiancee lay at the feet of the IRA.

The "people power" campaign they launched at home hasn't brought the killers to justice, but it achieved something almost as significant by banishing Gerry Adams from the inner circle of American political influence.

Instead of seeing Adams, both Bush and Kennedy met instead with the McCartney women, whose presence "in Washington on this St Patrick's Day", as the Massachussetts senator noted, "sends a very powerful signal that it's time for the IRA to fully decommission, end all criminal activity and cease to exist as a paramilitary organisation."

St Patrick's Day in New York can often end in a hangover, so while the signs are hopeful, it's still too early to bet that American sympathies will evaporate entirely.

At an Irish fraternal dinner, for example, the head of the NYPD patrolmen's union, Patrick Lynch, fawned over Adams, the guest of honour.

What he said of the Ulster cops trying to solve the McCartney murder was little short of obscene: "I don't consider them police officers. They are soldiers who are trying to keep our people down."

This year, though, his remarks drew only muted applause.

Later, when Irish-American rock band Black 47 did a St Patrick's Day gig at a downtown club, the crowd sang lustily along with songs about rebel glory, IRA martyrs and the purity of the "fanatic heart". Nobody rattled the cup for the IRA, however.

From the big signs of change in Boston and Washington to smaller ones in a New York club, there is at last reason to hope that the venerable American inclination to give butchers the benefit of the doubt is finally and mercifully subsiding.

And on St Patrick's Day, that was definitely worth a toast.