ROGER FRANKLIN explores the dark side of being Irish.
NEW YORK - Whatever their other sins, Irish-Americans can't be accused of abandoning tradition.
Green beer on St Patrick's Day, painted shamrocks on South Boston's walls, the fighting leprechaun mascot of Notre Dame's football team - they are the happy, hackneyed symbols of a transplanted culture secure enough to laugh at its own cliches.
Then there is the other, darker side to the Irish tradition in America, the one that was on proud display in the ballroom of a nondescript Queens motel. The band played all the rebel favourites, the speakers denounced perfidious Albion's "army of occupation," the liquor flowed and, as always, the passed hat filled with cash.
Where that money was going, and what it would be spent on, was the real source of the evening's merriment. While the invitations that drew 200 Republican supporters to the event named the beneficiaries as Catholic victims of the Troubles, few could have uttered that explanation without a smile.
The real destination was pretty much spelled out by impish, silver-haired octogenarian George Harrison, who was given a hero's welcome when he stepped to the microphone. "I say to the people of Ireland, 'Keep hold of your weaponry, freedom will come only from their muzzles'," he said to cheers.
Harrison knows a thing or two about guns. According to the FBI, he was the IRA's chief weapons smuggler, supplier of explosives and hider of transatlantic fugitives for the IRA through almost three decades.
In 1985, when he beat charges of exporting weapons to terrorists, his lawyer made no pretence of actual innocence. In that instance, as a jury reportedly heavy with O'This and O'Thats decided, he'd been set up by the CIA.
"Ireland's great strength is its sons and daughters far from home," said another of the speakers at the so-called Gunrunners Ball, a man whose accent owed more to the Bronx than Belfast. And perhaps its greatest weakness, too, especially now that the truce in the North might just stand a chance of sticking.
For well over 150 years, long before some 3000 Irish veterans of the Civil War set out to wrest Canada from British rule, Irish-Americans' support for the rebel cause has been unstinting. After the chaotic "invasion" surged across the border near Niagara Falls, it tumbled right back again when a series of clashes with Mounties and a university cadet corps left the Irishmen bloody and beaten.
Thirty years later, the Irish in America were still at it, this time building a submarine they called the Feinian Ram. While the submarine worked brilliantly, repeatedly terrorising the captains of ferry boats on New York Harbour when it surfaced to fire a cannon across their bows, the stated goal of sinking the British fleet never came to pass. By the time it was ready for action, the men who supervised its construction were alternately hijacking the vessel or suing to have it returned.
And so it has continued, the feuding and the fundraising, right up until last month's bash in that Queens motel, where modern Ireland with its booming economy might as well not have existed. These were old grievances being celebrated, not the promise of a motherland transformed.
"The most vocal body of opinion among Irish-Americans suffers from a single, obsessive, unfortunate focus," is the way Tim Pat Coogan, the author of The IRA: A History described it at a lecture in New York some years ago. "There has been, over time, a drift of opinion and interest among Irish-Americans that has drawn their gaze away from Dublin and on to Belfast. The tragedy is that, from an American perspective, Belfast is Ireland. The struggle there is everything."
Whatever the appropriate explanation, the Queens gathering was a classic example of the way romantic illusions and tribal loyalties can so easily trump reality.
There was no mention, for example, of the scant sentiment in the South these days for reclaiming the six "lost" counties of the North. Nor that there is more revulsion than sympathy for the hard men of groups like the Real IRA, the faction that claimed credit for a 1998 bombing that left 29 dead in Omagh.
Yet that is the group one of the honoured guests at the Queens gathering, Dorothy Robinson, has been accused of bankrolling.
Why was she so militant? Was she, perhaps, the victim of an Orangeman's brutality, or did she have her door kicked in by British paratroops? Not exactly - those sorts of things don't happen too often in suburban New Jersey, where the 57-year-old antique shop owner has spent her entire life.
So why would she speak of the joy she feels whenever a Unionist or a soldier is slain? A man called Michael Gallagher put that exact question to her in January after crossing the Atlantic to get an answer.
It's really quite simple, Robinson told him: All of 160 years ago, British injustice forced her great-great-grandparents to flee the Old Country. Surely he could understand how she felt obliged to burnish that ancestral grudge?
Anyway, she asked, why the question?
That was easy, the visitor responded, handing her a photograph. The picture was of a smiling young man called Aidan, who was both Gallagher's son and a victim of the Omagh bombing.
Perhaps it was a sense of shame, or just fleeting regret. But, for once, if only for a moment or two, Robinson was as mute as Ireland's dead.
Grudges die slowly across the sea
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