‘I.R.A: All the Way’ — the slogan that hurts Britain

Press, 3 September 1981, Page 17

‘I.R.A: All the Way’ — the slogan that hurts Britain

GEORGE BROCK,

in New York, argues that no new British propaganda

effort will melt Irish-American opinions which have been in the deep freeze since the 19205.

Two hundred people are clustered around a yellow Hertz flatbed truck parked under the trees of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, in the shadow of the United Nations Building in New York.

The truck holds a makeshift altar and three priests. Facing outwards are a dozen young men and women in white shirts, black berets, and sunglasses, who are silent during the responses of the Mass. In front of them are nine full-size model coffins. As the bread and wine are distributed, “Take Me Home to Mayo” is sung from beside the altar in a rich baritone.

The priest's sermon closes with the thought that “once Britain is out of Ireland not one of these young men will be in jail."

The Mass is for Thomas McElwee, the ninth hunger striker (the total is now 10) to die three thousand miles away in the Maze. A fidgeting child of about ten wears a T-shirt bearing the slogan “IRA: All the Way." a slogan chanted minutes before as the congregation conducted the daily picket of the British consular offices on Third Avenue while soliciting contributions with a bucket from generally uninterested passers-by. The placards are strongly made and have lasted through 130 days of picketing: “British Child Killers”; “England is Genocide and Terrorism in Ireland, No TVCircus Wedding can change that.”

This scene and others like it during the six months of the hunger strikes have understandably appalled audiences in Britain. “We can t let the I.R A. get away with this." shrieked the "Daily Mail,” cataloguing in breathless detail the handful of Union Jacks which have been taken down by British businesses. Commentators' and M.P.s have suggested that the British counter-informa-tion effort in the United States should be stepped up.

■ A week’s visit to New York convinced me that this is unlikely to help, and that the carefully mounted protest spectacles have inflated the picture of Irish-American republicanism far beyond its political importance. The calls for further explanations of the British case are a typical British reflex towards a serious turn of events in Ireland: vent some irritation on a side issue as an ascape from the tougher problems of the central difficulty itself.

The Provisionals look across the Atlantic for three things: guns, money, and political push. The guns cannot be dealt with by high-profile political action: all the evi-

dence so far is. that, the smuggling is close-knit, clandestine, and not stimulated or slowed by the rise and fall of events in Ireland. The same cannot be said of the money. There is no accurate and agreed figure for the number of dollars which cross the Atlantic, but the figures declared every half-year by Noraid, more formally known as the Irish Northern Aid Committee, the American organisation which enjoys the Provo seal of approval, probably show the trends. Until March, the contributions had gradually declined from an all-time’ high in early 1972, just after Bloody Sunday in Londonderry. Then, the committee declared a despatch of $312,000 and several Irish-Americans said that a million dollars had been raised by all groups added together. There were resurgences: the amounts doubled during the second half of 1979, with the all-time low of $39,000 being delivered in the second half of 1977.

Noraid's funds have now climbed again, although the formal figures are not yet available. The organisation’s spokesman, a Bronx assistant district attorney. Mr Martin Galvin, says that they raised $lOl,OOO in May and June. The rises in funds go with dramatic events in Ireland: when the funds go up. it is the amounts which rise, the pool of contributors does not broaden in proportion. The list of donors declared by Noraid contains almost no non-Irish names. The effective work eroding this flow is only likely to be done when the' “war” is nut in the headlines and when there is political activity in Ireland to report; even then it is never likely to be completely successful.

If any voice is going to get a hearing against political violence it is most likely to be an Irish one, and the Irish Government's representatives have worked hard at this thankless job. Among the 215 million Americans who claim no Irish descent — some 16

million do — the NoraidI.R.A. connection is well recognised. Outside, and even in. centres of Irish settlement. the British do'not have great difficulty getting the message across. Journalists' copy written as a result of briefings by British diplomats even has an occasional tendency to get awkwardly out of control. Thus the Chicago "SunTimes" columnist, Edward Langley: "The Irish war will fade in direct proportion to the Irish-Americans’ willingness to challenge the I.R.A.’s line, to hear the British side and to — one hopes — realise what the I.R.A. is: less than 500 Oswald/Hinckley freaks supplied with Soviet-bloc weapons intent on turning both Irelands into an Allende-type Chile: there isn't a patriot among them.” Change the scene to the Brook Inn, in a fly-blown section of the Bronx, on a Sunday morning: around a hundred men sit and stand in the gloom drinking beer, some eating ham and eggs, while they listen to a live

relay of the Galway-Limer-ick hurling match broadcast at ear-splitting volume.

To talk to the clientele is to see how narrow the base of Irish-American republicanism is, and to hear its implacability.' Many of the most vocal anti-British protesters are the children of. or in a few elderly cases from, the generation which fought the civil war in the South in the early 1920 s and had held that partition was a sell-out and had lost.

Bill is in his late forties, with a trim grey moustache, shorts and smart white socks. He is an electricity companv inspector and his father arrived in New York in the late Twenties: "I guess he was somewhat on the run."

He compared Britain and the loyalists in Northern Ireland with nineteenth-century plantation owners in the southern American states who wanted to preserve slavery. British attempts to alleviate anti-Catholic discrimination were dismissed

as “tokenism" and "bullcrap." He blandly denied that the I.R.A. (the ten-year-old split between the Provisionals and the Officials does not exist in America) was at all left-wing.

“They're not too interested in how the country is run — they just want to put it together again." His disgust extended to the Government in Dublin: “They're just not doing anything." He was contemptuous of the low level of political involvement and clout among Irish-Americans. He dismissed the Four Horsemen — Senators Kennedy and Moynihan, Congressman O’Neill and New York’s Governor Carey — as “St Patrick’s Day Irishmen, strictly out for votes.”

The Four Horsemen recently wrote to President Reagan asking for a meeting about the hunger strikes: their letter did not even produce an immediate reply, although they are likely to get their meeting this month. They are not likely to get much else: Reagan has shown little sympathy even for the notion that Mrs Thatcher should be more "flexible" over the Maze, let alone anything stronger. There has been a polite silence over a letter from the new Irish Government asking for pressure on Mrs Thatcher. The Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, recently refused to comment on what he called an “internal" problem and went on to say: “One might make the case if there were not a Great Britain playing the role that it plays there today, we might even have to create one to prevent a blood bath."

The guns have to be tackled by specialists in detection; the political push is much exaggerated. The most serious of the problems is money, but the successes in reducing the contributions have been scored when the world’s media have not had reason to rediscover Northern Ireland. The Provos find American money important, but they would still exist even if none of it ever arrived.

The idea that huge numbers of gullible Americans can be “educated” in the realities of Northern Ireland is naive; it would be a waste of money and people to divert civil servants and Ministers towards IrishAmericans brought up on the hardened fantasies which they nourish to preserve their identity in the melting pots of American cities. The “answer” to the problem is not to shoot the pianist, but to write a better tune.— Copyright, London Observer Service.

A transcipt of talks between the leaders of Solidarity and a Government team led by the Deputy Premier) Mieczyslaw Rakowski, has just been published in Warsaw and provides an unusual and alarming insight into the Polish crisis.

It is alarming because it shows how suspicious the two sides are of each other a year . after Solidarity's creation as the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc.

There is still no sign that either union or Government have forgotten that Polish independence depends on their being able to patch up their quarrels among themselves. In addition, there seems often to be little common ground between them. The talks in question took place last month and w’ere broken off when Solidarity refused to go along with a joint communique which, it said, the Government had altered. The talks ranged over most of the problems facing Poland and were meant to lead to a common approach to their solution.

The food situation loomed large, of course, and some of the most angry discussion centred on Solidarity’s request that the Government give commissions appointed by Solidarity power to supervise the production and sale of food.

This brought the negotiations back again and again to Rakowski’s favourite theme: Solidarity was trying to take power from the Government.

“It is obvious in the situation as it exists in Poland," he said at one point, “that whoever controls food pro-