local Irish support organizations raise money in Chicago.
Joe Carroll reports.
Don't you dare call it a black-and-tan.
If you must order that frothy, two-tone mix of Guiness and lager, call it a half-and-half, Richard Wallace gently implores a young women as she waits for her drink at a Near North Side tavern.
The Black and Tans, after all, were a rapacious legion of British Army storm troopers unleashed on Ireland from 1919 to 1922 in an effort to crush resistance to British rule. Renowned for their cruelty toward civilians and cowardice in battle, mere mention of the Black and Tans incites anger and indignation in the hearts of Irish nationalists and their Irish-American brethren.
Don't you know your own history? Wallace nudges, having correctly guessed the striking black-haired woman is of Irish descent. She apologizes, gathers up her glass and her change, and promises not to do it again.
Wallace, a middle-aged Irish-American businessman, considers this exercise in political education just another small step on the long, hard road to Irish independence. But as national fundraising coordinator for the leading Irish Republican Army prisoners' support group in North America, Wallace's activism involves much more substantial work than correcting the syntax of bar patrons.
He and a tightly-knit cadre of hardline Irish nationalists have been quietly raising tens of thousands of dollars to support the spouses and children of IRA prisoners in Britain and Ireland. More importantly, they are working to dissuade Irish-Americans from supporting the peace treaty signed last year by the IRA's main political wing, Sinn Fein. Supporters of the treaty, commonly referred to as the Good Friday Agreement, say it is the best chance for peace and reconciliation since the conflict exploded in 1969. With its promises of power sharing and redress of Catholic civil rights grievances, the agreement won wide electoral support on both sides of the border in dual referenda last year. In addition to the northern parties signed up to the deal, the treaty has the steadfast support of the British and Irish governments. Detractors like Wallace, however, believe the treaty consolidates British rule in Ireland's northeastern six counties and sets back the cause of Irish independence by fifty years.
What is most striking about this latest effort to revitalize the 300-year-old Irish Republican movement is its focus on Chicago, a city that historically has been at best lukewarm to appeals for help from across the ocean. With many of the traditional East Coast bastions of IRA support controlled by pro-treaty factions, anti-treaty activists have shifted their attention to Chicago, where a small core of veteran IRA men have been holding the line against emissaries of the pro-treaty faction.
To that end, hundreds of hardline Irish nationalists will gather in Chicago this week to drum up financial support for a new effort to push the British out of Northern Ireland. Chicago has become a top priority for organizers because its huge Irish and Irish-American communities have been largely unscathed by the communal disputes racking Irish nationalist organizations on the East Coast. While groups in New York, Boston and Philadelphia have been torn by pro- and anti-treaty forces, the Midwest remains a clean slate, where the hearts, minds and dollars are still up for grabs.
"I have more faith in the average Irish-American to support us than most old-country and first-generation Irish. They're too busy getting themselves set up and established to get involved much with us," says Frank O'Neill, chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Irish Freedom Committee. "The second- and third-generation Irish are more inquisitive, and that's what we have here in Chicago, more so than, say, New York or other places. Anybody who listens and gets to know the score on what is going on in Ireland will become sympathetic to the Republican movement. But they have to be willing to listen in the first place."
The Irish Freedom Committee, is bringing former NORAID publicity director Martin Galvin to the Abbey Pub, September 25, to discuss the Good Friday Agreement and its implications. Galvin, a former federal prosecutor from the Bronx who acted as an official mouthpiece of the Irish Republican movement in the United States from the late 1970s to 1995, recently returned from Ireland, where he met with other dissident nationalists trying to revive resistance to British rule.
In a September 13 story about his visit, the Dublin-based Irish Times described Galvin as a "former close associate of [Sinn Fein leaders] Mr. Gerry Adams and Mr. Martin McGuinness. He resigned from NORAID in 1995 over the peace process." As one of the most prominent Irish-American leaders of his generation, Galvin's Chicago appearance is expected to draw hundreds of activists and sympathizers.
Irish Freedom Committee leaders are quick to point out that none of the money they collect goes to purchase rifles, bullets or explosives. Nor does it directly finance any operations by the Continuity IRA, a breakaway faction of the mainstream IRA and the only armed nationalist group that hasn't called a cease-fire. Instead, the money goes directly to the dependents of Continuity IRA prisoners, who receive small weekly stipends. On occasion, the money has also been used to help innocent victims of police brutality or sectarian attacks. "We're a prisoners support group," says Deirdre Fennessy, the national secretary of the Irish Freedom Committee, who resides in Chicago. "We have nothing to do with (weapons)." However, by providing support for prisoners' families, the money collected in North America eases the strain on the coffers of the Continuity IRA, which would otherwise have to divert resources from its nascent war effort to help feed the spouses and children of its imprisoned members. Local officials, it seems, have nothing to say about Galvin's visit or the ramifications of Irish fundraising in the Midwest. "I'm familiar with his name," says Carolyn Cragcraft, an official with the British Consulate in Chicago. "We would have no comment."
Galvin is a fast-talking New Yorker whose antipathy to the British presence in Ireland was so irritating to the British government they banned him from traveling to Northern Ireland in 1984.
In those days, NORAID, officially known as the Irish Northern Aid Committee, was the principal fundraising organization for IRA prisoners' dependents. NORAID's fortunes waxed and waned over the years, suffering huge membership losses when the IRA campaign grew particularly bloody in the mid seventies, but enjoyed a 1980 resurgence in the wake of hunger strikes, as seven IRA and three Irish National Liberation Army prisoners starved to death in a grisly bid to win political prisoner status from the British government.
In Chicago, NORAID staged rallies outside the British Consulate to demonstrate support for the hunger strikers, but the group never made the same sort of inroads in Chicago that were achieved in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities. Despite a long history of clandestine support for the IRA's bombing and shooting campaign, Chicago's Irish and Irish-American communities never embraced NORAID's appeal for 1960s-style street activism.
"Chicago was always a little bit weak," says O'Neill. "The Irish here didn't seem to know much about the Irish situation as it stands now. Chicago has always been a Free State city." "Free State" is a disparaging reference to the dominion status bestowed on most of Ireland by the British government after the Tan War ended in 1922. The southern government has long since quit the Commonwealth and declared full independence, but hardcore Irish Republicans regard the Dublin regime as little more than puppets. O'Neill, who immigrated in 1955, remembers Eoin MacNamee and other Chicago-based IRA men who provided weapons for the unsuccessful 1956-1962 Border Campaign.
MacNamee, a Merchant Marine and IRA commander who used a fluency in Spanish to establish far-flung seaborne smuggling routes into Ireland, settled in Chicago in the early fifties after years of hard fighting and imprisonment. He is perhaps most famous in nationalist circles for being the first IRA commander to recruit Protestants, a particularly dangerous endeavor in Belfast, where Protestant distrust of the IRA runs deep.
Once in Chicago, MacNamee worked covertly with other expatriate IRA men to acquire rifles, ammunition and other military supplies for the battalions back home. After the collapse of the Border Campaign, MacNamee and his associates bided their time until hostilities broke out again in 1969, at which time they resumed their arms smuggling activities. MacNamee died in 1986. "Eoin MacNamee was invaluable to the struggle," says George Harrison, an 85-year-old Brooklyn resident who ran IRA gun-smuggling operations on the East Coast from the fifties until 1982. Federal authorities believe Harrison smuggled thousands of weapons -- including Thompson submachine guns and heavy-duty M-60 machine guns -- to the IRA, but he was acquitted on arms charges in the early eighties after defense lawyers suggested the CIA had given tacit approval for the shipments. Harrison freely admits he was responsible for smuggling thousands of weapons into Ireland. "I was in Chicago a few times, meeting with MacNamee, discussing what we needed to do," Harrison remembers.
It was at one of those meetings that Harrison recalls his former commander in the East Mayo battalion of the IRA -- Martin Geraghty. Geraghty, who lived in Chicago for a few years in the sixties, gave MacNamee and Harrison this piece of advice: "Get the guns wherever you can -- Cuba, China, wherever you have to get them."
"During the fifties, it was easy," says a MacNamee associate who asked not to be named. "There were army surplus stores on every corner. You were able to buy any damn thing you wanted."
Those who worked with MacNamee, however, were usually reluctant to publicly agitate for increased Irish-American involvement in NORAID's efforts.
They were concerned that mingling with NORAID leaders would lend credence to British government accusations that NORAID was merely raising money to buy explosives and bullets, rather than supporting prisoners' families, the MacNamee associate says.
They also did not want to expose themselves to law enforcement by speaking at rallies or other events. The last thing a secret network needs is a member making a spectacle of himself. For those reasons, Chicago has long been considered ambivalent territory for people like Wallace and Galvin, says O'Neill.
But that may be changing: The Irish Freedom Committee has a solid base in Chicago, with two members of its seven-person executive council -- Wallace and Fennessy -- living here. The group has active chapters in New York, New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, Indiana, New Mexico, and Worcester, Mass. But the bulk of its fundraising and propaganda efforts thus far have focused on Chicago. Enter Galvin, who pledges moral support for the Irish Freedom Committee, though his official allegiance goes to another anti-treaty group, the 32-County Sovereignty Movement, which has yet to establish much of a presence in the United States. In the near future, Galvin says he expects most of the anti-treaty forces will "coalesce" into a single movement. "I support all (Irish) Republicans who oppose the treaty," he says.
NORAID, which Galvin broke from in 1995 after sixteen years as publicity director and editor of its weekly newspaper, abandoned its prisoner support role after Sinn Fein leaders indicated they intended to end the war and join the new Belfast parliament. The organization maintains chapters in some cities -- including Chicago -- but its national membership numbers are believed to have dwindled precipitously as many believed the war was effectively over.
Galvin says he left NORAID because he couldn't stomach the new strategy embraced by Sinn Fein leaders Adams and McGuinness. That approach, Galvin argued, left northern nationalists undefended from pro-British paramilitary groups. The new strategy also amounted to throwing in the towel on the question of British withdrawal from the six counties, he said.
"The British government saw this as an opportunity to get Sinn Fein leaders into a British administration in Ireland," Galvin says. "(Irish) Republicans were outmaneuvered. The British have succeeded in isolating all opposition to their rule in an assembly where (pro-British) loyalists hold an absolute veto."
The structure of the new northern parliament, which divides the assembly into nationalist and pro-British sections, requires both sections to vote Yes before any measures become laws. The architects of the treaty saw this as a safeguard against either side using the parliament to abuse or oppress their opponents. Hardline nationalists like Galvin, O'Neill and others, however, see that provision as a permanent block against Irish unification. Even if nationalists -- who are expected to become the majority in Northern Ireland by 2011 -- vote to break the connection with Britain, they could be indefinitely prevented from doing so unless the pro-British parties assented.
"Instead of moving toward justice and equality, we are locked into a loyalist veto," Galvin says.
Fennessy agrees, characterizing the treaty as "a total and utter sham." Galvin's appearance in Chicago will enable local Irish and Irish-Americans "to get what they can't get off the (Associated Press) wire."
The treaty provisions are currently bogged down in a dispute over whether the mainstream IRA should disarm now or wait until the May 2000 deadline set forth in the agreement. Pro-British politicians have refused to share power with Sinn Fein until the guns are turned over. Even among those nationalists who supported the agreement when it was signed and ratified last year, there appears to be growing disillusionment with the Sinn Fein leadership. The treaty has failed to deliver the limited gains promised, a development that may be playing into the hands of dissident groups like the Irish Freedom Committee.
"We're drawing people who've seen the deception of the (treaty), people who've been following the agreement and trying to see it through," Fennessy said. "What we're trying to do now is open the door to those people so we can refocus on removing the British presence from Irish soil."
Michael Galvin will discuss the Good Friday agreement and Northern Ireland on September 25, 8pm to 1am, at the Abbey Pub, 3240 West Grace. The public is welcome, and the Irish Freedom Committee will ask a donation of $10 at the door.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.