Noraid and the Northern Ireland Troubles charts the turbulent story of militant republican Irish American activists during the Northern Ireland Troubles, where Robert Collins describes the activities of not only Noraid — Irish Northern Aid (I.N.A.) — but of allied and competitor organisations that share the same social and political space. From the introduction of internment to Bloody Sunday, through the hunger strikes to the beginning of the peace process, Collins weaves the history of Noraid around the familiar narrative of the Northern Ireland conflict. In often meticulous detail, the book shows how Noraid depended on events in Northern Ireland to provide it with an impetus, as well as how as political campaigners in their own right they were later active in championing their own interventions too, on top of fundraising for the provisional republican movement.
What becomes clear in Collins's book is the importance of personal viewpoints in this tightly knit and highly charged network of organisations. The author does well personalising the readers’ understanding of prominent figures like Michael Flannery and Martin Galvin, especially when it comes to issues of wider association and loyalty in the midst of the various splits that pepper the history of militant Irish republicanism more generally. The episodic narrative works well too, with the turn of emphasis to the MacBride principles changing the tone from earlier discussions of fundraising and a middle period of legal support for those charged with gun running.
Collins poignantly links the issue of plastic baton rounds and I.N.A. via the death of John Downes during a Royal Ulster Constabulary (R.U.C.) attempt to arrest Galvin at a rally in Belfast in August 1984, and in these passages the writing and research elements of this work best come together. However, one is left wondering at times what the purpose was of describing quite so many interminable dinner dances, beyond creating a published record of their mere occurrence. Certainly, the reader does not get the impression that I.N.A. and its associated organisations were mainstream or mass organisations in Collins’s account, and he balances well the competing views of them as either a tiny bunch of disgruntled political exiles, or conversely, as the whole of Irish America united by this vanguard of organised Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) supporters.
In other words, Noraid and the Northern Ireland Troubles is not partisan, but it is source led — and honest to these groups’ primary sources. However, this kind of subjectivity carries risk; seen from the I.N.A.'s perspective, the death of John Downes (pp 148–54) appears to be judged as more tragic than the death of 29-year-old mother-of-one Joanne Mathers. Mathers was murdered by the I.R.A. while collecting census forms in 1981. Collins might have questioned I.N.A.'s defensive line that Mathers was murdered because the Provisional I.R.A. thought census workers were ‘potential informers’ (p. 92) and the fact that Mathers was nothing of the sort would not have taken much to clarify.
This loyalty to the sources unfortunately leads to more questions than answers when it comes to Noraid's involvement in supplying weapons and money for weapons, as well as other activity beyond their stated public aims. Often when little else did, allegations of gunrunning united both British and Irish government attitudes to Noraid throughout the Troubles. When the F.B.I. found machine guns and a flame thrower in a Brooklyn basement linked to Michael Flannery (p. 113), it seemed to this reader a ripe moment for a wider introspection of whether Noraid's financial reporting mandated under the Foreign Aliens Registration Act was entirely the whole story.
The book ends in something of a rush. In 1989, Denis Donaldson — by then an MI5 agent inside Sinn Féin — began work for I.N.A. in an undetermined capacity for an indeterminate amount of time (p. 184). It would have been interesting to have explored Donaldson's work. So too, despite earlier discussions of visa problems for Sinn Féin speakers, there is no discussion of how this impasse came to be resolved prior to Gerry Adams's visit in the autumn of 1993. The conclusion summarises but offers little in the way of further insight or analysis as to I.N.A.'s activities and it would have been interesting had Collins chosen to evaluate his findings at this point. The book remains a dutiful history and certainly a useful work and reliable reference of interest to scholars of Irish America at these important moments.
