Irish politics a whole new tea party for Boston

Monday, March 19, 2007

By Jim Dee

There was a time when political developments in Belfast routinely merited front-page coverage in both of Boston's daily newspapers. But no more. With US troops dying in ever increasing numbers in Iraq, it's the horrific bloodshed in Baghdad rather than political horse-trading in Belfast that now matters most to Bostonians.

However, in Irish-American enclaves across the city, long-time supporters of Sinn Fein and the IRA continue to closely follow events in Northern Ireland via the internet.

It was to its staunchest backers in neighbourhoods like Dorchester, Charlestown and South Boston that the IRA turned to for guns and money during the height of the Troubles. Likewise, visiting Sinn Fein representatives prioritised these areas when explaining potentially divisive issues such as the 1994 IRA cease-fire, decommissioning, and Sinn Fein's recent moves on policing.

The vast majority of republican supporters in Boston have remained loyal. But some have viewed recent seismic strategy shifts with dismay, and even disgust.

"Those who are co-opted - such as the so-called Sinn Fein of today - gave up all their principles on the backs of all those who died in order to bring freedom for the country," says Joe Dillon, a Dorchester resident who spent decades promoting Irish republicanism in the US. "So they are totally beneath contempt as far as I'm concerned."

Breakthrough

Dillon, now 79, utterly rejects the Good Friday agreement and dismisses any notion that any power-sharing deal between the Sinn Fein and the DUP will represent a major breakthrough.

"The Good Friday agreement wasn't to establish peace. Anyone who thinks that would have to be soft in the head," he says. "It was about pacification. And that is what the Good Friday agreement has done."

Dillon also believes that dissidents of the Real IRA and Continuity IRA are justified in continuing their attacks, "even if a small percentage of the indigenous population want to do what they have to do against a foreign invader."

Al Madden (80), another Dorchester resident whose living room is filled with IRA memorabilia - including posters proclaiming 'No Surrender, No Decommissioning' and 'The IRA calls the Shots' - says that he was " disappointed" when Sinn Fein accepted the agreement.

"It stopped the killing. So that's good. But does it have anything good politically? We'll have to wait and see on that," says Madden. " Because I don't see London or Dublin coming up with any kind of white paper or green paper saying 'This is what we have to do if we are going to have a 32-county Ireland'."

Ceasefire

Madden also opposed the IRA's first peace process ceasefire of 1994 because " that gave up what I considered to be an important way to get the English out of Ireland, which was the physical force movement. Ireland was taken by force and has the right to use force to get its sovereignty back".

Across town in South Boston, convicted gun-smuggler Pat Nee strongly disagrees.

Nee, a former associate of famed Boston mobster James 'Whitey' Bulger, served a jail term for assembling a 7.5 ton weapons shipment for the IRA that was intercepted by the Irish navy off Kerry in 1984. He said the 9/11 attacks on America changed his thinking.

"There was a mind-set among a lot of us that we could never be involved in an armed struggle again," says Nee (61). "I was in the marines. Now I see American soldiers alongside British troops in Iraq, and it gives you a different outlook. We were allies before 9/11, but 9/11 really brought it to the forefront of my mind, that I could not be involved in an armed struggle again. For me it was over."

Cathy Murphy (58), who began Irish solidarity after the hunger strikes, agrees. "I can't understand the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA. After 9/11, I don't think they'll ever get support from the United States. Never," she says. "I believe that's another way that Gerry Adams and them have to stay the way they are right now, if they want support and help from the United States."

However, 'Mathew' (not his real name) - who was also a major player in supplying weaponry to the IRA for over a decade - said that the 9/11 attacks had no relevance.

"They're two totally different situations. No Irish republican group, or anybody that I ever met, would ever consider doing anything like that. Those bombings in Birmingham and Guildford, I don't know who did that or what they were thinking when they did that," says Mathew. "The IRA people I worked with, their main enemy was the British Army. And that's who they wanted to fight. They didn't even think too much of the police. They considered their number one enemy to be the British Army."

Paul Spadaccinni (40), a Dubliner who moved to South Boston in 1986, says that republican dissidents who castigate Sinn Fein and the IRA for supporting a peace agreement that enshrines the principle of consent, are missing the point.

"You have to move forward. You can't make judgments based on what your grandfather, or your great grandfather thought. It's not the same kettle of fish anymore. And if we kept on the road we were on, it wasn't going to get anywhere," said Spadacinni.

However, for Mathew, while still strongly supportive of Sinn Fein and the IRA, the acceptance of consent unsettled him.

"To this day, I'm still not sure how I feel about that," he says. " You could understand, people were trying to negotiate. There have to be compromises in any negotiation. I am not one of these hard-line revolutionaries. You have to be involved with the reality of things. And reality is about compromises."

Retaliation

Mathew said that he had "mixed feelings" concerning Sinn Fein's recent endorsement of policing, but that he opposed the IRA's decision to fully decommission.

"I disagreed. I still disagree," insists Mathew. "The fact that stuff would still be in a dump and was still available would tend to hold back certain elements - the Ku Klux Klan element - in the north. These people, loyalists, are basically cowards and any thought that there may be retaliation against them tended to keep them in control. The police certainly weren't doing it - the police were taking part in it."

However, Nee believes the IRA was right to shed its weaponry.

"I spent a lot of years putting together weapons shipments. So what if they cut them up? They served their purpose," he says. " Eventually, we will get the things we need through politics. You're not going to get it all at once. You're not going to heal everything all at once. But it's coming."

Like all of those interviewed, Nee said that he never viewed unionists as the enemy. "I think the level-headed ones can look into the future and see that a united Ireland is inevitable, that the days of ascendancy are over.

"Whether they consider themselves loyalists, British, Irish, they all live on one little island and sooner or later they have to talk and get along."

Asked whether he felt Ian Paisley will ever change, Nee smiled and said: " The only way that Ian Paisley will change is if Alzheimer's sets in and he forgets who he is."