PoliticsAnalysis

Sinn Féin’s battle to engage the Irish-American heart, mind and wallet when it comes to Irish reunification

The lives of the modern, career-focused Irish in the States are a far cry from those of the immigrants who escaped a moribund Ireland in the 80s and 90s

The Irish tricolour painted on an Irish pub, The Killarney Rose, in New York's Financial District. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien
Keith Duggan's picture
Keith Duggan
Sat Mar 02 2024 - 13:27

The date of Friday’s Sinn Féin powwow in the heart of Manhattan, framed around Mary Lou McDonald’s generous and inclusive vision of a harmonious, unified Ireland, was lost on no Irish-American of a certain generation.

Thirty years have jogtrotted by since Gerry Adams was granted a visa waiver which allowed him to visit New York for a highly contentious February visit, which Sir Patrick Mayhew, the former Northern Ireland secretary, had attempted to block with an eleventh hour call to the US ambassador to Britain, Ray Seitz.

“The fact was Adams had to renounce violence. Granting this favour before that would be completely wrong – in NI terms and also dangerous in terms of the US/UK relationship,” Mayhew told him.

No matter. Adams travelled. The conference, held in the Waldorf Astoria, was packed to capacity and, reflecting on the 25th year anniversary of that visit, Adams was able to say tell the BBC that, symbolically, the visit was “important in showing that you could build an alternative to armed struggle, and you could enlist support from powerful people in the USA”.

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In 1994, Manhattan was flooded with young Irish people. A piece in the Los Angeles Times from 1989 quoted statistics that over 100,000 had ‘slipped’ into the United States without documentation since 1982.

In a year when the southern US border has become the most contentious issue of the upcoming election, the word ‘slipped’ conjures up a nimble, easily-achieved feat for the illegal Irish. And it was. Irish people simply flew into Logan, to O’Hare and JFK, and didn’t leave.

That piece depicted the new arrivals of having escaped a moribund home country. “There’s more Irish here than I ever dreamed of,” one Irish woman – they withheld their names – told the reporter.

“The pubs at home are empty.”

The arrival of Adams; the ceasefire that summer; the party leader’s hugely-publicised 10-city tour that September; all were instrumental in the metamorphosis of Sinn Féin.

Last Friday’s event was, understandably, more subdued in mood and measured in tone. The energy generated by the influx of the 1980s/1990s Irish has dissipated because some moved home and those who stayed built lives and moved to the suburbs, ceding the city to the next generation of young.

The old trick of ‘slipping’ into America is no longer so easy. Visas are more difficult to come by, and the Irish who do live and work in the city are here through choice and career opportunity rather than the lack of alternative which provoked the great influx in the 1980s.

Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald said "the reunification of Ireland is firmly on the table" at a keynote address in New York.

Little wonder, then, that the age profile in the Great Hall in Cooper Union was not particularly young. There was a decent crowd and the afternoon programme was engaging. The theme of the panel discussions which followed McDonald’s opening address spelt out where Sinn Féin see themselves three decades after Adams’ feted arrival.

Professor Brendan O’Leary and author Megan Stack spoke about ‘the pathway to unity’. Jack McGarry, the founder of The Dead Rabbit pub, and Sophie Colgan, who hosts the Navigating New York podcast, spoke about the seldom-heard story of the Irish who have made lives in New York over the past decade or two.

And it became clear, as the afternoon passed, that the event was a concerted attempt by Sinn Féin to engage the Irish-American heart, mind and wallet when it comes to the next historic step in the evolution of Ireland.

“I heard a lot of people talking and say, OK, we have had this awful trauma collectively,” Mary Lou McDonald noted at one point during the panel conversation that closed the event.

“We had conflict. We have endured and inflicted pain. We get to peace. And there is a danger that people think: that’s done. Ireland’s done.

“We need to rally the United States to the reunification agenda. We are hitting a reset button here. It is part of the same journey, but it has got a different focus now. There will be a [US] presidential election in the autumn. Irish reunification: why is that not a question for whoever occupies the White House at that time?”

Whether the next occupant of the White House is especially interested in answering or even thinking about that question remains to be seen. But in the haloed, windowless chamber of the Great Hall, the mood was of an irreversible move towards referendum and an All-Ireland island.

And had you happened to walk down Astor place, as the great-granddaughter or grandson of a Kelly or Murphy, wholeheartedly American but still aware of this old-country family legacy, and wandered into Cooper Union out of curiosity, you could be forgiven, listening to the conversations, for assuming that the Auld Sod is even now agog with debate about an imminent referendum on a united Ireland.

“I think we are all agreed that we are at a very particular inflection point in Irish history,” McDonald remarked.

“And the Irish journey and all of us want to help in an instructive and an inclusive way. The United States will be absolutely central to this journey over the next decade.”

Maybe. That LA Times piece is extraordinary to read now in the context of contemporary Ireland because it tells of an Irish-New York experience as thoroughly vanished as the Clancy Brothers holding a young Bob Dylan enthral in the White Horse Tavern.

Irish New York in 1989 was a city of construction and bar work and the pubs thick with cigarette smoke and the lyrics of Shane MacGowan. A Chinese grocery store in Queens advertising Irish bacon. Lines of people gathering at Gibbons Import Store in Jackson Heights to grab one of the coveted 4,000 provincial newspapers shipped across the Atlantic every weekend. Nothing like reading the town notes from 3,000 miles away.

There was a latent energy in the Irish American enclaves of the great cities then which may not be as easily to harness this time round.

But Sinn Féin have a history of engaging the goodwill of United States power brokers and from the stage in Cooper Union issued a clear intention to begin a new chapter, even if thousands are no longer sailing.