Re: And yes, if the IRA were to start lobbing mortar shells and artillery from the nation of Ireland, I would theorize that the Brits would demand that it cease. And if Ireland did nothing ot prevent such acts of terrorism and military hostility, the Brits would have to assume that Ireland's complicity for such violence would justify their crossing the border and rooting out the terrorist arms caches and infrastructure.
Again, by your logic, British stormtroopers should cross the Atlantic and crack down on Clan na Gael, a staunch supporter of IRA.... After all, since Britain is commonly dubbed the 51st state of the USA, we could conveniently spin the whole punitive expedition as a purely domestic matter, could we not?
The Irish-American Connection
by Diane Roberts
sptimes.com
Excerpt:
In 1867, a group in New York City founded Clan na Gael, a secret "brotherhood" partly in response to a failed Nationalist uprising in Ireland and partly in reaction to virulent anti-Irish prejudice in the United States. But Clan na Gael's chief purpose was, and is still, to fight the British presence in Ireland.
Clan na Gael was an inspiration for later Nationalist groups such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which took root in Ireland itself. But the Irish groups always looked to the United States as a sort of training ground for the Nationalist cause. The revolutionary Maud Gonne and the poet William Butler Yeats both toured America soliciting donations to the IRB. In 1913, Sir Roger Casement raised funds in the United States for the Irish Volunteers, later the IRA. During the first World War, Casement also tried to get the Germans to help the Irish against the British and was executed in 1916 for his pains. But it was U.S. money that fueled the Easter 1916 rebellion and it was U.S. money that flowed to both sides in the bloody Irish Civil War.
Things haven't changed all that much for hardcore Irish-American Nationalists. Clan na Gael still collects American money for Irish Republican causes, though it experienced a schism over the Good Friday peace accord almost two years ago, which some say has diluted its effectiveness. Dorothy Robinson, a fourth-generation Irish American and one of the leaders of the splinter Clan na Gael, said at the time that her "core of hardliners" studied the agreement in which the British government promised a devolved government for Ulster, the Irish government gave up its constitutional claim to the six counties of the north and the paramilitaries ordered a cease-fire. They rejected it: "We saw nothing which would lead to a united Ireland."
Both branches of Clan na Gael have been accused of aiding the 32 County Sovereignty Committee, which may have links to the so-called Real IRA, the breakaway terrorist organization responsible for the Omagh bomb in 1998, which killed 28 innocent bystanders, as well as another splinter terrorist cell, the Continuity IRA. The amount of money raised for Irish Republican causes in the United States remains mysterious, however. In 1998, the FBI estimated that American organizations might collect as much as $8-million a year, though Justice Department figures put it much lower, under $700,000 a year.
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