Irish Northern Aid Committee

The Irish Northern Aid Committee, known as Noraid, was a fundraising group through which supporters in the United States backed the IRA’s armed campaign. Its role in the account is shown through Brendan Hughes’s visit to New York: a journey intended to build morale and financial support that instead revealed how sharply the politics of some American supporters could differ from his own.

Role and Diaspora Context

Hughes travelled to the United States after his release from prison, carrying the standing of a republican icon and seeking morale and financial support for the armed campaign. Irish American support drew on a long history of migration shaped by poverty, famine and discrimination. The book notes that support for armed struggle could seem more fervent in Boston or Chicago than in Belfast or Derry, where families lived close to the danger of violence. Some people in Ireland viewed American advocates of the war as safely distant from its consequences, even as the IRA had long relied on the United States for support. Hughes himself had earlier obtained an Armalite rifle from America.

The New York Meeting

In New York, Hughes met representatives of the Irish Northern Aid Committee. At one meeting, an opinionated Irish American benefactor told him that the Provos should widen their range of targets to include anyone associated with the British regime. Hughes tested the proposal by asking whether that meant shooting postmen. When the man affirmed that it did, Hughes answered that the benefactor should return to Belfast with him and shoot them himself. The exchange made the distance between advocacy and direct participation explicit: the proposed escalation came from a supporter who was not himself facing the consequences of such operations.

Political Disagreement and Outcome

The encounter also exposed an ideological divide. Hughes still regarded himself as a revolutionary socialist, while he found that socialism was not in vogue among the conservative Irish Americans who supported the IRA in the 1980s. The benefactor offered him a suitcase full of money for the cause, but as their conversation continued Hughes found the man’s politics increasingly objectionable. He eventually rejected the money in anger, and the benefactor left with the suitcase. The episode presents Noraid’s fundraising world not as politically uniform, but as a meeting point between support for Irish independence and views on violence that Hughes himself would not accept.