Irish America wants a united Ireland. And it’s ready to fund it. – POLITICO

Inside McKeon’s, one of several Irish pubs that line the main street of Yonkers, the quiet hum of early evening has settled in. Baseball beams down from silent TV screens as locals nurse pints of Guinness. 

Soon, talk turns to politics — not New York politics or United States politics, but Irish politics. 

In an election scheduled for Nov. 29, Ireland’s traditional parties are facing off against Sinn Féin, a political party once affiliated with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the militant group that carried campaigns of murder and bombing in Ireland and the United Kingdom well into the 1990s.

There’s little doubt where the sympathies lie among McKeon’s regulars. After all, it was in Irish-American enclaves like Yonkers that the community once raised funds to send guns and bombs to the IRA, whose stated goal was to kick the British out of Northern Ireland and reunify the island within a single Irish Republic.

Karl, whose great-grandfather came from County Cork, says he would like to see a united Ireland, but admits he doesn’t follow the intricacies of Irish domestic politics. 

“It should be one island. It shouldn’t have been split up by the Brits,” he says, referring to the 1921 partition of Ireland, which granted independence to the Republic of Ireland and left Northern Ireland as a part of the U.K.

Gerry, who moved from Ireland to the United States 40 years ago, thinks it’s time for a change. “I talk to my family back home, and they’re worried about Sinn Féin,” he says. “But I think their time has come. Why not give them a chance?”

The money for violence may have stopped flowing, but the fundraising for the cause of Irish nationalism has continued. 

Department of Justice filings show that Friends of Sinn Féin, the party’s fundraising arm in the U.S., has been busy since the U.S.-brokered 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought peace to Ireland. 

The group, which is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as an agent of Sinn Féin, has raised $2 million over the past five years. Most of the money comes from fundraising events, such as its annual gala dinner in New York, as well as individual donations and merchandise sales. 

While rules around political funding in Ireland prohibit money raised abroad from being sent to the Republic, Friends of Sinn Féin can legally send money to Northern Ireland. The group’s most recent filings show it sent $51,000 (€47,700) to its Belfast branch in the six months from November to April — just ahead of this summer’s election in Northern Ireland, in which Sinn Féin once again emerged as the most popular party in the region.

The money raised by Friends of Sinn Féin is used primarily to advocate for Irish nationalism in the U.S. — including splashy full-page advertisements in publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post, typically around St. Patrick’s Day in March. 

Ciarán Quinn, Sinn Féin’s representative to the U.S. and Canada, says the group’s American supporters — more than 34 million people in the country claim Irish heritage — have long relinquished any talk of violence. Their focus now, he says, is “the next stage” — the reunification of Ireland. 

“The dream of Irish unity, that grá [the Irish word for “love”] for Irish unity, Irish independence and sovereignty, has gone through generations,” Quinn says. “And this current generation now sees the potential of getting it across the line.” 

‘Wearing the Green’

The ties between the U.S. Irish diaspora and Irish republicanism run deep. 

When the Irish Republic was being founded around a century ago, nationalist hero Éamon de Valera, fresh from his audacious escape from Lincoln Prison in England, was hailed by crowds from Philadelphia to San Francisco as he embarked on an 18-month fundraising tour.

The founding document of Irish nationhood, the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, composed by the nationalist leaders of the Easter Rebellion of 1916, specifically references Ireland’s “exiled children in America.”

Irish-American culture is replete with shadowy memories of boxes being quietly passed around Irish bars from Boston to Chicago looking for money for the “cause.”

Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Féin from 2011 to 2018, was banned from traveling to the United States as violence raged in Northern Ireland. And yet, during “the Troubles” —  the 30-year conflict between Northern Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants — Noraid, an Irish-American organization, smuggled cash for weapons to Republican terrorists waging what they saw as Ireland’s fight for freedom.

After the Good Friday Agreement, the guns largely fell silent in Belfast. Sinn Féin slowly moved into the political mainstream, reinventing itself as a parliamentary party both in the Republic of Ireland and north of the border. 

Irish-America also followed suit. Noraid was wound down; Adams was granted a visa and became a regular fixture at the annual White House St. Patrick’s Day reception.

Even today, Sinn Féin enjoys a sprinkle of stardust in the U.S. that it doesn’t have back home. The party’s luminaries are frequent visitors, enjoying name recognition that serving members of the government in Dublin can only dream of. 

In 2019, Adams was given a hero’s welcome by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as she presented him with a lifetime achievement award from Irish-American Democrats, even as then-Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe looked on, unnoticed, from the crowd. 

Sinn Féin’s current leader Mary Lou McDonald also regularly travels to the U.S., where she’s greeted in some circles as a celebrity. In May, just weeks before European and local elections in Ireland, she found time to squeeze in a trip to a small Irish-American club in Massachusetts.

Irish nationalists have also been able to rely on the support of U.S. politicians. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton played a vital role in bringing about the Good Friday Agreement, and key players in the U.S. Congress helped bring the warring factions to the table and ultimately persuaded the IRA to decommission its arms.

As the U.K. was leaving the European Union, of which the Republic of Ireland is a member, Pelosi intervened in the negotiations between the two sides. She told the Conservative government in London that it could forget about a trade deal with Washington if it allowed a hard border to be erected on the island of Ireland.

After months of political chaos, the U.K. agreed instead to hold controversial checks between Northern Ireland and the British mainland. 

In recent weeks, Mary Lou McDonald also wrote to Irish citizens abroad ahead of this month’s election, urging them to ask their family and friends in Ireland to vote Sinn Fein. “As an Irish Citizen living abroad, you should have the opportunity to return and live, raise a family, and prosper in Ireland,” she said, the latest effort by the party to engage the diaspora in an election happening thousands of kilometers away.

‘A Nation Once Again’

For Ireland’s traditional political forces, the popularity of Sinn Féin in the U.S. can sometimes be a source of dismay.

“The unification project does not and should not belong to any one political party,” Leo Varadkar, a former Irish taoiseach, or prime minister, told POLITICO. “It belongs to all parties, civic organizations and individuals that believe in it.” 

He contends that many Irish-Americans believe that Sinn Féin “has stronger support at home than it does” — a reference to the fact that the party has been losing ground in the Republic of Ireland in the run-up to this month’s election. Having brought Sinn Féin within touching distance of government, its leader McDonald has seen support slip away as the party has dealt with a number of personnel scandals and struggled to articulate a policy on immigration, a key issue for the Irish electorate in November’s election. 

Varadkar, a member of the centrist Fine Gael party who often clashed with McDonald before he stepped down as taoiseach in March, has taken up the banner of reunification since his resignation. In a speech in Northern Ireland in September, Varadkar said that unification should be an “objective” and not just an “aspiration” for whoever is in power after the election.

His intervention is the latest indication that the unification question has moved into the political mainstream, regardless of how Sinn Féin performs in this election. The U.K.’s exit from the EU has also pushed the issue to the forefront, even among the Protestant communities that historically have wanted to remain part of Britain.

Under the Good Friday Agreement, it’s up to London to decide whether and when to call a referendum on whether Northern Ireland should leave the U.K. and rejoin Ireland. In reality, it’s a decision that would be taken in conjunction with Dublin — with input from Washington.

Richard Neal, a member of the U.S. Congress who co-chairs the Friends of Ireland caucus on Capitol Hill, says that the U.S. has long had an interest in what’s happening in Ireland. “The Good Friday Agreement is one of the most-significant American foreign policy achievements in recent memory.”

He’s bullish that the next chapter in Irish nationhood — unity — is not far away. “That is where this is heading,” Neal says. “The nationalist question, which has been debated for centuries, is going to be resolved.”

“The nationalists have to win it, but they have to also prepare for it,” he adds. As they do, they’re sure to be able to count on their supporters across the Atlantic.

The Irish-American network can be relied upon to play a key role in any referendum on the status of Northern Ireland, says Dan Mulhall, who served as Ireland’s ambassador in Washington between 2017 and 2022. 

“I think you can expect that funding will flow toward any campaign for Irish unity,” Mulhall says. “The Irish in America have been a factor in movements toward Irish independence and debates about nationhood for 150 years. I don’t see that changing.”