‘Sure, It's Hard to Keep up with the Splits Here’: Irish-American Responses to the Outbreak of Conflict in Northern Ireland 1968–1974

This article examines Irish-American responses to the conflict in Northern Ireland from the outbreak of the conflict in 1968 until the early 1970s. It focuses on developments in Boston, the most ‘Irish’ of large American cities. It details the slow growth of political activism on the Northern Ireland issue in the city and examines the extent of mobilisation and the form which it took. It examines the early Irish civil rights support groups in the US and the circumstances in which they disintegrated. It examines the importance of immigrant activists and of Irish-American indifference to ‘civil rights’. It looks then at the process by which Noraid, a support group for the Provisional Republican movement in Ireland, came to dominate Irish-American responses to Northern Ireland in the early 1970s.