NORAID and the Harrods bombing - 23 December 1983

There was once, perhaps there will always be, an American film star with an Irish name.

It was his own and I say that because in his time practically every film star who'd been born with a Russian, German, Lithuanian, Polish, name had it changed by the producers, most of whom at that time were Russian, German, Lithuanian, Polish immigrants and they – in spite of the evidence of scores of millions of immigrants from central and southern Europe – assumed that the United States was essentially an Anglo Saxon country. As Robert Benchley put it, "We call England the motherland because most of us come from Poland or Italy".

Anyway, this strange prejudice, strange in the men who held it, was responsible for Frederick Austerlitz being rename Fred Astaire, Spangler Brugh turning into Robert Taylor, Emmanuel Goldenberg becoming Edward G Robinson, Kirk Douglas shedding his true name of Issur Danielovitch Demsky.

Irish was all right, the first producers were canny enough to know that in the cities where they were going to pick up most of their revenue – in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia – the Irish were the majority immigrant group, constituting in some cities as much as a third of the population and if it got out that Paddy O'Neil had his name changed to, say, Derek Wakefield there would have been a hot time in the old town that night, so no changes were anticipated when there appeared at the studios George Murphy, Pat O'Brien, Ronald Reagan.

Well the man I have in mind, I ought to say at the start, was a very genial, large, warm-hearted simple man and at Hollywood parties – always in his case family parties – he was the life and soul giving, as the evening wore on, heartbreaking renderings of Mother Machree and Did Your Mother Come From Ireland? He was on a visit to Ireland one year when I was there in Dublin seeing an Irish friend of mine I'd known since university days. The film star made the rounds of all the livelier pubs, wearing always a green tie and sometimes a green check suit, he embraced everybody right and left. He stood drinks all round; without being prevailed upon he launched into his favourite renditions.

My old friend, a countryman to the bone, was not impressed by this genial man. "I presume to understand, he's what we call in the United States," I said, "a professional Irishman." "That's not what we call the type," he said with gentle disdain, "they're known here as returned Americans." I hope the old film star never heard the phrase, it would have crushed him.

There are about 40 million Americans of Irish origin in the United States today and no ethnic group maintains with more pride or confidence a dual loyalty – most of them, of course, except the long-ago transplanted Ulstermen in the south. Scotch Irish as they're called here. Most of them are Roman Catholics; most of them, I dare to say, are not strikingly well informed about the fearful complexities of the Ulster Irish question.

Among them, of course, there are legions of professional Irishman, especially on Saturday nights and noticeably when an English accent is in the offing. But for the rest I think it's fair to say that they would, if polled, support a United Ireland without going into the terms or conditions of unity.

In fact, it has been a notable failure of British information, British propaganda if you like, that most Americans of whatever origin are unaware of the basic statistical fact that in Northern Ireland, Protestants outnumber Catholics by about 2 to 1 and wished – have declared their strong wish – to remain inside the United Kingdom. I doubt that a majority of Americans knows that Northern Ireland is as much a part of the United Kingdom as Dorset or Lancashire.

I've tried to make this clear to very old friends of mine of Irish origin who feel no particular passion on the subject, but they do convey, with delicate tooth-sucking doubt, that my analogy must be pretty far-fetched. It's their touching tribute to the length and steadiness of our friendship that they don't ever bring up the Irish troubles. I think that if challenged, suddenly some dark night and without access to an almanac or an encyclopedia, I'm afraid they believe – though they don't want to believe – that British troops are in Northern Ireland to keep it by force inside an empire that has gone.

Well if this is the case with educated, liberal-minded people, it's not hard to understand that while the great majority of those decent Irish Americans deplore the never-ending violence of the past, what is it four or five years, not to dwell at all on the long history of Sinn Fein in the past 70 years or so, there is certainly an active minority – and many of them people of goodwill – who contribute to the Irish Northern Aid Committee, known for short as NORAID.

These contributors – many of them not rich at all – I'm sure truly believe that their dollars and cents are going to the good cause of relieving the pitiable condition of families that have been rendered homeless by the bombings and the killings; others know that much of the money is meant to support members of the IRA who are in jail. How many of the rich contributors are well aware that the money goes also to provide arms for the IRA is something nobody knows for sure or will ever know, not even the American government through the Department of Justice, which has been looking into NORAID, its funds and their destination for a long time.

The department says categorically that about three-quarters of all the funds that buy arms or otherwise sustain violence in Northern Ireland come from the United States. The justice department has acted on its findings to the extent of declaring NORAID to be an IRA agent and demanding that the courts require it to do what all foreign agents and lobbies are meant to do, which is to report itself under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and, in accordance with the law, publish the names of its members, say what they do and where its funds go. There's a case coming up before a federal judge in New York in January. So far we do know the justice department has confirmed NORAID has recruited somewhere between 5 and 30,000 American members in 19 branches between the east and west coasts.

Now the president and the most prominent members of the Congress – most conspicuously the speaker of the house, Mr Tip O'Neill and Senator Kennedy and Senator Pat Moynihan of New York have continually condemned any American aid that goes to the IRA and two years ago, they heard the prime minister of Eire say the same thing in a speech to Congress.

I ought to say what is a little spooky to reflect on at this point, that probably a vast majority of the 225 million Americans have never even heard of NORAID. All they see on television all the time is burnt buildings, the distraught wives or fathers of husbands and sons killed on one side or the other, British soldiers peering round street corners and taunting schoolboys, random pictures of random violence, a panorama of diffuse violence, enough to provoke most people I should guess to wish a plague on both their houses.

Now what the atrocious bombing of Harrods has done is to upset this even-handed distaste in the minds of ordinary Americans, bring them up with a shock to some grim understanding of what the IRA is all about and leave them with a feeling, which the Boston Globe expressed as well as anybody.

" Anyone who loves Ireland," its editorial said, "should be heartsick that its good name is invoked to justify this savagery" and the Globe very firmly hammered the point home by speculating how Bostonians would feel if one of their own department stores was bombed and then they read that the Lord Mayor of London had been a guest at a dinner held to raise money for the bombers.

The fact that one American died in Saturday's atrocity has – how shall I put it delicately – has served to underline the miserable fact that the victims were from any political point of view harmless, neutral human beings going about the supremely unpolitical business of taking their children to buy Christmas presents. And most papers and television shows reported the IRA's expression of sympathy with the dead and injured as a nauseating gesture, which certainly has merely sharpened, in a revolting way, the character of the assassins. I'm afraid there is, for the time being, no more to say.

On Wednesday the general assembly of the United Nations closed its annual session. This, I'm sorry to say, will be news to practically everybody listening. There was a time when every responsible newspaper on earth had at least one reporter permanently assigned to the doings of the UN. For a time, the New York Times maintained a bureau of six people. Today, not one paper in a score keeps a man or woman at the UN and for the most part its doings are shuffled off into fill-up corners of the newspapers.

The end of the annual assembly, which begins in the autumn and always tries to finish just before Christmas is, however, worth a note and this year it was worth one small cheer. The president of the assembly's farewell was refreshingly devoid of cliches and polite hopes, he is Senor Jorge Illueca of Panama. He startled the departing guests by imploring the two superpowers to put an end to their madness and pull back from the prospect of nuclear confrontation, to get back to the negotiating table and to recognise that the arms race is acquiring an irrational momentum of its own beyond the control of either side.

The Secretary General, Mr Peres De Cuellar, whose job is to tiptoe on a tightrope above 150-odd squabbling nations took the plunge into their midst. He glared at the Russian and American heads of state, so to speak, and he urged them to have the courage and the sense to negotiate. Nobody, he says, has given them the right to decide our fate.

That's about the only bit of good news I can offer at this birthday celebration of the Prince of Peace. No, there's one other: three eight-year-old boys clubbed up to contribute 60p, 60 pence, to the fund for the police victims of the Harrods bombing. So I want to wish you, in the old-fashioned way, a merry Christmas and, by permission of Mr Reagan and Mr Andropov, a happy New Year.

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