Posted on 03/12/2005 6:31:50 PM PST by quidnunc
Sinn Fein has had to call off a series of St Patrick’s Day fundraising events in America this week as pressure on Gerry Adams, the party’s president, spreads across the Atlantic.
The events have been downgraded to speaking engagements after Adams was advised he would not be given permission to raise money in America because the IRA has come under heavy criticism for its involvement in bank robbery, money laundering and murder.
Senior Irish-American senators have now demanded that the terrorist group disband.
The reversal in Sinn Fein’s fortunes is largely due to the unrelenting campaign mounted by the girlfriend and five sisters of Robert McCartney, a Belfast father of two knifed to death by an IRA gang six weeks ago.
Previous tours on the weeks around St Patrick’s Day — which falls on Thursday — have been lucrative for Adams, sometimes raising more than $100,000 (£52,000) from IRA supporters at black-tie events.
The hat may be discreetly passed round to cover expenses at this week’s events, but there will be no entry charge. Some backers may also feel the £26.5m raid on the Northern Bank in Belfast just before Christmas, for which the IRA has been blamed, makes the need for funds less urgent.
Since he was first granted a US visa by Bill Clinton in 1994, Adams has hogged the media limelight on American tours. This time, however, he will be overshadowed by the McCartney women, who are expected to appear on Larry King Live.
The women have also been granted an audience with President George W Bush while Adams and other Northern Irish politicians are excluded from the White House for the first time in more than a decade.
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(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
And this is all butthump and means about as much as Syria's promise to take its troops outta Lebanon.
All BLARNEY!
...British identity propaganda BS. Our USA outlawed giving money to the IRA a long time ago.
I was referring to the thread, BTW. I'm an American and do identify as one.
One quite fair criticism which the British laid against the War on Terror, at least initially, was that the U.S. had turned a blind eye to Irish-American funding of terrorism for years. In fact, such support for Irish terrorism goes back as far as aid to the Fenian raiders against Canada shortly after the Civil War.
posted here also http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1361650/posts
'Bout damn time.
The money wasn't donated directly to the IRA, it was given to various 'relief societies' which everybody understood were front groups for the IRA.
one more IRA ping
Has the Catholic church ever refused Communion to such terrorists?
Had the colonists not practiced terrorism agains the British, we would still be British today. The Northern Ireland Irish want what we have and what they Republic of Ireland has....freedom from the British. Any of us can understand that as Americans.
It has been some 10 years since I have actively followed the politics of Northern Ireland, and while I do not agree with the all the tactics of Sinn Fein, I understand their cause. They should have their freedom. In the movie "The Patriot" they said they tried talks and that didn't work, they tried greivances and that didn't work. And all that was left was war. Any short course on British history proves that that's all the British understand.
Today's IRA has nothing in common with the IRA that many older Irish-Americans were so proud of. This is not the Michael Collin's IRA. This is a philosophically Marxists and functionally criminal organization that is paranoid and criminally vicious. It's long past time for people to give up their quixotic illusions that this is the mythical IRA. Gerry Adams is a fraud; he's an evil man. Kennedy should do something right for a change and not meet with this man.
But now they seemed to have transmogrified into nothing more than a particularly violent crime syndicate.
A majority of the residents of Northen Ireland wish to remain in the UK, and that should be an end of it.
See my post #14. I'm afraid too many Americans know about Irish history only from movies. The Irish Catholics suffer more from the IRA now than from the Brits. The IRA is more like the mafia than like legitimate armed combatants.
The majority of the American colonists wished to remain a part of Great Britain at the outbreak of the first civil war. We won our independence in spite of them. Causes are won by active minorities. One has to look only at the pro homosexual movement to understand that.
Besides, majority rule in the antitheses of how we do things in the USA. We are a democratic republic and have an electoral college so that the majority doesn't rule.
You're pro-terrorist then, if so why don't you just come out and say so?
The majority of Cubans want to be free. A violent minority wants them to be communists. Using your theory, and I know you're playing the devil's advocate (as if he needs help), Cubans deserve Castro. And as for comparing the US struggle with Britain in 1176, it ignores the fact that there is an Ireland that's free of Britain. And it is at its wits end with today's IRA. The Americans who led to the US to Independence have nothing philosophically in common with the IRA.
That's 1776 not 1176.
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