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This is something that has long perplexed me. America has long been suckered into the quaint image of "The Ol Sod" presented by little old ladies collecting "for the widdas and orphans ye know" on street corners, subway stops and in "Irish bars" across the country.
Suckered in because this money went straight to terrorists for guns, semtex and hide-out money.
Funneled from the east coast and from the west coast this went on far too long. These are murdering terrorists who preyed upon the naivety, and stupidity, of Americans with hazy images of a place out of "The Quiet Man" and what they should have been thinking of was the aftermath of the bombing in Omagh.

I think what we were told on the coasts and implied in the media was “just like your country had to fight to get out from under the British, so do we.” it was all glorified, something like “it is a war” is what I heard many many times. You know what I believed changed people’s perspectives? Seeing 9/11 happen here.

Suddenly what was happening on another continent wasn’t really a war to be their own free country, it was in fact terrorism. I never put it together as terrorism, naively I suppose.

We can thank our media, and Bill Clinton too. They helped romanticize it -

My last name could not be any more Irish, when I moved to San Francisco for a couple of years (97ish) my dad said “you stay away from the Irish there, remember John Wayne’s Quiet Man was an American, not an Irishman. They are not what you think they are, and you stay out of their politics” What a wise dad I had.