One law for the Americans

One of my favourite quotes of the last ten years, for a public display of unintentional black humour, came from a spokesman for Noraid, the American-based organisation which raises funds for the IRA.

This chap had been asked, a few days after 9/11, to comment upon the possibility that people might perceive some similarities of method between al-Qa’eda and the good ol’ knee-cappin’ Provos. The Twin Towers had collapsed and Americans were, for the first time, acquainted with the trauma of terrorism on their own soil. The Noraid man was quite outraged by the nature of the inquiry and eventually spluttered, ‘There’s no comparison at all. None whatsoever. The IRA always gives a warning.’

Now, to my mind, this attempted rebuttal falls some way short of actually clinching the argument. But it seems to have done the trick with the US authorities because, a little later, when George Bush’s government drew up a list of proscribed terrorist organisations or organisations which raised funds for terrorists, Noraid was notable by its absence. So, too, was the IRA. Various murderous and wacko Peruvians and Tamils and Colombians found themselves personae non gratae, along with a whole bunch of Arabs, as you might expect. But as far as the US was concerned, Noraid and the IRA were just tickety-boo, and so, at this very moment, money is still being raised for the punishment gangs and the arms dealers and the drugs runners in the shamrock-bedecked bars of Boston and New York and San Francisco and Chicago. Perhaps the Noraid man’s justification — that the IRA are kind enough to warn people before they murder them — was more powerful than I, in my naivety, had realised. Or maybe it’s that the US government did not wish to estrange the millions of its countrymen who, for reasons which entirely elude me, gain a certain sort of pleasure from pretending to be Irish and complaining loudly about ‘centuries of Bruddish Opprussion’.