September 21 1974
Irish Foreign Minister Dr Garret FitzGerald appealed to Americans yesterday to stop donating money that financed terrorist activity in Northern Ireland.
“Every penny given contributes to bombs and bullets to kill Irish people,” Dr FitzGerald told a press conference in New York shortly before delivering a speech before the American Irish Historical Society.
In his speech, the Foreign Minister said: “I appeal to that minority of Irish-Americans who have been misled by the propaganda of the IRA to withdraw any financial support they may be giving directly or indirectly through Noraid or similar bodies to this organisation, which is a threat to the lives and security of everyone in Ireland.”
Irish-Americans, he said, were mistaken if they believed their money would help bring peace to Northern Ireland. He blamed the IRA for provoking the “Ulster” workers’ strike that wrecked the Sunningdale Agreement, which sought a common programme for the future government of the predominantly Protestant six counties.
“The IRA looms large as a destructive force, setting Irishmen against Irishmen, and exacerbating bitterness between the Protestants and Catholic sections of the community in Northern Ireland,” he said.
“The destructive role of the IRA in the Northern Ireland situation in the past five years cannot be underestimated.
“Some of the minority of Irish-Americans who may have been misled into supporting financially organisations of this kind, many still believe that the guns and explosives bought with their money are used exclusively against British forces in Northern Ireland, whom they may be persuaded by the IRA propaganda to see as occupation forces present in Northern Ireland against the wishes of its people, or the people of Ireland as a whole.”
Dr FitzGerald said 900 of the 1,000 persons killed in the past five years had been Irish, not British. He added that the British Army was in Northern Ireland as the only guarantee of safety of the Catholic minority.
“That is why no responsible body in the Republic, or among the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, seeks the withdrawal of these British forces,” he said.
The Minister said his government believed there were two essentials for a solution to the Irish problem. They were power-sharing in government by Catholic and Protestants and recognition of the bonds that tie all Irishmen together.
In trying to limit one of the IRA’s biggest sources of finance and weapons, Garret FitzGerald appealed to Irish-Americans to stop offering money on false pretences, claiming the funds for the IRA were being used mainly to kill Irish people.
