LIES, DAMN LIES AND LEPRECHAUNS

Michael Moran says that there are two

politically convenient myths about Irish Americans, and demolishes both of them

TWO WEEKS ago, just a day after the Irish Republican Army's ceasefire took effect, my wife and I dined at the home of an English friend. In the course of an evening's conversation, the subject of Ire- land came up when a well-educated fellow guest asked me whether it was true that one cent of every dollar earned by McDonald's goes straight to the IRA.

This is obviously absurd (and I'm sure Ray Krock, the German-American who ran McDonald's for nearly a quarter of a century, would have been very surprised to hear where all his hamburger profits were going). But it's a good example of the view held by many Britons about the Irish in America.

American aims and the influence of America's Irish community are widely mis- understood. This is a hangover from the past which should be urgently corrected. For years, it suited all parties involved, from the British and American govern- ments to the Unionists and Republicans in Ulster, to exaggerate the influence and cohesion of Irish-Americans.

The results of neglecting the facts are easy to detect in the inaccurate way in which the British media depict America's Irish. Attention is lavished on the extremes — the tiny minority who actually raise money for the IRA's operations, and the elites such as the Kennedys who are rich and powerful.

These deliberately cultivated misconcep- tions about Irish-Americans never mat- tered much in the past. As long as Washington and London had the Soviet Union to join hands against, a little self- interested propaganda was excusable. But Washington's new activism on Northern Ireland and the disintegration of the USSR have changed that. British propaganda, which once served a purpose, must now be debunked lest it become an obstacle in itself to progress in Ireland.

So who are the Irish in America, and why is an American president so involved in negotiations on the future of a British province? To answer these questions, it is necessary first to expose the myths and dis- tortions which have been ingested as fact and which regularly turn up as 'background paragraphs' in British news accounts.

The most egregious, what I call the Myth of Population, is a grotesque exaggeration of the size of America's Irish-American population. It's often remarked that in the United States the population of Irish descent is eight times the present popula- tion of Ireland itself. And indeed, accord- ing to the 1990 US Census report, 39 mil- lion people of the 250 million who live in the United States claim some degree of Irish ancestry. As a statistic for census pollsters, this figure is fine. But in the con- text of politics or demography, it is enor- mously incorrect.

Rarely has a statistic been used as pro- paganda so effectively by so many different sides of a conflict. The fact is that almost half of the (approximately) 40 million are descendants of Irish Protestants, hardly inclined to support the IRA. Another sev- eral million are 'born-again' converts to evangelical Protestant Churches, similarly uninterested in (and mostly averse to) Irish unification.

It is safe to assume that perhaps about 23 million Irish-Americans are descended from the Roman Catholic Irish. Yet this population is enormously diverse and has by and large lost its interest in Ireland. The vast majority of it arrived in America between 1845 and 1880, fleeing famine, homelessness and other misery in Ireland.

A survey conducted by a group of sever- al American universities concluded that over 40 per cent of this core group of Irish- American Catholics — roughly 8 million people — don't even know which part of Ireland is independent and which part is British. What's more, all but a few million have by now intermarried. They are likely to have as much Italian, German or even English blood as Irish. In short, they are assimilated Americans, and their views on Ireland are not only unsophisticated, they are non-existent.

Why then does almost every British newspaper article on Ireland and its con- nections in America cite the 40 million number as if it were part of the IRA's active reserve? The fallacy has in fact been encouraged by all sides in the con- flict. Irish nationalists like to be able to claim the support of this supposititious 40 million. Ulster's Protestants use Irish- Americans the way Senator Joseph McCarthy once used communists. And until very recently the British government liked to cite that vastly inflated number of Irish nationalists back to the Ameri- can government to justify London's opposition to any American involvement in Ulster.

What remains of that vaunted '40 mil- lion' after truth is sifted from fiction? Giv- ing the Unionists the benefit of the doubt, perhaps 2 million Irish-Americans have a genuine interest in Northern Ireland. And that brings us to Myth Number Two: the political influence of Irish-Americans.

There is a tendency in Britain to com- pare the Irish influence on American poli- cy to the influence American Jews wield on Washington's Middle East policy. In reality, Irish-American political groups resent each other and lack money and organisation.

There are business and heritage groups who support the Dublin government's goal of peaceful Irish reunification. Tony O'Reilly's Fund for Ireland sprung from one such group. In Congress, there are two factions. One is the 'Friends of Ire- land,' a congressional caucus including Senators Ted Kennedy and Patrick Moyni- han who condemn IRA violence but see the division of Ireland as the root cause. Their support for Gerry Adams's visit last February was a break with past policy. They are disdained by pro-IRA Americans as `St Patrick's Day Irishmen' who only speak out when events are about to over- take them. The other Irish group in Congress is the Ad Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs. This group, chaired by Rep- resentative Tom Manton, would have granted Gerry Adams a visa long ago, but also publicly opposes IRA violence. Since the granting of Adams's visa in February, the distinctions between the Friends of Ireland and the Ad Hoc Committee have almost disappeared.

Finally, there is Noraid, the small IRA front organisation which barely raises enough money to fund its own propaganda activities in America. For obvious reasons, Noraid attracts the most attention of any Irish-American group. Yet the group's sig- nificance has been horribly exaggerated, and it has reaped the benefits.

British and American intelligence say `Will you tell them, or shall 1?' that Noraid at its height, during the Bobby Sands hunger strike in 1980, raised no more than a million dollars a year. Outra- geous as that may sound, it is a drop in the bucket compared with the billions of pounds spent annually by the British to combat the IRA and keep the Ulster econ- omy afloat.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of recent British coverage of the Irish-Ameri- can connection is the assumption that peace in Northern Ireland will win votes for President Clinton.

In truth, the Irish stopped voting as a bloc about the same time they elected one of their own, John Kennedy, as president. By 1960 the Irish had by and large moved from immigrant neighbourhoods into the suburbs. They may still go on a binge on St Patrick's Day, or on occasion even listen to Irish folk music, but they do not vote in presidential elections based on a candi- date's position on Ireland. Did the 57 mil- lion Americans of German descent vote for George Bush after German unification? At most, the Irish in America will applaud peace in Ireland for the same reasons they welcomed peace in the Middle East.

Mr Clinton, whatever his shortcomings, is no political fool. He knows the political facts of life in America, and will not be expecting an Irish landslide to keep him in office. Rather the opposite.

Irish-Americans may be one of the least likely groups to vote for him. Irish-Ameri- cans today are as likely to be conservative Republicans as big-city Democrats in the Boston or Bronx mould. A large percent- age of them hate Clinton for promoting gay rights and abortion. Very, very few of them would list Ireland as an issue of importance if asked.

The New York Republican (in the American sense), Tom King, is in an inter- esting position to put this all in perspective. As a conservative Republican, he is a sworn enemy of President Clinton. But he gained notoriety when he ran for Congress in 1992 by making Irish republicanism a part of his platform. Mr King says his polit- ical consultants begged him to drop the ref- erences to a Gerry Adams visa in his stump speeches, warning they were anything but a vote-getter — and this in heavily Irish Nas- sau County, New York.

So Mr King knows something about the political value of being an Irish republican in America. But his conclusion about Mr Clinton's Irish activism is mixed. He says he believes Mr Clinton's interest is gen- uine. And like a good conservative Mr King ridicules what he sees as the liberal naivety which has led an American presi- dent to take on an issue which will do him no political good, and has the potential to do him grave harm if Northern Ireland should fail, once again, to deliver the politi- cal prize of peace.

Michael Moran is the United States affairs analyst at the BBC World Service.