I

Shortly after his first election as mayor, Daley insisted on the return of the St Patrick’s Day parade to downtown Chicago. Since 1869, it had been removed from the Loop and replaced with small events held in various neighbourhoods. Under Daley, the parade rose to become one of the premier events in the civic calendar. Some observers recall that he never seemed more in his element, and more like a Gaelic chieftain, than when he was marching down State Street, shillelagh in hand, with the river dyed green behind him. While Daley revelled in this St Patrick’s Day kitsch, events in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s gave him a more practical opportunity to show concern for his ancestral heritage.

After Ireland was partitioned in 1921, the Ulster Unionist Party monopolised political power in Belfast and generally catered to the needs of the Protestant majority. While Catholic nationalists had many grievances against the central government, discrimination was most blatant at the local level. Unionists gerrymandered electoral boundaries to ensure their control of district councils. These local authorities became associated with a wide range of discriminatory practices against the Catholic community, particularly in the allocation of services, jobs and public housing.

In 1967, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was created to challenge discrimination under the Stormont regime. Its non-violent campaigns were inspired by contemporary international political movements, especially the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations on US college campuses and the African-American struggle for civil rights. By 1969, the NICRA and its support groups were organising large protest marches in Northern Ireland’s towns and cities. These demonstrations inevitably led to confrontations with the Stormont authorities and loyalist mobs. Sectarian rioting intensified in the summer, with hundreds of houses burned in Belfast and thousands of people, mostly Catholic, forced to relocate due to intimidation. Hundreds of those made homeless began to stream across the border to refugee camps, while the Irish Red Cross took on the mission of providing food, clothing and medical supplies. On 14 August 1969, with daily violence making the province increasingly ungovernable, British troops were deployed on the streets of Northern Ireland.

These events were widely reported in Chicago’s three main newspapers and on local television channels. The Chicago Tribune, Chicago Daily News and Chicago Sun-Times had correspondents regularly on the ground in Belfast and ran front-page features on the major developments. Their editorials, opinion pieces and commentaries all generally favoured the NICRA’s objectives and became an important source shaping Daley’s interest in what was going on. In particular, they reinforced his sympathy for those fighting anti-Catholic discrimination, an issue he understood all too well from the history of nativist attacks the Chicago Irish community had suffered when the city was run by a Protestant elite. As Cohen and Taylor argue, ‘Hard as it may be to imagine now, one of the major forces driving Daley — born in a working-class Irish Catholic neighborhood in a city run by wealthy Protestants — was something as basic as an aspiration for full-class citizenship.’Footnote ⁹

Just as Daley’s concern for events in Northern Ireland was growing, several individuals and organisations asked if he would be willing to help those who had been directly impacted by violence. Among them was Dermot Ryan, the millionaire owner of the largest private hotel chain and car rental fleet in Ireland, who had been in Belfast during some of the city’s worst sectarian rioting. What he saw inspired him to set up the Northern Ireland Inter-Denominational Distress Organisation (NIDO) to provide aid to those who had been driven out of their homes. He quickly attracted support from some of Ireland’s leading politicians, sporting icons and entertainment personalities, and began soliciting for funds through broadcasts on Raidió Telefís Éireann and in a series of notices taken out in Irish, Irish-American and British newspapers.Footnote ¹⁰ On 19 August 1969, Ryan, with the encouragement of Sean Lemass, who was a board member of the Ryan Hotel Group, sent a telegram to Daley asking if he would become a patron of the NIDO.Footnote ¹¹

Daley’s initial reaction to this appeal was negative. Ryan, as a supporter of Senator Eugene McCarthy, had been in Chicago during the chaotic events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention (DNC). He was deeply critical of Daley’s handling of protesters and had issued several statements describing being tear-gassed and beaten by the Chicago Police Department (CPD).Footnote ¹² The mayor’s anger at this later made headlines when a group of Chicago police officers found out they had inadvertently booked into one of Ryan’s hotels during a tour of Ireland in September 1968. With Daley’s approval, they immediately cancelled their reservations. Later, with the controversy still swirling, young Irish leftists held a protest demonstration outside a reception for the CPD in Dublin, during which they chanted ‘Daley’s Nazi Pigs Out!’Footnote ¹³

Ryan eventually agreed to refund deposits the CPD had paid for booking his hotel but reignited the feud by spearheading denunciations of Waterford City Council’s decision, in April 1969, to confer the freedom of the city on Daley. In media interviews and letters published in the Irish Times, he attacked the mayor by quoting from the Walker Report, the special inquiry that concluded CPD actions at the DNC amounted to a ‘police riot’.Footnote ¹⁴ This sparked a backlash from conservative, mostly older, Irish supporters of Daley, typified by Richard Walsh, vice-chairman of Dungarvan District Council. In letters to the Irish Times and Munster Express, he maintained that Daley had turned a city with ‘an unenviable reputation for gangsters and hoodlums’ into the best run metropolis in the US, that the CPD had maintained ‘iron discipline’ during the DNC despite being provoked ‘beyond human endurance’ and that the ‘charity of spirit and uprightness of character of this great Catholic Mayor is borne out by his human approach to the inter-racial problems’.Footnote ¹⁵

It is an indication of the degree of concern Daley had for the situation in Northern Ireland that, despite his feelings toward Ryan, he contacted Sean Lemass and Brian O’Kelly, Irish consul general, for an assessment of the NIDO. After getting assurances the organisation had started providing vital assistance in areas of Belfast and Derry, Daley announced he would accept the offer to become a patron. Colonel Jack Reilly, the mayor’s director of special events and principal spokesman on Irish affairs, later issued a statement asserting that ‘Dermot Ryan is no friend, but that doesn’t enter into it as long as you can help someone.’Footnote ¹⁶ Ryan, somewhat surprised but delighted with Daley’s support, immediately replied: ‘Though I have not always agreed with your point of view I want to say that I am very impressed at your magnanimous gesture in joining NIDO and we all here are tremendously appreciative of your interest and help for our brothers in Northern Ireland.’Footnote ¹⁷

Daley, as part of his commitment to Ryan, then organised a ‘Friends of Ireland Committee’ to begin soliciting financial donations. It quickly brought in contributions from political allies, labour unions, construction companies and law firms, all probably motivated to some degree by the quid pro quo requirements of the city’s patronage system. In mid-October 1969, Daley sent Ryan a ＄10,000 cheque for ‘the people of Northern Ireland who are facing so many unreasonable and unfortunate problems’.Footnote ¹⁸ This willingness to send financial assistance to those in need was likely shaped by Daley’s familiarity with the tradition of Irish immigrant remittances back to the homeland and by his own long-standing personal history of donating cash to charitable projects in Waterford.Footnote ¹⁹

At the same time as Daley’s support for the NIDO, and also in response to the August 1969 riots in Belfast, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) launched a Northern Ireland Relief Fund and aimed to raise ＄1 million for the ‘destitute and oppressed Irish in the Six Counties’. AOH National Secretary James Sullivan contacted Daley as part of this effort and asked for his support.Footnote ²⁰ The mayor quickly agreed, and at the organisation’s Midwest meeting in Chicago in November, he pledged a donation of ＄10,000. In January 1970, Daley sent a cheque for this amount to Cardinal William Conway, the Catholic primate of all Ireland.Footnote ²¹

The mayor’s support for the NIDO and AOH was warmly welcomed in Ireland. Both groups sent Daley glowing testimonials from individuals and families that had received aid.Footnote ²² The announcement that Chicago money would also be donated to the Irish Red Cross, however, ignited a highly publicised conflict between the mayor and Bernadette Devlin, who at the time was the most recognised Irish politician in America. National newspapers and television broadcasts regularly portrayed her as an ‘Irish Joan of Arc’, while at the same time fixating on her hairstyle or the clothes she wore. Chicago’s media often amplified these reports, typically describing her as ‘a colleen to excite the heart’ or ‘a feisty, Irish blue-eyed brunette who favors blue jeans and sweaters’.Footnote ²³ There was virtually no coverage of Devlin’s leftist politics and, consequently, most Chicago Irish, including Daley, had only a vague idea of who she was, aside from a superficial image of her as a Celtic warrior princess battling British tyranny.

On 21 August 1969, Devlin arrived in New York as part of a nationwide tour to publicise the Irish civil rights movement and raise money. When it was first announced that she also planned to come to Chicago, Colonel Jack Reilly suggested Daley was interested in meeting her for ‘a cup of tea’ in City Hall.Footnote ²⁴ Initially, Devlin’s first few days in New York were a great success. The media adulation continued, her public rallies attracted large crowds, and newspapers ran stories of how financial donations were being collected in buckets. The longer she stayed, however, the more Devlin began to stray from the traditional nationalist script most of her Irish-American supporters had expected. Instead of rousing tales of Irish resistance to British oppression, she praised the African-American struggle for civil rights, defended her socialist ideals and condemned the influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland.Footnote ²⁵

Daley was given briefing memos on Devlin’s activities and public appearances from the time she arrived in the US. They described how she had received ‘a vast amount of friendly coverage from the Communist, left-wing, and underground press’, and had ‘occasionally led her political adherents in singing the International and given the clenched fist salute’. Daley was also told that People’s Democracy (PD), the civil rights organisation that Devlin had helped found in Belfast, had ‘a program not unlike that of Students for a Democratic Society’. He was particularly alarmed by reports that Devlin had been in touch with leaders of the Black Panthers and that she was going to meet Jesse Jackson, director of Operation Breadbasket, a programme working for African-American economic justice in Chicago.Footnote ²⁶ On 27 August 1969, influenced by this information, Daley announced he would be sending ＄10,000 to the Irish Red Cross.Footnote ²⁷

Devlin reacted furiously, claiming the Irish Red Cross had ‘done nothing’ to help Catholic refugees and had also refused her requests for masks to protect children who were exposed to tear gas during riots in Derry.Footnote ²⁸ In addition, many of the young leftist organisers of her tour were still seething with anger about what had happened at the DNC in 1968. One of them, Leonard Glazer, phoned Colonel Reilly and said Devlin was not interested in a reception at City Hall because Daley was a ‘racist pig’.Footnote ²⁹ Although Devlin initially tried to disassociate herself from these remarks, the damage was done, and whatever remote chance there was of a meeting disappeared.

On 30 August 1969, at a press conference on her arrival at O’Hare Airport, Devlin again questioned Daley’s support for the Irish Red Cross, a decision, she said, that implied she could not be trusted with a donation. She sneered when asked if she was disappointed that the mayor was not there to greet her. Then, in an obvious swipe at Daley, she attended a fundraiser at the Winnetka home of Democratic committeeman Lynn Williams, an outspoken critic of the mayor.Footnote ³⁰ And later, during a speech at Chicago’s Hollywood Ballroom, she told an audience of mostly conservative Irish Americans that if they opposed African-American civil rights, they were behaving like Orange Order bigots in Northern Ireland. Years after this, Devlin maintained that the ‘Windy City Irish never forgave me for this insult’.Footnote ³¹

Brian Dooley in his book Black and green: the fight for civil rights in Northern Ireland and Black America suggests Devlin’s criticisms of racist Irish Americans in Chicago were implicitly aimed at Daley. She was reflecting the views of some of her PD and NICRA colleagues who had denounced the hypocrisy of the mayor’s support for civil rights in Northern Ireland while at the same time resisting the black freedom struggle.Footnote ³² Len O’Connor extends this line of attack by highlighting the irony of militant prejudice on the part of Daley and the Bridgeport Irish who customarily referred to blacks as ‘savages’ and who ‘as the children of immigrants who had suffered so much from intolerance they yet could practice it so willingly’.Footnote ³³

Some critics also condemned Daley by making negative comparisons between his policies and those of the Stormont government in Belfast. In 1969, for example, Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, wrote several columns for the Chicago Daily Defender, the city’s main African-American newspaper, claiming that these included the use of police to violently attack civil rights demonstrators, widespread discrimination in the allocation of public housing, and blatant racial hiring and promotion inequality in government employment and city services.Footnote ³⁴ And Daley had to endure attacks from Mike Royko in the Chicago Daily News, the city’s most read social and political commentator. From the start of the NICRA’s campaigns, he wrote several unflattering columns comparing the Daley administration’s abysmal failure to provide basic amenities in the city’s black ghettos to the Stormont government’s anaemic attempts to improve conditions for the Catholic community.Footnote ³⁵

Daley’s press secretary Frank Sullivan, in Legend: the only inside story about Mayor Richard J. Daley, recalls that ‘because of his Irish background’, the mayor ‘was well aware of the struggles of a minority people for social, political and economic fairness’.Footnote ³⁶ But it seems Daley never saw, or acknowledged, the similarities between what the NICRA was fighting for and the struggle for African-American civil rights. In all probability, like many Irish Americans at this time, he had only a limited understanding of the subtleties of what was happening on the ground in Belfast, assuming, from his romantic nationalist vision of Irish history, it was tied to the centuries-long struggle against British injustice and part of the unfinished business of ending partition. He would have viewed the NICRA’s civil rights campaign as something entirely different from the racial problems he was dealing with in Chicago. And he certainly would not have seen himself as a hypocrite, or a racist, but as someone who was simply responding to the obvious need of ‘his people’ for material support and justice.

There were, however, limits to Daley’s desire to provide assistance. While he may have been confused about the objectives of the Irish civil rights movement, he quickly viewed Bernadette Devlin as part of the same mix of leftist, anti-Vietnam war ‘agitators’ he believed had been responsible for the chaos in his city in the summer of 1968. He must, therefore, have felt some satisfaction and vindication for denying financial support when aides gleefully told him that Devlin had prematurely ended her US tour because she ‘could no longer guarantee to people how their money might be used’.Footnote ³⁷

Years after the clash with Daley, Devlin began spinning her take on what had happened in Chicago. In her recollection, the mayor had desperately wanted to milk whatever positive publicity he could get from meeting her. But she had flatly refused his overtures, embarrassing someone she detested for his racism and militaristic approach to student protesters. She claimed that,

Devlin’s recollections, however, do not seem to square with available evidence. There are no reports of this in the Chicago press. The three main papers covered Devlin’s visit extensively and would have undoubtedly published a story like this had it happened. Instead they reported that Daley had left the city when Devlin arrived and spent the weekend at his summer home in Grand Beach, Michigan.Footnote ³⁹ Once Daley clearly grasped Devlin’s leftist political leanings and saw the groups she was associating with, there was no conceivable way he would have arranged a reception in City Hall let alone send a police escort out to O’Hare for her arrival.

II

The deployment of British troops in 1969 did little to stabilise Northern Ireland. Violence continued to spiral as the newly formed Provisional IRA launched bomb and gun attacks throughout the province and loyalist paramilitaries responded in kind. On 9 August 1971, faced with this mounting civil disorder, the Stormont government, with Westminster approval, introduced internment without trial. That morning, the security forces arrested 342 people, all Catholics, in a series of dawn raids. There was an immediate upsurge in sectarian rioting, shootings and bombings. By the end of the year, 140 people were killed, quadruple the number killed in the seven months before internment. In this same period, 7,000 Catholics were driven from their homes, and refugees in unprecedented numbers again began crossing the border to camps in the Republic.

The Irish consulate continued to be a major source of information for Daley. Helen Gavigan, the acting consul general, sent him updates on the Lynch administration’s condemnations of internment and harrowing first-hand reports about the spiralling violence.Footnote ⁴⁰ Daley’s understanding of these events was again shaped by coverage in the Chicago media. All three major papers reacted negatively to the mass arrests. Editorials in the Chicago Tribune described detention without trial as ‘intolerable’ and compared it negatively to the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II.Footnote ⁴¹ The Chicago Sun-Times likewise described the ‘repressive policy of internment without trial’ as ‘an insult not only to the Irish but to the memory of the barons who won their rudimentary rights in the Magna Carta’.Footnote ⁴² In addition, Daley continued to receive regular correspondence from friends and acquaintances in Ireland. Typical of this was a letter from County Donegal native Kathleen McElkenny, the cousin of Illinois Supreme Court Justice Daniel Ward. In her report on the notorious murder of Fr Hugh McMullan by British troops as he was administering the last rites, she described how ‘soldiers fired shots as he lay writhing in agony on the roadway to make sure he wouldn’t survive’.Footnote ⁴³ Daley was also getting mail from his own constituents pleading for his intervention to help relatives that were being held in Long Kesh.Footnote ⁴⁴

The reports about internment convinced Daley of the need for another initiative, one that would be more expansive, in terms of political objectives and fundraising, than his earlier effort. With this in mind, he organised a reception for over 500 prominent Chicagoans at the Palmer House hotel on 24 August 1971. Invitations to the event called for the need to establish an Irish Relief Fund to help alleviate the ‘plight of the Irish people as they suffer at the hands of their oppressors’.Footnote ⁴⁵ During the reception, speaker after speaker took turns condemning internment and the British and Stormont governments. The tone of the event was set by Patrick O’Malley, president of Canteen Corporation, and co-chair of the new fund, who told the crowd that Catholics in Northern Ireland were ‘fighting as strong a fascist state as the one Hitler ran with his pogroms some 30 years ago’.Footnote ⁴⁶ At the end of the evening, those present voted overwhelmingly for a resolution that ‘condemned the negligence of Britain in fulfilling her responsibilities toward all the citizenry of Northern Ireland’ and criticised ‘the bigotry of the Stormont government which has resulted in blatant discrimination in jobs, housing and voting for a sizable section of the people’. The resolution also called on prominent world figures, including President Nixon, the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury, to ‘appeal to the conscience of Britain to allow the mediation of the United Nations in this tragic lapse from the liberties we all hold so dear’.Footnote ⁴⁷

As money began to flow into his newly reconstituted Irish Relief Fund, Daley felt it was imperative to have some of his aides and associates travel over to Ireland to report on conditions and get a clear sense of where donations would have the most impact. So, on 2 September 1971, Congressmen Roman Pucinski and Morgan Murphy, both loyal products of Chicago’s Democratic political machine, were dispatched to Belfast. During their two days in Ireland, they met with William Fitzsimmons, the Stormont government’s minister of health and social services, who told them that the province’s welfare system was such that there was no need for American money. In their report back to Daley, the congressmen concluded that this was because the minister ‘is Protestant and obviously prejudiced against Catholics’. They also toured through Ballymurphy and other areas of west Belfast that had been severely impacted by violence. While there, they met with Fr Sean Lowry, from Catholic Family Welfare, an organisation that was supplying food and clothing to homeless families, and Fr Padraig Murphy, head of the Innocent Dependents Fund, a group that was providing financial assistance to relatives of internees. Pucinski and Murphy were very impressed with the work these two priests were doing and recommended they should receive support from the Irish Relief Fund.Footnote ⁴⁸ The two congressmen also advised Daley to increase his donations to the Irish Red Cross after they met with some of the families at the Gormanstown refugee camp in County Meath.Footnote ⁴⁹

On the suggestion of Pucinski and Murphy, Daley had several phone calls with Frs Murphy and Lowry, discussing details of their work and finding out how he could help. Shortly afterwards, he sent Colonel Reilly to Belfast with two ＄10,000 cheques for both of their organisations.Footnote ⁵⁰ While there, Reilly also made a draft proposal on how the Irish Relief Fund money could best be spent. It recommended renting a warehouse in Dublin where purchased necessities could be stored and from which trucks bearing the name ‘Chicago Relief Fund — Mayor Richard J. Daley’ could transport supplies to Belfast. Reilly also suggested that the mayor travel to Ireland to inspect the refugee camps and do a tour of west Belfast.Footnote ⁵¹ There are no records of how Daley responded to these proposals and none were acted upon, perhaps because the scale of the operation envisioned would have used up too much of the available funds or concern that trucks bearing the mayor’s name might have presented an irresistible target while passing through loyalist neighbourhoods.

The largest donation in this period came in mid October when Fr Gilbert Graham, a close and trusted friend of Daley, delivered a ＄50,000 cheque to Mary Murphy, the general secretary of the Irish Red Cross.Footnote ⁵² While there, Fr Graham met up with James McDonough, yet another of the mayor’s associates, and they visited Coolmoney Camp in County Wicklow and Camp Lynch in Cork. In their report back to Daley, they relayed the personal stories of trauma they had heard from refugees who had fled Belfast and relayed the gratitude and praise that most of them had for the work of the Irish Red Cross.Footnote ⁵³

Almost at the same time as he was getting this information, Daley was given an unexpected opportunity to get more directly involved in the campaign against internment. This came when Belfast native Brigid McDonnell was visiting her sister in Chicago in October 1971. She contacted the mayor and asked for his help in highlighting the case of her son Patrick who was being held in Long Kesh.Footnote ⁵⁴ This came at a time when the first reports of the abuse of internees were appearing in the Chicago media. Daley put her in touch with Roman Pucinski, partly because her sister lived in his congressional district. After getting details of her son’s case, the congressman arranged a meeting with Chicago attorney Luis Kutner, a world-renowned expert on habeas corpus, nicknamed the ‘Springman’ for his ability to get his clients out of jail.Footnote ⁵⁵

Kutner was alarmed at the details of McDonnell’s case and, with encouragement from Daley, travelled to Northern Ireland in December 1971 to see what could be done. In a subsequent briefing to the mayor, Kutner described how, ‘within hours of arriving in Belfast’, a British soldier held a gun to his head ‘with the reminiscent hard cruelty and arrogance of a Nazi Storm Trooper’. He also met with a number of released internees who gave him details of how they had been brutalised during interrogation by British troops.Footnote ⁵⁶ Armed with these testimonies, Kutner then travelled to Dublin to consult with lawyers for the Irish government who were about to file a complaint against Britain with the European Commission of Human Rights, alleging that internees had been subjected to torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. Kutner also filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the High Court in Belfast on behalf of Patrick McDonnell and for all of the other internees.Footnote ⁵⁷

When Kutner returned to Chicago, he had several meetings with Daley who praised the work he was doing and promised full support for his efforts on behalf of ‘the people who cannot speak for themselves in this unbelievable internment in Northern Ireland’.Footnote ⁵⁸ He also spoke at meetings of the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), the city’s main Irish republican support group, describing police brutality he had witnessed in Belfast and relating the stories of torture he collected from prisoners. These international condemnations of internment created considerable pressure on the British government, and Kutner’s legal efforts were later credited with winning the release of hundreds of internees and securing substantial financial compensation for the trauma they had suffered.Footnote ⁵⁹

III

As part of the ongoing protests against internment, the NICRA organised a large demonstration in Derry on 30 January 1972, despite an earlier ban on the event by the Stormont government. During confrontations between protesters and the security forces, the British Parachute Regiment was deployed to arrest ‘ringleaders’ involved in rioting. In the process, they opened fire on the crowd and killed thirteen demonstrators; a fourteenth victim died later of wounds he had received. What happened on Bloody Sunday sparked widespread international criticism. Jack Lynch declared a national day of mourning and recalled the Irish ambassador from London. Shortly afterwards, a crowd of over 20,000 attacked and burned the British embassy in Dublin.Footnote ⁶⁰

The reaction of the Chicago press to Bloody Sunday was uniformly critical of the security forces. The Chicago Sun-Times characterised the events as ‘slaughter’, describing the British army’s ‘indiscriminate fire’ as a ‘colossal overreaction’ against ‘unarmed demonstrators’.Footnote ⁶¹ The Chicago Daily News also described what happened as ‘slaughter’ and demanded an immediate ‘searching inquiry’.Footnote ⁶² The Chicago Tribune carried a banner headline ‘Death on a Londonderry Street’, showing a photograph of the moment when Hugh Gilmore, one of the victims, was shot dead. It condemned the ‘shooting of civilians with or without provocation’, blamed ‘trigger-happy British troops’ and suggested it was time for Prime Minister Edward Heath to introduce direct rule from London.Footnote ⁶³

Daley was outraged by the reports of what happened in Derry. He immediately released a statement describing the Parachute Regiment as ‘Storm Troopers’, whose slaughter of ‘men, women and children’ had ‘shocked the people of Chicago’. He then went on to assert that ‘the sham of British occupation has now been revealed to the world. Hundreds of Irishmen have been left to rot in jail without charges or trial, victims of every conceivable form of indignity. The shame belongs to Britain and its people.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Shortly afterwards, Daley met with Gerry Collins, Ireland’s minister for posts and telegraphs, and reiterated his support for the Dublin administration’s ongoing effort to get UN intervention in Northern Ireland. He also announced he was sending ＄25,000 to Cardinal William Conway for the ‘relief of the families of the dead and wounded’ and followed this up with another ＄50,000 donation to the Irish Red Cross and two more ＄10,000 cheques to the Innocent Dependents Fund and Catholic Family Welfare.Footnote ⁶⁵

With emotions over Bloody Sunday running at fever pitch, Daley also authorised permits for three large demonstrations that were held at the Civic Center and outside the British consulate. These protests peaked during the 1972 St Patrick’s Day parade when a ‘huge Irish Northern Aid marching group’ carrying placards that read ‘Support IRA Freedom Fighters’ circulated collection boxes among the crowds.Footnote ⁶⁶ NORAID leaders praised the ‘courageous stand’ Daley had taken against the British and his decision to send money to the families of the Bloody Sunday victims. Flush with expectations that the mayor would champion their cause, they sent him an honorary membership card for their Southside unit.Footnote ⁶⁷

Predictably, Daley was strongly condemned by British and unionist political leaders who claimed his actions were providing encouragement to the IRA. Surprisingly, however, some of these criticisms were welcomed in Chicago. Shortly after Daley announced the cash donation to the victims of Bloody Sunday, Virgil Craft, a controversial opponent of state aid to Catholic schools, announced the creation of the Committee for Relief of Victims of the IRA. The group began appealing for donations and demanded that Daley also send financial aid to ‘families of soldiers, Ulster police and others slain by the IRA’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Letters to the city’s newspapers re-emphasised this point, with one asking of the Irish Relief Fund: ‘Is the money intended for the families of those victims deliberately and brutally murdered in cold blood — even before the eyes of children — by the IRA? Or does it only go to the families of those victims “massacred” by the “British Gestapo”?’Footnote ⁶⁹

Some Chicago media also warned of the possibility of the mayor’s donations ending up in the hands of the IRA, an insinuation driven by the fact that there was no formal public accounting of how the money was being distributed in Ireland. In October 1971, Michael Killian, the Chicago Tribune’s leading commentator on Irish affairs, wrote a humorous column that featured the leader of the IRA reaching into a cashbox labelled ‘Mayor Daley’s Irish Relief Fund’ to get money to buy whiskey.Footnote ⁷⁰ Daley was furious and ordered Colonel Reilly to send a response letter questioning Killian’s ‘journalistic integrity’ and condemning him for making fun of the bloodshed and suffering in Northern Ireland.Footnote ⁷¹ The mayor was similarly incensed when, after his statements on Bloody Sunday, an editorial commentary on Chicago’s WBBM radio demanded complete transparency on where his donations were going and warned of the possibility they might end up with the ‘wrong people’.Footnote ⁷² But what most irked Daley was a column in the Chicago Daily News by Mike Royko, who immediately saw humour in the suggestion that the ‘law and order’ mayor was being linked to Irish revolutionaries. His satirical article claimed he had obtained a confidential British intelligence report that had exposed ‘Rennie Daley’, a play on Rennie Davis, one of the protest leaders during the 1968 DNC. The alleged document highlighted how ‘Rennie Daley’, through his statements on Bloody Sunday, had blown his cover as a fervent ‘enthusiast of police brutality’, and was now clearly revealed as an ‘outside agitator’, the term the mayor had frequently used to condemn anti-war activists. With faux sincerity, Royko then claimed British intelligence proposed that the lord mayor of London counter the activities of ‘Rennie Daley’ by ‘establishing a Chicago Relief Fund which would be used for the benefit of the Black Panthers, Weathermen, and other revolutionary groups using tactics similar to the IRA’.Footnote ⁷³

IV

Bloody Sunday led to a stream of new recruits coming into the IRA and a major escalation of its campaign of gun attacks and bombings; 1972 would become the bloodiest year of the Troubles. On 24 March, partly in response to this violence, the British government prorogued the Stormont government and imposed direct rule from Westminster. The Irish government welcomed the move, hopeful that it would lead to substantive reforms that would benefit the Catholic nationalist community. Then, in early July, leaders of the IRA were flown to London to meet with William Whitelaw, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, and other British ministers. Hopes that this might produce a political agreement were quickly dashed, and the Provisional IRA intensified their campaign of violence throughout the province. On 21 July 1972, they detonated twenty-six bombs in Belfast that killed nine people and left others horribly injured. Bloody Friday, as the attacks became known, caused outraged reaction in Ireland, Britain and throughout the world. The Chicago Sun-Times typified the city’s media response in describing the IRA as ‘monsters’ and ‘child murderers’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Similar denunciations came as the Provos widened their campaign to mainland Britain and all three papers began to condemn those in Chicago who were funding ‘Irish terrorism’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Jack Lynch, in response to rising IRA violence, introduced legislation that made it easier to secure convictions of members of ‘proscribed organisations’ through the non-jury Special Criminal Court in Dublin. The Broadcasting Authority Act was also used to censor appearances of republican leaders and supporters on television and radio. In addition, the Irish government became increasingly alarmed at the financial and material support the IRA was getting from across the Atlantic. In Chicago, NORAID had established three chapters that had raised over ＄30,000 in their first year of existence, established a significant presence in the Irish fraternal and cultural societies, and had effectively conveyed its perspectives on Northern Ireland through the city’s network of Irish radio shows.Footnote ⁷⁶

While Irish government officials had welcomed Daley’s statements condemning internment and Bloody Sunday and calling for UN intervention, they wanted to ensure he did not say anything that might give encouragement to the IRA’s support base. Consequently, on the heels of a short informational visit to Chicago by Irish ambassador William Warnock in late February 1972, Tánaiste Erskine Childers was sent to communicate the Lynch administration’s principal objectives.Footnote ⁷⁷ He asked Daley to keep political pressure on Britain but impressed upon him that the Provos were ‘Marxists’, a label guaranteed to earn the mayor’s disfavour, and emphasised they were ‘the single biggest element in stopping a solution’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Shortly afterwards, this assessment was hammered home by Irish Minister for Justice Des O’Malley, who also emphasised the need to marginalise Chicago NORAID. These warnings were given extra resonance later that year when activists supporting a hunger strike by IRA chief Seán Mac Stiofáin forced the Irish consulate to temporarily close after death threats were phoned in to Tim Corcoran, the new consul general. Daley was appalled by this and issued a strong rebuke of those responsible.Footnote ⁷⁹

It was in the context of all these developments that Daley, in the final months of 1972, tried to determine what to do with the cash that remained in the Irish Relief Fund. While he believed that the Irish Red Cross had done a good job, numbers in the refugee camps were declining. Irish government sources had also informed him, unfairly as it turned out, that some Belfast families, rather than fleeing from imminent danger, had arrived prepared for a vacation, with children carrying fishing rods and swimming gear.Footnote ⁸⁰ Daley was also frustrated by the criticism that his funds were almost exclusively going to the Catholic population and the persistent speculation, without evidence, that some of the money sent to Belfast might be ending up with the IRA.

Consequently, in the weeks before Christmas, Daley helped set up a cross-community ‘Committee of Irish Leaders’ to distribute the remaining money. This committee, headed by Mary Murphy, Fr Padraig Murphy and Rev. Kenneth Ruddock of the Church of Ireland, was given authority to provide articles that would, according to Daley, ‘bring joy to troubled little ones’ in the name of the ‘Christ Child who came into the world to bring peace and God’s will to all men’.Footnote ⁸¹ In the following weeks, over ＄50,000 was given to Protestant and Catholic primary schools in areas of Belfast that had seen some of the worst sectarian clashes. Daley was clearly very proud of this effort, stressing the non-sectarian nature of the funding and the transparency of its distribution. He later issued a press release that contained dozens of letters of thanks from school administrators and pupils. A typical example came from H. S. Wilkinson, headmaster of Simons County Primary School: ‘This is a Protestant school which has an enrollment of 330 pupils at present, and it is situated in a fringe area where, as a result of the civil disturbances, approximately 10% of the houses are unoccupied or bricked up. At least one of my former pupils has been assassinated and at least five have been seriously wounded, so your kind gift is greatly appreciated by both pupils and staff.’Footnote ⁸²

By 1973, after all the money had been distributed, Daley felt that the Irish Relief Fund had served its purpose, despite occasional calls in the media that it should be revived to offer Chicago’s Irish community a clear alternative to NORAID.Footnote ⁸³ As Northern Ireland descended into a seemingly interminable round of sectarian violence, Daley’s initial optimism that the conflict would be resolved quickly, and financial donations could make an impact, turned to frustration. His time was also consumed by the daily challenges of running Chicago and by ongoing criminal convictions of members of his police force and those within his inner political circle. In addition, Daley was forced to cut back on his activities due to deteriorating health. On 6 May 1974, he suffered a stroke and had to convalesce for months after surgeons performed an endarterectomy.Footnote ⁸⁴

Though he stepped away from fundraising, Daley continued to work closely with the Irish consulate in Chicago, endorsing its appeals to send donations to cross-community groups in Belfast and issuing statements calling for a peaceful solution to the conflict.Footnote ⁸⁵ The new Irish coalition government that assumed power in 1973 intensified its predecessor’s efforts to keep the mayor informed of its objectives and get his help in working against the activities of militant nationalists in Chicago. Daley obliged by hosting some of Ireland’s most prominent political leaders, including the SDLP’s John Hume in April 1974, Garret FitzGerald, the Irish minister for foreign affairs, in October 1975, and Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave in March 1976. While in Chicago, the mayor organised public forums at which their plea not to support the IRA was impressed upon the city’s Irish-American community. This message was always accompanied by strong editorial support in all of the three main newspapers. So, for example, in response to the Taoiseach’s visit in 1976, the Chicago Tribune told its readers: ‘As Cosgrave explained in numerous appearances here, an American dollar given to the IRA is likely to bring about the death of an Irishman, woman, or child. Any Irish American who ignores the advice of the freely-elected leader of the Irish people, and listens instead to the ravings of a few radical madmen, is a poor patriot — and a poor Irishman too.’Footnote ⁸⁶

In John Hume in America: from Derry to DC, journalist Maurice Fitzpatrick outlines how the Irish government’s overtures to Daley were part of a broader campaign directed toward the national political leadership of Irish America in Washington, particularly Senator Edward Kennedy. Like the mayor, Kennedy had caused considerable controversy over his early statements on the Troubles, describing Bloody Sunday as ‘Britain’s My Lai’ and calling for the immediate removal of troops. But as with Daley, the Irish government helped persuade Kennedy to moderate his tone and give full support to constitutional nationalist objectives.Footnote ⁸⁷ The senator, in turn, used his influence to ensure that Daley, despite regular criticism from Chicago NORAID, continued to appeal for political dialogue in Northern Ireland.Footnote ⁸⁸ The climax of the Irish government’s efforts came on St Patrick’s Day in 1977 when Kennedy, House Speaker Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill, Governor Hugh Carey of New York and Senator Daniel Moynihan issued a joint statement in which they pleaded with Irish Americans to ‘renounce any action that promotes the current violence or provided support or encouragement to organizations engaged in violence’. If Daley had lived, he surely would have endorsed this appeal.Footnote ⁸⁹

V

On 19 March 1976, at a lavish black-tie banquet attended by John Cardinal Cody, Lieutenant Governor Neil Hartigan, and most of Chicago’s Irish-American cultural and business elite, Liam Cosgrave heaped praise on a beaming Mayor Daley for the financial generosity he had shown to the people of Northern Ireland ‘whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed by the violence’. ‘For this’, the Taoiseach continued, ‘and for his concerns that this money be used exclusively to help those in need, the people of Ireland will always be grateful.’Footnote ⁹⁰ While Cosgrave was obviously reading his audience, and undoubtedly overplayed the legacy of Daley’s Irish Relief Fund, the ＄250,000 sent from Chicago was not insignificant. Testimonials from those who found themselves in refugee camps, or were struggling because a family breadwinner was being held in an internment camp, indicate that the money from Chicago, at a very basic level, helped provide a welcome degree of material support. And perhaps more importantly, it showed that there were those across the Atlantic who cared about their suffering.Footnote ⁹¹

Daley’s condemnations of internment and Bloody Sunday were backed up by support for Luis Kutner’s legal campaign to secure the release of internees and by sending money to the families of those murdered in Derry. These interventions infuriated leading British politicians and Stormont officials. Some mocked Daley’s criticisms of the Parachute Regiment, perhaps with some validity, as the height of hypocrisy coming from someone who had ordered his own police force to ‘shoot to kill’ arsonists during riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Others claimed his statements were nothing but a cynical ploy designed to win Irish-American political support in Chicago — a harder argument to sell considering Daley had won the 1967 and 1971 mayoral races with over 70 per cent of the votes.Footnote ⁹²

The administrations of Prime Ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson, while publicly dismissing Daley, and indeed other leading Irish-American political leaders who were speaking out against policy in Northern Ireland, were conscious of the damage this criticism was doing to Britain’s international reputation. There was also concern that condemnations from the US might negatively impact efforts to stem the flow of dollars and weapons to the IRA. So, while the British government was motivated by multiple considerations, the pressure coming from Irish America, of which Daley was an important part, reinforced the necessity to address Catholic nationalist grievances in Northern Ireland. It helped reinforce a commitment to power sharing and contributed to a process that eventually led to fair employment legislation and the eventual phasing out of internment.

In his book NORAID and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1970–1994, Robert Collins highlights the many challenges New York’s Provo supporters faced in the years following Bloody Sunday. Encouraged by the British government, US law enforcement agencies launched a campaign of surveillance and infiltration, deportations and extraditions of IRA volunteers, and visa denials to members of Sinn Féin, all of which significantly undermined NORAID’s effectiveness.Footnote ⁹³ In Chicago, the impact of these pressures was compounded by regular editorials in the city’s newspapers that typically castigated IRA supporters for contributing to a campaign of murder from a safe distance thousands of miles away from the conflict. All three papers also ran investigative reports that reinforced accusations NORAID donations were being used to purchase weapons for the IRA.Footnote ⁹⁴ Most importantly, these points were regularly conveyed to Chicago’s Irish-American community by consular officials and by visiting government leaders who emphasised that a united Ireland could only be achieved through constitutional means. They also encouraged those who were concerned about the Troubles to fund organisations, such as the Ireland Fund, that were engaged in peaceful cross-community ventures. Daley’s backing for these efforts, which from 1973 onward reduced the appeal of Chicago NORAID to a small core of hardline republican activists, may well have been his most important intervention in the Northern Ireland conflict.