Maeve Higgins: American lens on The Troubles remains all too relevant today

A new podcast series about Noraid shines a light on nationalism, power, and identity during the Troubles. Maeve Higgins speaks to its creators

British troops make an arrest during a civil rights demonstration in Belfast. Noraid was a tiny shoestring operation who were able to shape the narrative for many thousands of Irish-Americans and sympathisers against a highly sophisticated and funded operation like the British Information Service. Photo: Keystone/Getty Images

FOREIGN AGENT is a new podcast series about the Irish Northern Aid Committee, or Noraid, the small but impactful American organisation devoted to the cause of Irish republicanism during The Troubles.

The six-episode series, produced by Novara Media, makes for compelling listening. It covers gun-running, hunger strikes, and spying, but not in a sensational way. It’s an important record of the American lens on that time and the stories within serve to illuminate bigger themes of nationalism, power, and identity.

The writing is intellectually rigorous and the show is elegantly produced, incorporating archival footage, analysis, and history into a historical narrative that remains all too relevant today. 

This week I spoke to the creator and host Nate Lavey and his co-creator and producer Michael McCanne, both of whom are American. Here are some excerpts of our conversation.

Maeve Higgins: What drew you to this story in the first place?

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Nate Lavey: I started working on this story back in 2015. I had read Ed Maloney’s book, A Secret History of the IRA, and had not really thought that much about the IRA or The Troubles until then. But in the book, there are a handful of mentions of Irish Northern Aid and that American connection. That prompted me to start doing a little digging. 

A British soldier searching a Belfast teenager in 1971. Photo: Keystone/Getty Images

I filed some Freedom of Information requests with the FBI to get access to some of the surveillance documents that they had collected over the years. And the story sort of percolated until about a year ago, I guess, when I was telling Michael this story about Irish Northern Aid. And with the election in Northern Ireland coming up at that point, we were interested in the sense of Irish nationalism as being present in the United States and how the meaning of that nationalism has shifted.

Michael McCanne: When Nate told me this story I knew a little bit about the history of The Troubles, but never heard this American aspect and was really fascinated. I thought people would be interested in hearing it, especially people interested in how small social activist groups try — and sometimes succeed and sometimes fail — at changing public policy.

MH: Nate, you’re a documentary filmmaker and a video journalist. Michael, you’re a writer and a filmmaker. I’m wondering why you chose podcasting as the medium for this particular story?

Michael McCanne: Podcasting is an experiment for both of us but when tackling a subject like this, podcasting really lends itself to the material. It’s also a scrappy production, so we were able to tell this story on a shoestring budget.

Nate Lavey: And a lot of the archival material really hasn’t been used before in a documentary way, as far as I know, and I think there’s something special hearing people’s voices. Sometimes a written transcript can flatten out the individual’s meaning. You get so much more through the audio, you can hear them hesitate, or rephrase something, or get emotional.

MH: There’s also this cool interview with Dr Danielle Zach where she talks about the media’s role in the conflict and about how the British government shifted the narrative from an anti-colonial struggle to one of intractable sectarian violence. Is there anything to be learned from that today?

Michael McCanne: One very important thing to say is that the United States government, as well as the Irish and British governments, clearly tried to disrupt the influence of the Irish Northern Aid and other pro-Republican activists in ways that might be found unconstitutional today, at least in the US. That included this attempt to really control the narrative about the conflict in Northern Ireland and to portray Irish-American activists as sort of naïve, or as dupes.

Nate Lavey: It takes Noraid a while to respond to this and this puts them on the back foot for a while but I think what’s interesting is that despite the fact that Noraid was a tiny shoestring operation, they were able to shape this narrative for many thousands of Irish-Americans and sympathisers against a highly sophisticated and funded operation like the British Information Service. And that connection they helped build remains to this day.

MH: You talk about the ‘lace curtain Irish’ abandoning their connection to the struggle back home and failing to support the Black civil rights movement in the US. Can you draw any lines between now and then?

Michael McCanne: The period we’re looking at is really interesting because Irish Americans are participating in this shift away from the traditional New Deal Democratic coalition. Some Irish Americans are starting to drift to the right. Noraid is an example of a reassertion of Irish American identity at a time when, for lack of a better word, Irish Americans are moving towards a general politics of whiteness, as embodied by the ideals of the Republican Party.

Nate Lavey: Questions of Irish nationalism have always, in the United States, been contested when it comes to the politics of whiteness. Just last year at the St Patrick’s Day parade in Boston, you had a neo-Nazi group with a sign that said “Keep Boston Irish”. Which is obviously connected to MAGA stuff, but this idea that Irish nationalism can be used in service of white supremacy is present now and has been present all along. 

Back in the 1970s, you’d see anti-busing graffiti and racist graffiti on the walls in Southie next to pro-IRA graffiti. That is another through-line, thinking about these questions of whiteness and race in a way that remains true today.

MH: Yeah. I found it helpful to listen to because the connection between then and now is just so difficult to understand. It made me a little self-conscious too because I’m from Cobh, where your documentary starts with those six suitcases of guns found on the quay, and I didn’t know a lot about this! What has the reaction been so far?

Michael McCanne: From talking to people in Ireland, we learned some people wrote off Irish American support as naïve or a misjudgment of some kind. I have the sense that that’s the prevailing narrative. You know, whether you agree or disagree with what these activists did, they knew what they were doing. They were not duped or fooled into supporting the Provisional IRA. I guess what this podcast does is explore multiple historical personal and identity-related reasons why people would do that, and how they could do that and still hold contradictory, very American-based politics.

MH: You packed so much into this show — who would you like to listen to this?

Michael McCanne: The hope is that someone who is interested in The Troubles, but doesn’t really know it might be able to approach the story through a different perspective. Also, people who know the story pretty well might find a new dimension to it and be able to explore a new set of questions. And it seems like an important time to do that because this story and the political movement Noraid was based on is still continuing, even if the armed campaign isn’t. And who knows what the future will bring in terms of the border and Brexit and a united Ireland?