Internationalist Review of Irish Culture

Even though she returned to the Bogside on 2 September 1969, with the keys to New York, San Francisco and Detroit, Bernadette Devlin must have felt defeated: she had raised only one-tenth of her million-dollar goal despite her impassioned pleas for aid in the wake of the “Battle of the Bogside.” Her two-week speaking tour to raise funds for relief in Northern Ireland had only underlined the differences between the Northern Irish civil rights movement and Catholic Irish-America. This trip, straight from Derry’s barricades, was partially designed to get her out of the Bogside for her safety and partially meant to solicit money from the deep pockets of America. This paper is an exploration of the connections between radical elements of the Northern Irish civil rights movement and Irish America in the late 1969/early 1970 period. It focuses on how class-related tensions precipitated a split within the Irish civil rights communities on both sides of the Atlantic and how this split eventually created the conditions for the rise of militant Irish republicanism. Specifically this paper looks at the Northern Irish student activist Bernadette Devlin and her 1969 tour of the United States as well as the first conference of the National Association for Irish Justice (NAIJ). The aim of this paper is to begin a discussion on Irish-American networks in the late 1960s – one that not only explores the reflexive relationship between Irish and American class politics but also analyses how those fundamental differences prevented the formation of a broad-based coalition of support.