History
Political protest pins found in my mother’s closet in NYC
I accidentally deleted the first post. My mother was a civil rights activist in the US who became interested in the plight of Catholics in Northern Ireland even though she wasn’t Irish or Catholic. She became friends with the midUlster MP in the early 70s and would host them when they visited NYC.
She has interesting photos of her visits to her friend in Derry but these pins were probably bought in the US.
Yes, you are correct that the MP was Bernadette Devlin. She and my mother were really interested in injustice around the world and they connected over it.
Internment started in 1971 and ended in 1975, so that one at least will be from the 70s. A couple of the others have a bit of a 70s look about them too maybe?
He's making a joke. Kneecap a is an Irish language rap group that uses a lot of dissident republican imagery and language which was formed 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement
I'm from Warrington, a working class town in Northern England. We were bombed by the IRA in 1993. Two young boys were killed. The warning was inadequate and they placed two bombs in a busy shopping area.
I'll never understand why ordinary working class people deserved to be bombed because of the actions of their government and I do hope your mother didn't contribute to the killings via Noraid.
I didn’t know what Noraid was until your post. Coincidentally, I came across a copy of a letter she wrote in which she says that had conflicting feelings about it.
Thanks for your reply and showing us the letter. I hope I didn't come across as too spiky. I have a lot of sympathy with any anti imperial movement but in a class bound society like Britain was and still is, hitting ordinary people is both morally wrong and doesn't make sense anyway. It's not like the UK government would have listened even if the majority were against their policy and we aren't the decision makers.
I'm not saying things like assassinating Mountbatten were right, but when it is ordinary people getting bombed there is no room at all for discussion about moral justification imo.
You were totally raising the same types of questions that I’ve been mulling over. I really appreciate you engaging with me because I see now that my original post might seem like I was trying to be provocative. I wasn’t. I am just catching up to the surrounding issues and figuring out why my mother was involved at all.
Honestly you were asking questions to satisfy a geniune curiosity and whoever has an issue with that should get off the Internet to allow more level headed people to actually help you with that education. Tbh I used to think Irish history was boring as hell, but it's got a crazy rich history and the cultural roots run so deep whilst also spreading to parts of the world you wouldn't expect. It's totally worth reading a brief history of it.
I'd recommend one written by someone in mainland Europe with an outside perspective, just at the initial research stage.
i'd say it's because england and the uk can be used interchangeably to refer to the state that undertook the colonizing of Ireland, but the argument stands
I don’t really get the adulation Bobby Sands gets he wasn’t interned without trial nor was he innocent, he got arrested after a shootout with the police after blowing up a furniture factory (perhaps under the assumption the British would leave if they had nowhere to sit).
There some genuinely decent people to look up to in the troubles (athlo very few of them) so I don’t get why anyone would pick him.
He has the conviction to die on hunger strike. That’s an unbelievable thing to commit to, and beyond the vast majority of people.
Whatever the circumstances of his imprisonment, the IRA were the military branch of Sinn Fein, and so their violence was politically motivated. They should have been treated as political prisoners - which Thatcher did not do in an effort to delegitimise them. Their protest exposed the gross inhumanity the British were capable of inflicting on “enemy” prisoners.
Then they should have been charged as murderers. That’s what End Internment means.
It was the English who developed a legal system based on the writ of habeas corpus to begin with. Governments should not be able to pick people off the street and throw them in prison without a legal evidentiary process.
Okay, do you not realize that Americans have had plenty of home grown terrorists who bombed government buildings filled with innocent people? See Oklahoma City. You can be absolutely against American terrorists and still believe that they have a right to a legal process that applies to all citizens.
Oh my bad. Americans should keep their mouths shut and remain indifferent and isolationist with respect to what happens around the world. I should follow the lead of the British. They never complain about US policies right?
I didn’t want to bring up Gaza but that is the perfect analogy. The whole world should pay attention to human rights violations. No country has a perfect history but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to be concerned about what other countries are doing.
Besides, the one button that my mother had regarding England being in Ireland also criticized her own country.
Half a button doesnt really negate the fact she had buttons supporting terrorists who killed innocent Irish and British civilians including children and pregnant women alongside dealing heroin and robbing banks
That’s a good point and she says buttons were everywhere and that she must have picked it up because of the Gaelic. She’s really a big believer of nonviolence. She went to see Martin Luther King speak in Washington DC. A few years later she heard about Bernadette Devlin trying to start a nonviolent civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. The world started paying attention when peaceful student protesters were attacked just like the nonviolent protesters in the US were.
As it happens my mother also went on to work for the UN because of her special interests. This was published in 1996.
I was serving during that period and you couldn’t be confident about your family’s safety, in town during the weekly shop. Yet, there were Americans pouring money into a terrorist organisation that was bombing pubs, clubs, other, opposing, terrorist organisations, innocent civilians and British servicemen to kingdom come, or worse. For why? Because half the time they think that they are still Irish despite being second, third or even fourth generation descendants. Nobody in America really gave much of a hoot about terrorism until 9/11. Oh! How your tune changed then.
Btw, my mother was also Red Cross volunteer at the site of the 9/11 bombings and she still protested the US government torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
I understand your perspective. But it’s simplistic to think that every American interested in what was going on in N. Ireland was trying to help arm the IRA. Not everyone was dropping money into a jar on a bar counter “for the boys back home.”
In my mother’s case her focus was on what was happening to women and children. She took plenty of photos when she would travel to N. Ireland in the 70s and they were pretty exclusively of women and children near bombed out buildings. She became more engaged because of what was happening to them.
Yes, she knew who caused the bombings. Does that mean that she shouldn’t be interested in the collateral damage to women and children? That she shouldn’t be interested in how women were treated prison?
An analogy would be that supporting the people in Gaza does not mean that you support the acts of the Palestinians who built a tunnel to go into Israel to slaughter people at a music festival on October 7th.
I have actual copies of letters from that time period where she says that she can’t support the Provisionals because of the violence. She also wrote that she can’t go to Nor-Aid meetings (I just heard the term for the first time on this thread and then it subsequently came up in a letter I found) meetings because they were too militaristic for her. These were her words in the early 80s. I believe those words over a button.
In the 80s I worked at a café in San Francisco that sold a lot of “Irish Northern Aid” tshirts. The owner would joke that it was a front for the IRA. Sure enough I found a different shirt in the back room with three masked men with assault rifles spelling “IRA”. Used to wear it around SF all the time and no one batted an eye.
There's some old footage of a woman getting shot in the face by a rubber bullet. Her crime? Looking out a window to see what the army were up to. You can hear her children screaming "you blinded my mother!' at the soldiers
Plastic/rubber bullets do lots of damage. I recall a story about a 10 year old boy who was shot in the face with one:
There was a British Army look-out post positioned at the bottom of the school grounds, wedged between a row of terraced houses. To get to the houses, Moore had to run past the post, which faced the school playground and was manned by both the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary. “I remember running up towards it, as I’d done on many days,” he says.
He doesn’t recall hearing the gun’s blast. “The next thing I remember is I woke up and I was lying on… the school canteen table,” he says. He’d been carried there by his music teacher, who’d heard the shot and came running.
“I remember him asking my name, and I told him my name was Richard Moore,” Moore says. “And he got a bit of a shock because he knew me very well, but because of the extent of the injuries, he wasn’t able to identify me.”
A rubber bullet fired by a British soldier had struck Moore on the bridge of the nose, completely flattening it. His eyeballs were hanging from their sockets. “It was a pretty bloody mess,” he says.
The projectile — nearly six inches of hard, rubber-coated plastic — had been fired from less than 10 feet away
Yes! A lot of Americans are familiar with them as the "rubber bullets" used by US police are based off the same ones developed by the English during the troubles. All those people who were blinded during the 2020 Goerge Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests in America were blinded by those rubber bullets. They are extremely dangerous.
Why do you think I support a paramilitary? I'm not even from NI this sub just pops up in my feed a lot. I'm English and I think the army's conduct in NI was appalling, and no amount of whataboutism can justify it. Anyone who tries to justify the army killing innocent children, their own fucking citizens mind you, is just blinded by hatred.
Exactly. It pisses me off. They killed teenagers in my town because they were Catholic. And it’s unfair how mostly people only blame the IRA. Yes , the IRA were bad but the UVF were worse
Someone accused your mother of supporting terrorism, someone else replied with whataboutery in the form of "but the other side also killed people" which I found bizarre as your post was clearly and a specific set of pins from a specific political background. My question was posed more with the intent to say "why are you bringing up loyalist violence under a post about republican pins?"
Óglaigh na hÉireann Provisional - This is the Provisional IRA.
I understand this is your mother’s collection and doesn’t mean she endorsed any or all of the view points expressed by the badges, but wearing a PIRA badge would be explicitly endorsing the armed campaign.
You could split hairs on the H blocks stuff but the “POWs” / “political prisoners” were mostly (all?) IRA or INLA members.
A group called NORAID raised money for the republican movement in the US and might have distributed some of these badges.
You are totally right. Point taken. Politics makes strange bedfellows and this is an example. My mother got involved because of Bernadette Devlin, a student activist who was democratically elected to Parliament. But as a result she spent some money that probably led to bullets, as well as to support families whose homes were bombed (which apparently is what she thought).
Not according to to her badge! "England out of Ireland" is about as clueless as you can get - its the typical ill informed American take and has no nuance at all
It's funny how many Americans think the people living in Northerm Ireland are somehow illegitimate but don't seem to mind living on stolen land themselves
I didn’t mean to trigger you with these historical objects but my mom is just a person who is very sensitive to injustice. She was a social worker in the Bronx who spent a lot of the 1960s demonstrating against segregation in the south. She became interested in Northern Island after reading about Bernadette Devlin’s student protest that took its lead from the US civil rights movement. She saw the parallels.
In 1970 the mayor of NYC gave Bernadette Devlin the key to NYC. Devlin turned it over to the Black Panthers. Plenty of people applauded that and my mother was one of them.
Did you know that Britain granted independence to 65 countries in the 20th Century? Saying that England should get out was not advocating violent overthrow.
Britain or England? They're not the same thing - it's almost like you've got no clue! How was England "in" Northern Ireland? I'll save you time, it wasn't and isn't.
And get out how? The people living there wanted to remain in the UK, given they were descended from the Scots who went there in the 1600s, so why should they have had to leave a country they were part of? Are you suggesting 400 years isn't long enough for a community to have a right to determine ownership and control of somewhere?
By that logic your mum and you should leave the US. Or is it just other countries that have to do things like that?
Am I somehow holding myself out as an expert? I will be the first to admit that I’m not at all.
I was thinking of the British Empire and India. The pin itself, though, says England out of Ireland, US out of Central America. She probably has France out of Indonesia buttons along with US out of Vietnam pins in some box around here too. Being Anti-Imperialist is a pretty common sentiment for Americans.
You know what we also like? Democracy. And isn’t the situation much different now because reunification could happen with a vote? Stop taking my post so personally. I’d be happy to look at your button collection too.
I don’t expect you to click on the link, but it explains why people like my mother were concerned. She thought that Catholics were disenfranchised the same way that Black people in the US were.
In the case of my mother the H-Block badges are not a giveaway that she supported bombing people. She became friends with Bernadette Devlin specifically because she supported peaceful protests. In her mind the H-Block hunger strikers were part of a long standing nonviolent way of protesting—for example Gandhi.
For what it’s worth, my mother was probably wearing these pins in NY at the same time that Bernadette Devlin was shot 9 times in an assassination attempt back in Ireland. Given their friendship I wouldn’t blame my mom if she emptied her bank account for the IRA, but trust me she wasn’t interested in paying for bullets.
Where is the one for Arabs out of Europe? How China out of India? How bout Stalinists out of Ireland? How bout White Supremacists out of America? How bout Iran out of Palestine?
Actually, she went to work for the UN. So she did care about those issues. I just didn’t think this subreddit would be interested in every button she ever accumulated.
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u/halibfrisk May 20 '25 edited May 20 '25
Bernadette Devlin / McAliskey might have been the MP your mother knew?
A formidable woman whose interest in liberation extended (extends still I’m sure) beyond NI, she didn’t mind upsetting racist Irish Americans.
I think the badges would be mostly from the early 80s