Look, you folks seem to have a couple of misconceptions about what I am saying.
I have no love for the Provos or any of them. I don't excuse violence or terrorism.
The court cases against NORAID were nevertheless trumped up. The conviction in question was based - like a lot of FBI cases - on the testimony of criminal informers, some of whom had CIA ties. It doesn't hold water.
NORAID was allowed to continue to function out in the open after going through some legal hurdles. It was a political case during the Reagan Era when Maggie and Ronnie were best buddies. If you are going to believe the FBI and RUC and other security forces selectively then knock yourself out
I was present for some of this pass the hat stuff and it was ludicrous. People would throw on some Republican song on the juke box, curse about the brits and collect some princely sum in the dozens or hundreds maybe of dollars. And it was always touted as going to widows and orphans and prisoners' families. And no - I never gave any money.
The Feds were all over NORAID and it wasn't some huge operation. It was mostly one guy in a little second floor office. The NORAID guys did NOT want to hear anything about weapons or hear the word IRA. At pubs where hats were passed, people would get melodramatic and pissed off because it was ''dangerous'' to talk about it as if it happened in Belfast.
None of this gun running and shit happened out in the open - it would have been shut down very easily and quickly. What did happen behind the scenes was more of IRA people coming over and buying guns like Armalites through corrupt military guys or whomever. But they were mostly bankrolled on their own or by foreign governments - like the Lockerbie case. For their own good, they didn't want to rattle some middle class Irish American into getting caught up in a court case. The ones who did do criminal activity on behalf of the terrorists were already criminals themselves - Irish American gangsters and the like. Sympathetic historians of the IRA do not lend any credence to NORAID being a big player - again it was a political case. The case against Flannery was handled so poorly that it only caused contributions to NORAID to increase.
The point is, the whole myth is way overstated. the vast majority of Irish Americans just thought the whole scene on both sides was a shit show and had sympathy for the Catholic side but weren't about to fund terrorism. The whole narrative holds about as much water as current War on Terror Tales.