Noraid is on board for the Belfast Agreement. That was the message one of the biggest and greenest of the Irish-American organisations had for Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams when he flew in for 30 minutes of its annual conference in Hartford, Connecticut, last week.
The presence of Senator Chris Dodd, a confidant of President Clinton, also signalled that Noraid is seen as free of any whiffs of cordite.
The money for the families of IRA prisoners will continue to flow to Belfast from the Irish Northern Aid Committee network across the US. The "units", as they are called, will still campaign for a united Ireland and denounce any abuses by security forces in Northern Ireland.
But if the agreement is good enough for Gerry Adams, it's good enough for the supporters of an organisation which for 28 years has been supporting the IRA's activities while denying that its funds are going to buy guns. After a long legal battle, Noraid was forced by the US Justice Department to register as an agent of the IRA but it did so under protest and no longer files its financial details the way Sinn Fein does in the US.
The flying visit by Mr Adams also signalled an end to tensions that had appeared between Noraid and the Friends of Sinn Fein, the party's fund-raising arm in the US. There were some mutterings as the high-profile Mr Adams and his glitzy New York fund-raisers in the Waldorf Astoria and the Plaza overshadowed the humbler efforts of the hundreds of Noraid workers over the years.
As Rich Lawlor, a prominent Noraid member, told this correspondent: "We'd been around for all these years and now the big dinners and the fancy parties `for Sinn Fein' have been attended by people who before wouldn't even look at us." As Mr Adams began getting visas for fund-raising during the last three years, "a lot of the wealthier people were coming on board for Sinn Fein," he said.
But Mr Lawlor, a former member of Connecticut state assembly, is happy that this resentment is now in the past thanks to Mr Adams showing up to praise the Noraid faithful in person for their work for the cause. Mr Adams embraced the mother of Richard Johnson, a US citizen serving out a 10-year sentence in a federal prison on a charge of illegal export of weapons technology.
Mr Adams himself referred to the tensions when he recalled that a prominent Noraid member told him that "a couple of years ago we thought you wanted to get rid of Noraid". But now all that is in the past.
Martin Galvin, once Noraid's bestknown member for his exploits in avoiding a ban on his entry to Northern Ireland, also belongs to the past. He had already split from Noraid where he had been a director of publicity and an editor of the Irish People, but now his opposition to the Belfast Agreement left him a target of the barbs at the Hartford conference aimed at dissenters.
Paul Doris, chairman of Noraid, told the conference: "Enough is enough. We won't let a few begrudgers and naysayers, primarily based in New York city, ruin the hopes of a new generation of Irish."
Another former prominent member of Noraid opposing the agreement is John McDonagh, who runs the Radio Free Eireann show on a New York station and has been promoting the aims of the 32-County Sovereignty Committee of Ms Bernadette SandsMcKevitt. For him Sinn Fein has accepted a "partitionist" agreement and its members can no longer appear on his show.
Incidentally, Hartford has the only monument in the US dedicated to Bobby Sands and the dead hunger-strikers. It was erected by Noraid and donated to the city. The Noraid delegates made a pilgrimage to the landscaped monument after a reception in City Hall.
As Mr Adams spoke, a banner hung in front of the top table, saying "England get out of Ireland". It seemed out of synch with the agreement Noraid now accepts, which means that England gets out of Ireland only when there is a majority ready to vote for that in Northern Ireland.
Mr Adams glossed over the "consent" aspect of the agreement and instead talked about Northern Ireland now being in a "limbo" situation where Britain was on the way out, but it was like a divorce with one parent hanging on "until the children grow up".
In spite of its hardline reputation, Noraid has shown enough flexibility to follow the shifts in Sinn Fein policy in recent years, even if this meant the loss of some big names.
Michael Flannery - the once-venerated founder member of Noraid who came to the US after fighting in the War of Independence and on the republican side in the Civil War - is dead, but he had broken from Noraid when it followed the Sinn Fein decision to end the abstentionist policy in 1986. He switched support to Republican Sinn Fein and even opposed the 1994 IRA ceasefire. For the Noraid members as they later sang rebel songs and danced in the conference rooms of the Holiday Inn in Hartford, Mr Flannery was just history. But with his republican record he could not have been called one of the "long rifles", or armchair gunmen, as Paul Doris sarcastically described the present dissenters from the agreement.
After the Belfast Agreement two prominent Sinn Fein members who have been jailed for IRA activities, Joe Cahill and Martin Ferris, toured the New York area selling the agreement to Noraid activists. Ms Sands-McKevitt, with the help of Martin Galvin, was visiting the same Irish-American haunts and bars with the opposite message, but even the memory of her martyr brother could not win over the Noraid members.
They are putting their trust in Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and expecting the prison doors to swing open and make their organisation redundant. But they are also expecting a united Ireland when the "divorce" decree is made absolute.