Kathleen Savage has, in her own words, mellowed. Now in her 80s, she remembers being in the kitchen in her family’s home in Lynn, north of Boston, the day after Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972.
“My father was reading the Boston Globe. I remember he put the newspaper down and said, ‘Oh, dear God, they’re killing our people’. And I said, ‘Dad, what is it?’. And he explained it to me’,” she says.
Savage has visited Ireland frequently in the decades since, while also becoming a prominent figure in the 1980s in Noraid, the US-based group condemned as an IRA fundraiser by Dublin and London.
She has long backed the cause of Irish unity, but her focus today is on the need for agreement between all sides on a package that would improve the lives of everyone.
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“We’re pushing for Irish unity, yes, but I believe people are more interested in the economics,” she says. “If the economics work, then people get what they want on pensions, healthcare and everything else.”
Sitting in a Derry hotel just yards from the city’s walls, she says unity now is “less about flags and four green fields” than about practical co-operation.
“Oh, yes, as far as I’m concerned. People have to live together. Everybody should be treated equal,” she says during a break in a 10-day fact-finding tour for a 43-strong Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) delegation. Their trip was themed the “Freedom for All Ireland” tour.
Does she believe her changed attitude reflects a broader shift in those among Irish-Americans?
“Well, it’s a critical change for me, I can tell you,” she says, with a dry chuckle.
“Because I came to the realisation that people have to live together. They have to accept where someone else is coming from. That everyone can keep their beliefs.”
Savage’s opinions reflected the views of others on the trip, though the AOH remains as trenchant as ever in its beliefs, especially about the British government’s handling of legacy cases.
The Irish-American group, who travelled from 14 US states, were told about the last minutes of Bellaghy GAA chairman Seán Brown, who was killed in May 1997.
Brown was kidnapped outside the club as he locked the gates and subsequently killed by loyalist paramilitaries, some of whom were suspected British agents.
“Yeah, that was very moving,” says Ed Campbell, now on his fifth AOH trip. “It’s a horrible thing. One minute, you’re walking along minding your own business. Then people beat the living daylights out of him and murder him. That’s just ... I don’t understand how people can be so cruel. Especially [to] somebody like Seán. He never bothered anybody.”
The handling of legacy cases has to be faced, numerous members of the AOH delegation argue. They point to wholesale redactions in official documents about killings. This must not be allowed to stand, they say.
Back in Columbus, Ohio, Michael Mentel is a court of appeals judge. His great-grandparents came from Thomas Court in Dublin’s Liberties.
Now in his 60s, Mentel illustrates the importance of Ireland for his family as he grew up.
“Every week we’d meet, all the family,” he says. “Three things were talked about. First, the grandkids, they had to be talked about. Then, local politics because my entire family was involved. And then Ireland, even before the Troubles and certainly afterwards.”
The opinions held were traditional and fervent. They were imbibed from his grandmother, Bernadette Moran, who was born in Perth, Scotland, after her parents were forced to leave Ireland for work.
“She was very staunch, very much so – it was about suppression, colonialism,” Mentel says. “A lot of that, obviously, came from the lives her father and mother faced even before emigrating to the US.”
Now living in Albany in New York state, Dolores Desch’s upbringing was also coloured by the history of Ireland. Her grandfather, Thomas Raleigh, was expelled to the US from Mullingar, Co Westmeath.
“He was arrested for throwing stones at British soldiers. They were going to deport him to Australia. He asked the judge, ‘please, deport me to New York – I have a brother there. Don’t send me to Australia’.”
Once in the US, he married a woman who was also from Mullingar, though they had not known each other in Ireland. “She was very anti-Brit,” says Desch. “Her brothers were deported, too.”
In time, her grandfather joined the US army in an effort to accelerate naturalisation, serving during the first World War after the US joined in 1917.
Desch continues: “When he came back, they married. They would fight over one thing – that the Brits weren’t so bad after all. My grandfather would say [that] because he had been in the foxholes together in France.
“They became brothers there. My grandmother never bought a dime of it.”
Desch grew up on Staten Island, New York, where the family helped out Noraid during the 1970s and later. Like the others, she sees the future as something requiring co-operation and agreement, though the Irish Government’s decision not to plan for unification is disappointing for many of them.
A decision to hold a unification referendum requires approval from the Northern Ireland Secretary of State. “So, that’s always the fly in the ointment, right?” she says.
The passage of time helps, Desch argues. “I always believe that as you distance yourself from the violence, the sadness of it, the hatred of it and start to build together, that unity is inevitable.”
Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s Shared Island programme is applauded, but few, if anyone, in the AOH group believe it goes far enough.
Desch is more supportive than many. “You build on what you can, as it goes. That’s a great way to keep going, sharing hospitals, sharing infrastructure, all of that.
“The (Irish) Government has a lot of practical issues they’re trying to deal with and that’s quite understandable, but you always need to think about what the people, in their heart of hearts, want.”
In Mentel’s eyes, Irish-America has moved on, but it has not left its past behind. The AOH was founded in 1836, he notes, and one of its main purposes then was “freedom for all Ireland when it was doubted that any of it could be free”.
“We’re still following through on that. We hope to work with others to achieve it. But Irish America is not living in nostalgia – it has moved past that. It is sitting in 2026 and looking forward,” he says.
“Our role is to encourage, it’s not interference. It’s not just about singing Four Green Fields, and all that. There’s now a more sophisticated Irish America that’s yearning and listening.”
During the trip, tour leader Martin Galvin – the face of Noraid during The Troubles – walked towards the Guildhall for a presentation by the mayor of Derry, Sinn Féin’s Ruairí McHugh, to Kathleen Savage.
Galvin remains insistent that the opinions he held in the past were right, that they have been vindicated, though questions about the legacy questions facing the IRA are deflected.
The interests of everyone in each of the 32 counties will, he says, be better served by an Irish government in Dublin than having “the six counties’ interests decided to suit English interests at Westminster”.
