“Mr. King and the IRA made the oddest of political couples. While Mr. King was an opponent of legalized abortion, a fiscal conservative, and a prominent supporter of English First - which campaigned against federal funds for bilingual education - the IRA and Sinn Fein are close to supporting abortion rights, have campaigned to give the Irish language official parity with English, and were in a pseudo-Marxist phase when Mr. King made his alliance with them. None of that bothered the IRA's American supporters.
"People like Adams were banned from America, there was censorship in Ireland, and there was no one around who would support armed struggle," a former head of the Manhattan unit of Noraid, John McDonagh, said. "But here you had this guy whose father was an NYPD cop - a politician, a lawyer, and from Queens. We may not have liked his politics, but it was so good to have someone like that, a very credible person who spoke up for us."
As Mr. King became more outspoken in his support for the IRA he was also fashioning his political career. In 1977 he was elected to municipal office in Hempstead, and four years later he became Nassau County comptroller. His breakthrough came in 1985,and for that he could thank IRA supporters in New York.Four years before, 10 IRA prisoners had starved themselves to death on a hunger strike in protest of being denied political status by the British. Week after week during the lengthy fast, tens of thousands of Irish-Americans turned out for noisy Noraid protests - and mainstream politicians, from Mayor Koch to Senator D'Amato - lined up to speak from Noraid platforms.
In the years after the hunger strike, Noraid was a major player in New York's Irish-American politics. That was most evident in the yearly election of grand marshal of the St. Patrick's Day parade, when Noraid sympathizers were chosen each year. In 1985, the group threw its weight behind Mr. King. When he won and led the procession in top hat and tails, before an estimated 2 million spectators, the Irish government boycotted the parade. Efforts to persuade Cardinal O'Connor and the city's political establishment to follow suit failed.
"It was a battle for Irish-American hearts and minds," Mr. Galvin, the Noraid leader, said. Noraid won the battle hands down, due in no small measure to Mr. King's soaring popularity in the Irish community.
"Definitely, being grand marshal helped," Mr. King said. "It gave me an opportunity, a forum for about a month, and the fact that people in the Irish-American community now knew the name King was definitely a big plus." The proof of that came that November, when he was re-elected as Nassau comptroller against a candidate who made the contest a referendum on Mr. King's pro-IRA views. Noraid lobbied heavily for Mr. King, holding fund-raising events and publicizing his campaign in its paper, the Irish People. The following year, Mr. King signaled his wider political ambitions and ran as GOP candidate against Robert Abrams for state attorney general.”
See here: https://thebrokenelbow.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/rep.-king-and-the-ira_-the-end-of-an-extraordinary-affair-copy.pdf
