Inside McKeon’s, one of several Irish pubs that line the main street of Yonkers, the quiet hum of early evening has settled in. Baseball beams down

Irish America wants a

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2024-11-28 23:00:02

Inside McKeon’s, one of several Irish pubs that line the main street of Yonkers, the quiet hum of early evening has settled in. Baseball beams down from silent TV screens as locals nurse pints of Guinness.

In an election scheduled for Nov. 29, Ireland’s traditional parties are facing off against Sinn Féin, a political party once affiliated with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the militant group that carried campaigns of murder and bombing in Ireland and the United Kingdom well into the 1990s.

There’s little doubt where the sympathies lie among McKeon’s regulars. After all, it was in Irish-American enclaves like Yonkers that the community once raised funds to send guns and bombs to the IRA, whose stated goal was to kick the British out of Northern Ireland and reunify the island within a single Irish Republic.

Karl, whose great-grandfather came from County Cork, says he would like to see a united Ireland, but admits he doesn’t follow the intricacies of Irish domestic politics.