FINE GAEL'S fundraising arm in the United States raised almost $30,000 last year, according to accounts filed with the US Department of Justice.

Publisher Niall O'Dowd is just one of a number of well-known Irish-Americans who contributed to Fine Gael last year.

He was instrumental in obtaining a visa for Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams to travel to the US after the 1994 IRA ceasefire and for his involvement in Hillary Clinton's US presidential bid last year.

O'Dowd, whose brother Fergus is a Fine Gael TD, is the publisher of The Irish Voice newspaper and Irish America magazine.

According to the documents, O'Dowd donated $1,500 (around €1,000) to Friends of Fine Gael.

The body, set up in 2007 and based in New York, has hosted just one fundraising activity to date.

That event was a "deluxe dinner" attended by 147 guests at the Manhattan Club in Rosie O'Grady's Restaurant on Seventh Avenue in New York on 26 June 2008.

Three Fine Gael TDs – Shane McEntee from Meath East, John Perry from Sligo-North Leitrim and Noel Coonan from North Tipperary – donated $150, the cost of a ticket for the dinner, each to the body.

Well-known Irish-American hotelier John Fitzpatrick, who owns the Fitzpatrick Hotels where senior Irish politicians have stayed in New York, is also listed as one of the donors to Fine Gael on the accounts.

Fitzpatrick, one of the leading figures in the Irish-American business community donated $1,500 to the party.

Accounts for the body were filed with the US Department of Justice in Washington last November and the extent of its activities in 2009 have yet to be declared. The body is expected to file accounts for that period in the coming weeks.

Since the advent of the North's peace process, Sinn Féin has tapped into Irish-America for over a decade by sending party president Gerry Adams on the "after-dinner circuit" in the US to raise funds for the party. Fine Gael's fundraising bid has raised nothing like the amount of money Adams' trips used to garner during key junctures in the peace process but the New York dinner could become an annual fixture.

Fine Gael's main fundraising activity on the domestic front is the party's hugely successful annual Christmas draw.

The party also holds an annual National Golf Classic as well as two other golf classics in Cork and Britain.

A spokeswoman for Fine Gael confirmed the party declares donations collected by Friends of Fine Gael to the Standards in Public Office Commission as "donations from Irish citizens are subject to the electoral acts".