The Irish gunrunners of Philadelphia who ferried rifles to the IRA
“The boys in Philly really came through for us,” one Irish rebel in America said.
Daniel Cahalane, a father of three with a thick Cork accent and a head of black curls, was well-respected among Philadelphia’s working-class Irish community. A carpenter with his own business in the late 1960s, Cahalane could often be seen driving his dark-green work van from his home in Newtown Square to contract jobs around town. He was fastidious in his appearance, and fiercely proud of being Irish.
By 1972, Cahalane was also one of the Irish Republican Army’s most successful international gunrunners, ferrying rifles and bullets from Philadelphia and its suburbs to arm guerrilla fighters in Northern Ireland. Eventually, Cahalane welded a false bottom onto that green van to make it easier to transport the lethal contraband.
The story of Cahalane’s efforts, and those of a close-knit circle of his peers in Northeast Philadelphia and Delaware County, forms the core of Ali Watkins’ new book, The Next One Is for You: A True Story of Guns, Country, and the IRA’s Secret American Army. By the 1970s, Republican paramilitary groups like the IRA were waging a guerrilla campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland, and reunite Ireland. Watkins’ book tells a little-known part of the bloody, decades-long conflict that came to be known as The Troubles.
Watkins, a New York Times reporter, pieces together how a “strange collection of suburban fathers with brogues” in the Philadelphia-area came to raise cash for and smuggle weapons to the front lines of Belfast. They snuck ArmaLite AR-180s into the luggage of politically-aligned passengers on luxury ocean liners and stuffed them into crates leaving New York ports.
Five of the men involved, including Cahalane, ultimately came to be known as “The Philadelphia Five,” convicted of an obscure weapons charge in a 1975 federal case.
“It was one of those stories that was so well known within this specific group — household-name basis. But you step outside these Irish pubs, it’s like nobody has any idea what you’re talking about,” Watkins, 33, said in an interview, across the street from Philadelphia’s federal courthouse, where she spent months poring over typewritten documents from the case.
Watkins, who was raised near Reading in an Irish American family, had grown up hearing rumors about her own great-grandfather: how he had served in the IRA in the 1920s and fled to the United States under hushed, hazy circumstances. Her grandmother never wanted to talk about it.
In the book, out this week, Watkins documents how American IRA supporters sought to create a plausibly mainstream organization that would garner support, and collect funds, from Irish Americans. They founded the Irish Northern Aid Committee, or NORAID, which had the vague humanitarian mission “to help and clothe the people of Northern Ireland.”
And the group did fund people who were displaced by riots and anti-Catholic harassment in Northern Ireland. At the same time, the group’s cash — collected in tin cans and at informal auctions in Philadelphia and other cities around the country — helped to purchase ArmaLites that soon flooded Northern Irish streets. Philadelphia was one center of that clandestine campaign.
In 1971, Philadelphia’s NORAID chapters were collecting about $10,000 a month, with the city’s donors receiving poetic two-line receipts: Though the strife of the North fill poor Erin with care, / There are hearts true and trusted toward Erin so fair.
Cahalane worked alongside other Philadelphia-based gunrunners, including Vince Conlon, an IRA-veteran who eventually returned to Ireland, and Neil Byrne, an “eccentric bachelor” who served in the U.S. Army.
Together the men purchased many of the guns legally, in suburban Philadelphia gun shops, like one owned by Bucks County resident Marjorie Palace. When the men explained to Palace that they would be repeat customers, placing large, frequent orders for rifles and ammunition that would be picked up by a rotating crew, Palace didn’t hesitate, Watkins writes. She simply supplied the guns.
Cahalane, who led the Delaware County chapter of NORAID, signed personally for 119 ArmaLites that ended up on the streets of Northern Ireland.
As a shadow boss of NORAID in New York later explained, “The boys in Philly really came through for us.”
Watkins especially wanted to trace a single gun that came from Philadelphia and ended up in Northern Ireland, and after years of reporting dead-ends and false starts, she was able to track down a young IRA volunteer — an 18-year-old “with long brown hair and sad eyes” — who was carrying one of the Philadelphia Five’s guns when she was shot. The terrible consequences of that night reverberated throughout her life.
“To change a life … doesn’t take hundreds of guns. It doesn’t even take twenty-five,” Watkins writes in the book. “It only takes one.”