Feds Seeks to Deport 82-year-old Great-Grandpa Once Dubbed ‘the Leader of the IRA in America’

The Trump administration is trying to force an 82 year old Belfast-born great grandpa, who was arrested in Manhattan and convicted of trying to ship arms to the Provisional IRA more than four decades ago, out of the country, reneging on an agreement signed by Bill Clinton that allowed him to stay.

| 10 Jul 2025 | 02:23

Gabriel Megahey was dubbed “the leader of the IRA in America” by prosecutors when he was convicted in 1983 of gunrunning and trying to buy surface-to-air missiles for the Provisional wing of the IRA.

Now 82 years old, he finished his prison sentence in Otisville Correctional Facility in 1988 and remained in the United States with his American-born wife and six kids. He says the Trump administration under its immigration crackdown is now trying to force him to leave the country by cutting benefits to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

“ICE sent me a letter last week. They said I’m a convicted felon. They are trying to freeze us out,” he said. The letter said all his government benefits will cease on Oct. 23. He told Straus News he won’t be able to afford the medications he needs to manage a heart condition once that happens. “It would cost me $4,000 to $5,000 a month to pay for it on my own. I can’t afford that. I’ll have to go home,” said Megahey, who was born in the Andersonstown neighborhood of West Belfast. In addition to their six children, he and his wife, Patricia McConnell Megahey, have 14 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, all born in the United States.

Megahey was arrested by the FBI at a job site on Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street in 1982 and charged along with three others with attempting to ship $1 million in weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, to the IRA during some of the worst years of The Troubles. Under terms of the Good Friday Agreement brokered by the United States and signed by Ireland and Great Britain in 1998, all paramilitaries were granted amnesty and allowed to work and travel provided they stayed out of trouble. That order was extended by President Clinton to include the handful of IRA members serving prison sentences in the United States, which included Magahey and at the time about 20 others. Today, that number has dwindled to Magahey and two others.

”I worked for 30 years and never collected a single day of unemployment,” said Megahey.

He splits time between a home in Lewes, Delaware, and Riverdale, NY.

On July 9, Megahey was back at Ernie O’Malley’s pub on East 27th Street, which hosted a virtual rogues’ gallery of leaders of Irish-Americans who supported the Provisional IRA’s fight against Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Joining Megahey in the jam-packed pub was Father Pat Moloney, the rebel priest who has run a youth shelter in the East Village for decades, and Martin Galvin, an attorney and the former publicity director of the Irish Northern Aid Committee and editor of its weekly pro-IRA newspaper, The Irish People.

Megahey, Galvin, and Father Pat were brought to the pub for a rare reunion to watch a broadcast of a documentary that was airing in Ireland that day, NORAID, Irish America and the IRA.

Moloney, born in Limerick, Ireland, and a priest in the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church, has long maintained his innocence of a charge that sent him to federal prison for five years when prosecutors said he had a role in the Brinks armored car robbery in Rochester, NY, in 1993. At the time, the $7.4-million heist was the fifth-largest bank robbery in US history. “They never had a shred of evidence linking me to the robbery,” Father Pat has long maintained. An IRA man who Moloney had allowed to use an apartment he leased in Stuyvesant Town was found to have $2.1 million in cash in the apartment, and $107,000 was traced by serial numbers to the Brinks robbery. The suspicion was that the money was being funneled to the IRA. But while several others were acquitted, Moloney and the former IRA man he had helped shelter were convicted of “conspiracy to possess money from the robbery.” A jury sentenced him to five years in federal prison. He fought for the right to continue to say Mass during his years incarcerated.

Galvin was never arrested on any charges, but he was banned by the British government from entering Northern Ireland in August 1984. He defied the ban, and when the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary tried to seize him as he stood next to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, it triggered a riot in which one person, struck by a plastic bullet fired by a British soldier, was killed and several others were injured.

Galvin has always said NORAID was a charity that sent money to the families of Irish Republicans. The British said it was a front for gunrunning for the IRA, which they called a terrorist organization that relied on money from America. Despite his ban as an instigator, Galvin was never charged in any plots. In 1982, however, NORAID’s founder, Michael Flannery, a former insurance executive with Metropolitan Life, was arrested as he stepped out from mass at Blessed Sacrament Church in Jackson Heights, where he was a daily communicant. Flannery and four others were charged with gunrunning. In a startling twist, all five defendants acknowledged they were running funds and guns to the IRA but said it was a plot that was being executed with the knowledge and cooperation of the CIA. A Brooklyn jury acquitted all five.

Megahey, Father Pat, and Galvin all were featured prominently in the two-part RTE documentary, which gave a window into the Irish protest movement in the United States in the days before and after the IRA hunger strike in which 10 IRA members fasted to death in 1981.

Father Pat still lives in Bonitas House in the East Village, where he has battled drug dealers and gentrification and helped many undocumented migrants over the years. The New York Times once asked, “Is he a saint, a sinner or both?” Father Pat is 93 now and maintains to this day he was innocent and had no idea how the Brinks money ended up in the apartment. But he remains firmly committed to the Republican cause. “Ireland divided will never be at peace,” he said to cheers from the jam-packed pub after they watched the documentary.

John McDonagh, a cab driver and playwright who hosts the weekly Radio Free Erin on WBAI on Sunday mornings and arranged the watch party at O’Malley’s, noted that $5 million remains missing from the Brinks robbery. ”I was a little nervous when I saw Father Pat coming in with a shovel,” joked McDonagh.

After the IRA signed the Good Friday agreement in 1998, the fiery rhetoric that NORAID espoused was deemed passé. Sinn Fein, once seen as the political arm of the IRA, distanced itself from its onetime ardent supporters in America as it entered politics full time.

“I hope Sinn Fein acknowledges what Irish Northern Aid did for them,” Galvin told the crowd. “This we hoped was going to be the last time we had to fight for Irish freedom.”

Megahey, when asked if he was indeed the “leader of the IRA in America” as prosecutors had maintained at his trial, was dismissive. “They always lie,” said Megahey. He’s had no run-ins with the law in the 37 years since he was released from prison, he said.

“That was part of the deal. If we got into trouble, the deal would be rescinded,” said Megahey.

Asked if he has any regrets, Megahey said, “not a one. I’d do it all again.” But he added, “I wouldn't get caught the next time.”

”I worked for 30 years and never collected a single day of unemployment.” — Gabriel Megahey