Family secrets - Irish-America and the IRA
The IRA's gun-running ship, the Marita Ann, which was captured in 1984. The guns were believed to have been procured by Irish-Americans in Boston.
Irish-America has always lived with its contradictions. On the surface: St Patrick’s Day parades, parish activities revolving around mass on Sunday and drifting out of pub doors into the night air. Beneath that: the struggle for Irish freedom, IRA fundraising, gunrunning and whispered connections to a conflict across the Atlantic that many understood only through the painful lens of Irish history.
Speaking with reporter Ali Watkins, these contradictions are the heart of our conversation. Watkins has just published a new book that began as a private family inquiry and grew into a meditation on how Irish-America understood the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’.
“It was never supposed to be a romanticised story,” she told me from Belfast, where she splits her time between her reporting there and her Galway home. “It was about trying to understand both Irish America and Northern Ireland as they actually were during the 1970s and ‘80s.”
The project began with silence. Watkins’ great-grandfather, Peter Drumm, was a shadowy figure in family lore. Born in Liverpool to parents from County Cavan, he emigrated to Philadelphia in the early 1920s and died in 1991, aged 94, before Watkins was born.
Her grandmother, Drumm’s daughter, avoided speaking of him.
“She just never wanted to talk about her past,” Watkins recalled. “I never knew why.”
Then, on her deathbed in 2018, her grandmother revealed something unexpected: that Peter Drumm had once received an IRA pension. It was a fragment, a rumour more than a revelation. But for Watkins, it was the crack in the door that refused to close.
“As a journalist, you get used to questions that gnaw at you," she said.
During the Covid-19 pandemic and confined to her home, she began digging - first in online databases and archives, then in newspaper files. Slowly, the outlines of a larger story emerged.
“This one just wouldn’t go away," she remarks.
Watkins found Peter Drumm’s file online in the (fascinating) Irish Military Service Pensions Collection, which documented in detail how he had joined the Irish struggle for independence in Liverpool as a teenager, first in the IRB and then in the IRA, where his active part during the War of Independence earned him that pension, including raids for arms, bombs, explosives transfer of material to Liverpool for shipment to Ireland and the destruction of telegraph and telephone wires.
Her great-grandfather emigrated to Philadelphia in June 1922 where Watkins would later grow up. Fired up with new-found insights, her digging into the Irish-American community there revealed it had been at the centre of a vast support network for the IRA. The group NORAID claimed to raise money for prisoners’ families, but British and US authorities alleged it was a front for arming the IRA. In 1975, five local Irish-American men - by all appearances respectable, suburban fathers - were indicted for gunrunning.
“These were ordinary guys, soccer dads,” Watkins told me. “But they pulled off one of the biggest arms shipments ever to Northern Ireland.”
About 400 guns left Philadelphia, bound for Derry and Belfast. Watkins decided her book had to be both about the men who sent them and also the guns themselves. The latter quest proved to be almost impossible, yet after many false leads and dead ends, the dogged reporter caught a break.
One gun, she discovered, could be traced by serial number and turned up in the hands of a young Belfast IRA volunteer later prosecuted in 1973 for a shooting. Watkins contacted the PSNI for information - without success. Court records, however, gave her a lead: the name of the young fighter who served time and was now an older woman living in West Belfast. Watkins' emails went unanswered so the reporter drove into her street to finally close the loop on this story. But she never knocked. A realisation swept over her as she sat in her car.
“By then, I had learned enough to understand that silence can be a form of speech."
In that moment, she suddenly grasped a truth familiar to anyone who has undertaken oral history in Ireland: sometimes the refusal to speak is itself part of the story and showing up here - uninvited - now felt like a violation.
As a historian, I too have seen documents that suggest, whisper and hint - and then slam up against a silence that resists confirmation. The absence of words is not a void. It’s its own kind of testimony and must be respected.
Watkins described how she had to adjust her ear. In Philadelphia, she spent long nights in Irish bars, building relationships not by asking direct questions but by being present, listening, learning the cadence of the local speech, understanding what was not said.
“People told me 'no' without ever saying the word,” she said. “I had to learn to listen sideways.”
Eventually she was welcomed into kitchens and living rooms, trusted enough to be shown family photographs, to talk about sports and childhoods. Oral interviews slowly filled the gaps left by the legal and journalistic record.
Her larger conclusion is sobering. Irish-America, she argues, often understood ‘The Troubles’ through the mythology of earlier conflicts: the War of Independence and Civil War of the 1920s, the Border Campaign of the 1950s. Those earlier struggles were frozen in amber, romanticised as noble fights for freedom. When violence erupted in Northern Ireland, many in the diaspora saw it simply as the next chapter.
New immigrants arriving from Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and 1970s reinforced that perception. Radicalised by their own experiences of riots, raids, and funerals, they injected a sense of immediacy into communities that had long lived in myth.
But by the 1990s, the tone changed. Sinn Féin and other nationalists moved to bring Irish-American networks into the Peace Process. Funds were steered away from arms and toward politics. Today, that legacy remains: Irish-America is still a strong partner in sustaining the peace.
Yet the Ireland Watkins sees around her in Belfast is different again. She describes a cultural revival, particularly in the Irish language, couched in inclusive and anti-colonial language.
“There’s a whole zeitgeist about reimagining what it means to be Irish,” she said.
It is a far cry from the conservatism and Catholicism of Irish-America in the 1970s.
Watkins is careful in how she defines her work.
“This isn’t a book about personal history or about a historic chapter of the IRA in America."
It’s how communities reckon with conflict and the tension between myth and reality: Irish-America’s sentimental view of the struggle and the very different, far harsher campaign unfolding on the streets of Belfast in the 1970s and ‘80s. That gap, she suggests, has rarely been properly documented.
Yet, there is a modern lesson to be also learned here.
“We also let Irish-America have the privilege of a complicated, conflict-ridden history,” she said. “But we rarely extend that same nuance and grace to others.”
Her book is thus an insight in how immigrant communities narrate their pasts, about the privileges and blind spots that shape those stories and about how memory lives on in both what is spoken and what is withheld.
That, perhaps, is the real lesson of Irish-America and the IRA: that history is not just written in archives or headlines, but in the silences between generations, the tensions between myth and reality and the complicated stories whispered in communities that carry conflict within them.
Ali Watkins will be interviewed about her book, , discussing this true story of guns, country and the IRA’s secret American army, by Booker longlisted-author Elaine Feeney, on September 26th in Ballina Arts Centre. For tickets, log onto www.ballinaartscentre.com.
