I can tell you the exact moment I fell down the reporting rabbit hole, when I latched on the story like a dog to a bone. It was late summer 2021, in the fog of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I was spending the empty hours unravelling a classic Irish-American genealogical mystery: my great-grandfather had arrived in the States in 1922 on the run after being in the IRA.
For most of my life, I had used the tale to bolster my own ancestral bona fides, proof our Irishness transcended the paddywhackery so often associated with the diaspora. I loved the mystery of my great-grandfather’s story, this canvas over which I could drape my own heritage. But by 2021, I wanted more than broad strokes. I had become fascinated by one particular detail of his story. Although he had arrived in Boston, he quickly moved to Philadelphia. There, he nursed Irish republican sentiment until his death.
I wanted to know why he had fled to America, and why he had gone south. Why had Philly become home? Was there something that pulled him, an IRA veteran, to the city over any other? I started looking online for reports on the city’s diaspora, census numbers, extraneous colour.
Instead, a 1975 New York Times headline flickered across my screen: 5 Indicted in Philadelphia in Ulster Gunrunning.
It was a straight story with towering implications. The indicted men – some from my great-grandfather’s old neighbourhood – had sent more than 400 rifles into the North at the start of the Troubles.
The late journalist Jack Holland once wrote that Irish-Americans were “Ireland’s Arcadians”, the type of people whose ideal view of Irishness lies in a bygone past. There are 30 million of us, each with some story that explains where we came from. We are descendants who mine our families’ sometimes violent histories for stories, who speak with reverence – and perhaps some nostalgia – for bloody moments we never faced.
I’ve spent my career covering conflict, from street crime to spies and soldiers. I’m fascinated at what leads people to pick up a gun, and how that decision can define generations. I believe there is often as much trauma behind a trigger as there is in front of a barrel.
[ The Next One is for You by Ali Watkins: Shining a light on Noraid ]
The discovery of that New York Times article was the beginning of a four-year professional and personal journey. Who were the Philadelphia men? Who had they helped or hurt in Northern Ireland? Did they work alone, or were they a part of something bigger?
I wasn’t just digging into this as a journalist. I was digging as a great-granddaughter, too.
The result of this reporting is my book, The Next One is for You, which tells the story of those Philadelphia men and the guns they sent into the streets of the North. They would provide the Provisional IRA with their first major shipment of American ArmaLites.
But the story is not just about this ring of Philadelphia gunrunners. It is the story of the diaspora, which created one of the least known – and “successful” – unofficial gunrunning operations in contemporary American history, operating primarily from 1970 to 1973.
My book examines the Irish Northern Aid Committee or Noraid, the bogeyman that British and American officials long tarred as a front for the IRA in the States. Decades since its prime, Noraid remains shrouded in ambiguities.
After years of reporting, I have come to believe many things. The group was a critical nexus for the Irish-American community, one that fortified the diaspora’s view of the North and spread awareness about the grave abuses happening there. It did good humanitarian work to aid displaced Catholic families.
Noraid also became a useful way for those who wished to furnish the IRA with guns to do so. It was a convenient method to move money and weapons, and a plausible alibi. This was a feature, not a bug, of the way Noraid was created. It doesn’t mean that every Noraid member advocated for violence, or knew gunrunning was happening.
This book is not about who was right or wrong in a long, complex conflict. It’s impossible – and I would argue, inappropriate – for someone such as me, generations and an ocean removed, to make that judgment. Instead, my book is a human saga about immigrant identity and conflict. It traces the violent consequences that connect the book’s disparate characters, perhaps in ways they themselves never even knew. In such an intimate war, in such a claustrophobic place, one decision in Philadelphia could spool out into a tangle of bloody consequences, an ocean away.
[ The Next One is for You by Ali Watkins: Shining a light on Noraid ]
The most complicated character in this story isn’t a character at all. It lurks in the background of every decision and scene, so ubiquitous it transcends time and geography but so elusive that its details have slipped through my fingers. This isn’t just a story about people. It’s also a story about a gun.
At the time I began reporting this book, I had covered violence in America for years. It was a reporting rhythm I understood – I knew what documents existed for shooting incidents, what questions to ask, what databases to search. I knew how to find lawyers and criminal histories, how to gently convince grieving families to talk.
By my naive American reckoning, I believed those same skills would translate. It’s why I set out for this island in the autumn of 2022, having collected a mountain of reporting that I hoped would make it easy to find out where those Philadelphia guns had been recovered, in Northern Ireland. My intention was to identify a specific story on the other side of the ArmaLites, to detail an incident of violence caused by an American rifle in the North. For me, it was the most important part of the story. After all, The Next One is for You is not just an American tale.
But this is where I got the most American of lessons. I had assumed that such information would be easy to find, that the system would be oriented toward transparency. After all, this was more than 50 years ago, and many details about the Philadelphia case were already available in American court documents.
This assumption ground to halt with one phone call. After my Freedom of Information Act requests were stymied, I finally got through to a PSNI supervisor. Surely, I said, there was some misunderstanding; the information I sought was historic, did not appear to be the subject of a current case, and I already had the guns’ serial numbers. The Troubles had ended 25 years ago. A simple search in the archives would almost certainly unearth what I needed.
The supervisor walked me through all the various reasons why my requests would be denied, no matter how many times I sent them. Troubles-era cases weren’t subject to standard transparency statutes. Serial numbers were never released, no matter how old they might be. Lawyers were not able to discuss cases, and no, there was no central court system where I could look up charging documents from the 1970s.
Finally, he said it plainly: “Just because they gave it to you in America, doesn’t mean we’ll give it to you here.”
I’ve learned a lot since that phone call, but I still believe in the importance of direct questions, of holding authorities to account, of demanding clear answers, especially from institutions and governments. Still, the direct American in me has had to learn how to speak sideways, to read between lines and intimation, to see shapes in the fog and – perhaps most importantly – know when to let them go.
I hope the book can be a study of generational memory, a reckoning of sorts for how conflict and history gets distorted or remembered differently the further we as descendants move from it. Irish-America is not a monolith, but we have long been accused of romanticising violence. I hope, perhaps, by excavating this sliver of history, we can wrestle the sharper, complicated realities.
These questions are mine to confront, too. My great-grandfather was well into his later years when the Troubles began, but in describing this project to a relative, she stopped me. She knew exactly what I was talking about, she said; After all, my great-grandfather had donated money to the Philadelphia group for years.
How much did he know? How much did he do? I have looked down that rabbit hole, but turned away. This is the trouble with secret histories. In the absence of reconciled truth, we believe what suits us. Don’t we?
Ali Watkins is a journalist for The New York Times who works for the paper’s London bureau
