The Provisional Irish Republican Army began importing firearms and explosives in the early 1970s, with which it conducted an armed campaign against the British state in Northern Ireland.War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History Volume 2 by Robert B. Asprey (), page 1125Global Geopolitics: A Critical Introduction by Klaus Dodds (), page 205British Civilization by John Oakland (), page 108
North American arms United States To continue and escalate its armed campaign, the IRA needed to be better equipped, which meant securing modern small arms. In previous campaigns, weapons had been secured before hostilities commenced via raids on British and Irish Army bases. In 1969–1971, this was no longer feasible.Previous raids included the 1940 Christmas Raid, the 1953 Felstead Raid, and the 1955 Hazebrouck Raid. By 1972, the IRA had large quantities of modern small arms, including Armalite rifles, manufactured and purchased in the United States. The AR-18 rifle in particular was found to be well suited for urban guerilla warfare as its small size and folding stock made it easy to conceal. Moreover, it was capable of rapid fire and its high velocity round provided better stopping power.Taylor, pp. 108–109. Some AR-18s smuggled to Northern Ireland were intercepted before the IRA could get them.
The primary IRA's gunrunner in the United States was George Harrison, an IRA veteran who had lived in New York since 1938. Harrison set up a gunrunning network in America in the 1950s, when he supplied arms for the 1956–1962 Border campaign. He bought guns for the IRA from an Italian American arms dealer, George de Meo, who had connections in organised crime. Joe Cahill acted as the contact between NORAID and Harrison, and almost all of the smuggled guns went through the network run by the latter. In 1971, the RUC seized 700 modern weapons from the IRA, along with two tonnes of high explosive and 157,000 rounds of ammunition, most of which were manufactured in the United States.
Harrison spent an estimated US$1 million in the 1970s purchasing over 2,500 guns for the IRA. According to Brendan Hughes, a key figure in the Belfast Brigade, the IRA smuggled small arms from the United States by sea on Queen Elizabeth 2 from New York via Southampton, through Irish members of her crew, until the network was shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the early 1980s.Geraghty, Tony (2000). The Irish War. Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 172. These Queen Elizabeth 2 shipments included Armalite rifles, and were driven from Southampton to Belfast in small consignments.
In the late 1970s, another IRA member, Gabriel Megahey, was sent to the United States to acquire arms and was able to procure more Armalite AR-15 rifles, a number of Heckler & Koch rifles and other weapons. The purchase of these weapons was funded by Irish Americans sympathetic to Irish republicanism.Taylor, pp. 1–5. A batch of M60 machine guns stolen from a U.S. National Guard armoury was imported in 1977.Martin Dillon, The Dirty War: Covert Strategies and Tactics Used in Political Conflicts Taylor & Francis, 1999 , p. 400
Since the Troubles in Northern Ireland began in 1969, the United States Department of Justice had been cracking down on the IRA arms trafficking network in America. By 1975, the Justice Department had started to significantly weaken the Harrison network by prosecuting dozens of IRA arms trafficking cases, and as early as 1973, the IRA already found more lucrative sources of funding and weapons from foreign states, including Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The prosecutions of IRA gunrunners in America were so great that according to Belfast author Jack Holland, "Harrison was not aware of any major shipments of arms that had successfully reached the IRA from the U.S. since the late 1970s; that is, before his network's destruction [in 1981]". U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill told Northern Ireland Secretary of State Roy Mason in mid-October 1977 that the flow of guns and money had been greatly reduced. The United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1976 noted the role of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) in prosecuting IRA gunrunners:
Since September 1971, ATF has been involved in investigating Irish Republican Army (IRA) gunrunning activities in the United States. Numerous successful prosecutions of IRA "gunrunners" violating the Gun Control Act have resulted. Most notable and significant to date was the recent conviction in Baltimore, Maryland, of five IRA "gunrunners" charged with 23 violation counts of the 1968 Gun Control Act including using fictitious names, counterfeiting federal firearms licenses and illegally transporting firearms and explosive devices across state lines. Seized from the defendants were 70 of the 158 illegally purchased Colt AR-15, .223 caliber, semi-automatic rifles destined for the IRA in Northern Ireland.
On March 1, 1981, Claire Sterling wrote for The New York Times Magazine:
The IRA has come a long way since its early days of dependence upon the United States. Fund raising is mostly done at home nowadays, by means of protection rackets, brothels, massage parlors and bank stickups. And the incoming hardware is largely Soviet-made. It took only a few years to make the transformation with the help of the international terror network.
In 1980, De Meo was arrested and convicted of smuggling arms to the IRA. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. However, in a secret meeting at a hotel on Manhattan's East Side in August, FBI agents agreed to a deal with De Meo's lawyer that his sentence would be reduced to five years if he surrendered the IRA's primary gunrunner. At that time, the FBI had no idea who was the prime leader of the IRA arms support network in America. In 1981, Meo notified the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force about Harrison's attempt to smuggle a large cache of arms into Ireland from his home in New York. Subsequently, in June, Harrison, Michael Flannery and three other Irish gunrunners were arrested by the FBI as part of a sting operation, but acquitted at their trial in 1982. The men were charged with attempting to smuggle a consignment of arms to Ireland which included a flamethrower and a 20mm anti-tank rifle. Their acquittal was widely attributed to the unconventional efforts of Harrison's personal attorney, Frank Durkan; the men did not deny their activities, but claimed that they believed the operation had been sanctioned by the Central Intelligence Agency.Alexander, Shana. "The Patriot Game". _New York_, 22 November 1982. pg 58+.
Despite the men's acquittal, the arrest of Harrison halted nearly all of the guns being smuggled out of the country. Holland wrote that "there can be no doubt that with the arrest of Harrison, his gunrunning career ended and the IRA's most vital source of weapons was blocked", which was already in decline in the late 1970s; by 1980, the IRA was already importing a large number of weapons from mainland Europe and the Middle East. Irish journalist Ed Moloney in his book A Secret History of the IRA noted that:
After the destruction of the Harrison network, arms supplies to the IRA from the United States were infrequent and erratic. "There was very little stuff coming in," recalled one veteran. All too often weapons, sometime purchased over the counter in gun shops, would make their way to Ireland in twos and threes, only to be intercepted or captured by the authorities, who would then be able to trace them back and arrest and charge the sympathizers responsible. The IRA was never again able to construct a network in the United States as productive as Harrison's.
Megahey was arrested by the FBI in 1982 after a successful sting operation, where he was trying to purchase surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) for the IRA, and sentenced to seven years in prison. Another devastating blow to any major IRA gunrunning attempt came in September 1984, when the FBI warned the Republic of Ireland that a major IRA arms shipment was underway from the United States, and that the weaponry would be transferred to an Irish fishing trawler in the Atlantic. Subsequently, Irish authorities discovered that the arms ship was a vessel named Marita Ann, allegedly after a tip-off from Sean O'Callaghan, the Garda Síochána informer within the IRA. Three Irish Naval Service ships confronted the vessel off the coast of County Kerry, and prevented its escape by firing warning shots. A team of naval personnel and Garda officers boarded the ship, arresting the crew of five and confiscating seven tons of military equipment, as well as medications, training manuals, and communications equipment."Scannal: Boston " RTÉ Television The weapons had allegedly been donated by the South Boston Winter Hill Irish Mob.
Andrew J. Wilson in his book Irish America and the Ulster Conflict 1968-1995 wrote that:
The most effective measures taken by US law enforcement agencies, however, were against IRA gunrunning . . . The convictions secured by US law enforcement agencies against the gunrunning network in the mid-1980s caused serious problems for the IRA. After the seizure of the Marita Ann, the Provos began to concentrate their arms procurement ventures in Europe and the Middle East. Although the IRA continued to ship some weapons from America, US authorities successfully undermined the transatlantic arms network.
Canada In August 1969, some 150 Irish Canadians in Toronto announced that they intended to send money which could be used to buy guns, if necessary, to the Catholic women and children of the Bogside in Derry. The British Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) noted in the early 1970s that "the IRA has also looked to Irish communities elsewhere to obtain cash for its terror campaign of the past four years", and noted the presence of fundraising groups in Canada and Australia, and an attempt to establish connections in New Zealand.
Canadian authorities at first did nothing about the IRA fundraising in the country because collecting cash was considered a nonviolent pursuit that was not a threat to Canada. However, Britain told them the money raised in Canada was allegedly used to purchase weapons, including Canadian-made detonators being deployed for IRA bombing. Canadian IRA supporters smuggled detonators from Canadian mining operations for use in bombings in Northern Ireland. As a result, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) was charged with trying to intercept arms from flowing into Ireland from Canada.
In 1974, seven Irish Canadian residents were arrested by the RCMP for smuggling weapons to the IRA after "raids in St. Catharines, Tavistock and Toronto and at the U.S. border at Windsor". Philip Kent, one of those arrested, was discovered in his car for having "fifteen FN rifles and a .50 calibre machine gun". In February 1982, three Canadian republicans and Edward "Ted" Howell (a close ally of Gerry Adams) and Dessie Ellis from Dublin were arrested for trying to enter the U.S. illegally from Canada and "with a cache of money and a shopping list" of weapons for the IRA.
In 1993, Irish security forces uncovered an IRA bomb factory at Kilcock, County Kildare, discovering that parts of the detonating cord came from Canada. In 1994, a Canadian was arrested in Spain for attempting to deliver weapons to the IRA.
Libyan/Middle Eastern arms Libya Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi supplied a crucial number of arms to the IRA, as part of a strategy at this time of opposing United States interests in the Middle East by sponsoring paramilitary activity against it and its allies in Western Europe.