Irish Media “Borrows” Quotes from Our IRA Scoop
Our July 9 scoop about former Irish Republican gun runner Gabriel Megahey–once dubbed “the leader of the IRA in America” during his 1983 gun running trial in Brooklyn–leaped the Atlantic to appear in two outlets on the Emerald Isle, the Belfast-based Andersontown News and the Dublin-based Sunday World.

We got the word that three noteworthy Irish Republicans who were active during the Provisional IRA’s campaign against Britan, known as The Troubles, were going to be at Ernie O’Malley’s Pub on E. 27th St. on July 9.
We ended up with a big scoop, when one of the men, an 82-year-old great grandfather named Gabriel Megahey, once dubbed “the leader of the IRA in America” told us in an exclusive interview published July 10 that he was facing deportation by the Trump administration.
Within days, it was big news in Ireland. Megahey had stayed out of the limelibght for nearly 40 years after his 1988 release from a federal prison. He had served five years of a seven year sentence for trying to buy Surface-to-Air Missles for the Provisional IRA to shoot down British Army helicopters but was thwarted by an FBI sting operation. After serving his sentence, he had been allowed to stay in the USA with his American-born wife and six kids which eventually grew to include 14 grandchildren and 5 great grand kids, all American-born.
He drove up from Delaware where he now lives to be at Ernie O’Malley’s Pub on E. 17th St. to view a live screening of an Irish tv documentary about the role the Irish in New York and Boston played in supporting the IRA, which the British, Irish and American governments regarded as terrorists, but which supporters in the US regarded as freedom fighters. Magahey himself was a self-confessed IRA man from Belfast.
When Britain and Ireland signed the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, all IRA and Loyalist prisoners still in prison were released and past offendors were allowed to resume a normal life. President Clinton and his Attorney General Janet Reno had extended the clemency to IRA prisoners here, including Megahey. But the Department of Homeland Security had sent him letter last month telling him that as a convicted felon, he was facing deportation and all federal benefits including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were being stopped on Oct. 23. The scoop was so good that two publication in Ireland, the Andersontown News in Belfast, Northern Irleand, and the Sunday World in Dublin decided to use some of the quotes from our exclusive interview in the stories that they ran a day or two after our orignal scoop.
The weekly Irish Echo in New York had a story by its editor, Ray O’Hanlon, that appeared the day after our story. Using his own sources, he had obtained the actual document from Homeland Security ordering Megahey out. The Echo never interviewed Megahey who is not talking to anyone these days, but they had a document based scoop of their own. No problem with that.
The New York Post jumped on board posting on its web site on July 26 “Feds Seek to Deport 82 Year Old Convicted IRA Terrorist” which credited both our scoop and the Echo’s scoop and ran in the Sunday print edition this week.
In a sense, the story that we broke was the culmination of my covering The Troubles on and off for a variety of publications for 40 years, starting with my time living for a spell in Belfast in 1980. Over the years, I’d written about the The Troubles for Newsday, the Boston Globe, USA Today, The Nation, America, the Daily News the New York Post and the defunct Dublin daily newspaper, The Irish Press among others.
The New York Times was present the night that Meganey spoke to us exclusively in the East Side pub but as of press time have yet to follow up with a story of their own.
At first, several friends were congratulating me that my story leaped the Atlantic. But then when I tracked down the actual articles, there was initally no credit to any of the publications of Straus News whatsover. They had done some of their own research of course, and blended in material from the Echo’s scoop. They initially borrowed key quotes, without attibution, from us a journalistic no-no. After I contacted the Sunday World, they did, to their credit, belatedly attribute the quote to Our Town. They also followed it up with their own scoop on July 26 that when Megahey was in Belfast, he once killed a man with a single punch and did time in Northern Ireland.
NY Post attributed the scoop to reporting by us and the Irish Echo and properly credited us with some of the quotes they used. Megahey himself is no longer talking to anyone and our scoop remains his only public utterances on his pending deportation.
I’m still waiting for the response from the Andersontown News, which covers Megahey’s former hometown in the Ardoyne district of West Belfast.