Biography
Ciaron O’Reilly is an Australian peace campaigner and long-time Catholic Worker organizer whose activism includes repeated “disarmament” actions against military aircraft and war logistics. During the 1991 Gulf War period he joined the “ANZUS Ploughshares” action at Griffiss Air Force Base, where activists entered a U.S. base and damaged a B-52-associated aircraft with hammers and blood in an attempt to impede bombing operations; he was arrested and served a prison sentence in the United States.
He later became one of the defendants in the 2003 “Pitstop Ploughshares” action at Shannon Airport, in which activists damaged a U.S. military aircraft to protest the Iraq war pipeline through Ireland. He was arrested and prosecuted in Ireland, and after multiple trials the group was acquitted—an outcome often cited as a landmark for the “necessity” and antiwar-defense arguments raised in such cases.
In their January 2011 collaborative remembrance, Ciaron O’Reilly and Moana Cole describe thirteen months of U.S. imprisonment connected with the ANZUS Plowshares action, including additional immigration detention before release. They distinguish Cole’s voluntary departure from O’Reilly’s forced deportation. O’Reilly also recalls being visited at Pecos County Jail in Texas during this U.S. imprisonment. This recollection is retained as attributed context; it is not assigned as a new numeric total to either existing custody phase.
Source: ANZUS participants, Nuclear Resister, January 1, 2011.
In the published Catholic Worker discussion, Frank Cordaro recalled that Ciaron O’Reilly served thirteen months in U.S. prisons after the 1991 ANZUS Ploughshares action before deportation. O’Reilly’s own contribution describes confinement at Reeves County Law Centre Jail in Pecos, Texas. The retrospective thirteen-month account is attributed to Cordaro and is not converted to a guessed number of days or substituted for unresolved individual custody endpoints. Contemporary report, The Nuclear Resister.
