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.
