Jim Barr

Irish republican supporter held at the Philadelphia Detention Center in connection with US federal charges arising from solidarity with the IRA. Documented in PFOC Breakthrough magazine.

James Gerard Barr was a member of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). Named by a supergrass informer, he fled to the United States, where the U.K. sought his extradition on an attempted-murder charge from Northern Ireland. He was held for some seventeen months at the Philadelphia Detention Center until a U.S. federal court denied the extradition request in 1985 for insufficient evidence — a rare such denial. He was later granted political asylum in the United States in 1993.