George Gibney Waives Contest of Extradition, Will Be Taken Back to Ireland for Trial
July 10, 2025“Ireland secures extradition of notorious youth coach George Gibney who fled to Colorado in the 1990s” — today in the Colorado Springs Gazette
July 14, 2025by Irvin Muchnick
My 2,000-word piece mostly focused on the American side of the George Gibney story is scheduled to go live at the Colorado Springs Gazette, gazette.com, Monday at 5 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time.
The Irish media have thorough coverage of Gibney’s consent to extradition and his appearance, in a wheelchair, at Friday’s federal court hearing in Orlando, Florida, rubber-stamping next steps. The reports say it will take at least five days to organize his return to Ireland pending trial.
In an exquisitely, if somewhat cryptically, rendered passage about the role of the now very high-profile U.S. Department of Homeland Security agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Sean Whelan, Washington correspondent for Ireland’s RTÉ network, wrote: “ICE also had a small role in the George Gibney story, back in 2010, though it lacks the zeal of the agency’s more recent work.”
Actually, ICE had no known role in Gibney’s July 1 arrest at his home in Altamonte Springs, a suburb north of Orlando. Gibney was arrested by a swarm of deputies from the Department of Justice’s U.S. Marshal service, perhaps supported by local law enforcement. (According to neighbors interviewed by local television news, the operation included all the overkill optics of a bullhorn and multiple long guns drawn to take down a 77-year-old man, one of the signatures of 2025 America.)
What the Irish journalist was talking about was that, In 2010, the federal bureaucracy had had conversations about possible consequences for Gibney after he lied on his application for naturalized citizenship by withholding the information that he had been arrested and indicted in Ireland in 1993.
The State Department agency processing the application, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, denied citizenship. An ICE official wrote a letter saying that Gibney couldn’t be deported, however; he was not “removable” because he had not been convicted of a crime. Only of deceiving the U.S. government that would proceed to keep him as a guest for another 15 years.
