Joe McDonnell Tribute
Today is the 29th anniversary of the death on hunger strike of IRA Volunteer Joe McDonnell from West Belfast. Veteran republican Jim Gibney here pays tribute to the fifth hunger striker to die in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh.
It does not happen very often that the publication of this column [Jim’s weekly feature in the ‘Irish News’] coincides with the anniversary of one of the ten men who died on hunger strike in the H-Blocks in 1981. Today is one of those rare occasions. Twenty-nine years ago Joe Mc Donnell died after 61 days on hunger strike. He was one of the oldest of the ten men yet he was also a very young man. He was 30-years-old. Joe was married to Goretti and had two children, Bernadette and Joseph. Joe came from a large family of eight children.
He began his hunger strike on the 9th May 1981, four days after the death of Bobby Sands. Before his death, after sixty one days, three other prisoners had died - Francis Hughes, Patsy O’Hara and Raymond Mc Creesh.
Joe would have heard the news of their deaths while he was in a cell in an H-Block or in the H-Block hospital wing. There is no doubt that Joe would have known the fate that awaited him as the news of the death of each hunger striker reached his ears. Yet at no stage during his agonising hunger strike did he pause to consider his impending death.
In an article written by Danny Morrison several years ago, following a visit to the then closed and decaying Long Kesh, he recalled meeting Joe, two days before he died, in the canteen of the prison hospital. With Joe were Tom Mc Elwee, Kieran Doherty TD, Kevin Lynch and Mickey Devine.
Danny wrote: “Joe Mc Donnell, who had two days to live, was brought in on a wheelchair and kept joking throughout the visit. He smoked several cigarettes in between sipping water. I had been there to bring them up to date with our contacts with the British and the ultimately forlorn attempts to resolve the political status issue.”
Gerry Adams in his book ‘Before the Dawn’ wrote about knowing Joe from being interned with him: “Joe was a very happy-go-lucky guy.” He recalled Joe’s “sense of fun… On the day he started his hunger strike, he sent me out a King Edward Cigar from his prison cell.”
I wondered at the time and still do to this day where Joe and the other hunger strikers got their resolve to carry them beyond life. Indeed the same question may be asked of their loved ones who stood with them as they faced their final moments.
Three ex-prisoners who knew Joe as an active IRA volunteer outside and inside prison spoke to me about the man they knew. Seamy Finucane said Joe had a reputation in Andersonstown for being “a hands-on IRA operator”. He was a member of two active service units attached to the Belfast Brigade and Battalion staffs. He oozed confidence. “In his company you knew you were safe”.
“Being safe” around Joe is how a very young prisoner, Jim ‘Jazz’ Mc Cann, remembered his time with Joe on the blanket protest in the H-Blocks. “Joe was a tower of strength. He got a lot of us through the protest. He was forever the optimist. A ‘raker’, the life and soul of the wing.” Joe never took a visit with his family for almost five years because he refused to wear a prison uniform. But he “talked about Goretti and Bernadette and Jospeh and his family especially his sister Maura every day and night,” according to Jim. He was in constant contact with Goretti through comms and had visitors from across Belfast smuggle her comms to him.
Jim said, “Joe’s dream was to get a visit with Goretti and the children and to be reunited with them, wearing not a prison uniform but his own clothes.”
Former hunger striker Raymond Mc Cartney described Joe as “the heart-beat of the wing. The wise ‘old’ man of the wing, who was very protective of other prisoners.”
Joe had regularly argued for a hunger strike, two years before it actually began. To his comrades he was ‘rock-solid’, ‘unbending’, ‘stubborn and principled’, ‘a figure head’, ‘a family man’, ‘a caring person’.
And a man who made others laugh while he got them through the toughest and challenging of times.
Kilmainham Photographic Exhibition
Tess Buckley’s photographs of Kilmainham Jail, recently used to illustrate Niamh O’Sullivan’s book, ‘Written in Stone’, have gone on display in the Dublin City Council Offices at Wood Quay. The exhibition began on Monday 21st June and runs until Friday 25th June. There has been immense interest in the photographs which have encouraged people to do follow-up visits to the actual jail.
Death of Seando Moore
The death has occurred in Belfast of well-known republican activist and ex-POW Seando Moore. The Bobby Sands Trust would like to extend its condolences to Seando’s wife Patricia and the wider McCabe and Moore family circles. Go ndeanna Dia trocaire air. Thousands of people visited the wakehouse, among them the families of the dead hunger strikers to whom Seando had become very close due to his involvement in national commemoration committee which organised exhibitions and events around the 10th, 20th and 25th anniversaries of the hunger strike.
Seando was laid to rest in Milltown Cemetery on Tuesday 15th June and the oration was delivered by his friend and Secretary of the Bobby Sands Trust, Danny Morrison. He said:
“A former blanketman, Seamie Finucane said to me at the wake house on Sunday, ‘This better be a good oration!’ And I said, don’t be saying that, I am rusty and nervous enough. And he said, ‘Seando will be listening to every word you have to say and you better get it right.’
“Seando, our old friend and comrade, Seando.
“And Seando, before you start complaining about the Gaeilge, let me say, ‘Ta bron orm, ach tá mé ag foghlaim fóill!. Tá mé ag foghlaim go fóill!’
“When he first came to Beechmount, all those years ago, as an immigrant from Ballymurphy, Seando looked so young and innocent that Big Ted christened him ‘the child’. The speculation was that he was attracted to Beechmount because we had the best five star restaurant in the Belfast Brigade – Ma McCabe’s in Locan Street.
“The RA has been accused of many things down the years but it’s about time that it also took responsibility for the rickets suffered by the sons and daughters of Ma and Frank McCabe all of who’ll be quick to tell you at the drop of a hat: ‘we never got fed until all you lot had your fill.’
“So, Seando joined the Beechmount squad and was a courageous Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army. These were the days of Albert Kavanagh and Jimmy Quigley and Paddy Maguire and Stan Carberry and Basil Fox all of whom Seando was very close to.
“All of us have our memories of him. He was very, very funny, with his dry humour, and you couldn’t easily fall out with him. There was no spite in him and he was loyal and loving, as his mother and brothers and sisters knew and as we in Beechmount were to discover.
“Occasionally he and I used to stay up in my elderly widowed Aunty May’s house in Andersonstown. She was very traditional and every morning when Seando and I came down the stairs she would put out a boiled egg and a round of bread and butter. After sometime of this Seando was exasperated and said, ‘Has she no bloody Cornflakes?’
“A woman, Brenda, at the wake on Sunday was recalling the times when she used to dye Albert Kavanagh’s hair and Seando’s. I reminded her of what a terrible job she had made of Seando’s. A squad of us were at a dance in Clonard Hall one night when it was surrounded by the British army who came in firing rubber bullets and rounding up all the males. Myself and Basil were arrested and put into the back of Saracens – from where we were eventually taken to Castlereagh and interned. But from the back of the Saracen I could see Seando being put up against the wall and a spotlight was shone on him. I started to laugh because although his hair was black his eyebrows were still ginger! But he got away and lived to fight another day.
“I had made a gallon of home brew in the run-up to Christmas before I was arrested and Seando went to my house. “Mrs Morrison, I have just received an important message from Danny in Long Kesh and I have to remove everything that is under the stairs immediately.” So, Seando, and a few comrades took the beer round to Terry and Bernie’s and had a great time, he told me, when he eventually was arrested and landed into Cage 2.
“Of all the prisoners the internees had the most in terms of visits and parcels and letters and yet they did the most moaning. So, I was glad when Seando was arrested and interned – he was like a ray of sunshine to our Cage, a real wit and kept everybody in stitches.
“He was released after the big fire and during the 1975 ceasefire, I think.
“As I said, we had been going in and out of Ma McCabes and I don’t know when it was that he and Patricia put their eye on each other but from that moment on they were an item. There are lots of jokes about mother-in-laws but Seando’s case defies all the stereotypes. They got on so well that they lived next door to each other and she doted on Seando. Ma McCabe herself is very ill and all of our thoughts are with her today.
“Yesterday, I came across an unpublished letter that Seando wrote to her from the Blocks in 1978 and I hope she doesn’t mind me reading part of it out.
“‘Well, Ma McCabe and family, Got this chance to drop you a line. I hope you are keeping well and I’m sure you are still getting the regular visitors at dinner time. How is all the rest of the family keeping, too many for me to mention but I hope that they are okay. Before I forget, we had a smuggled photo here of a protest march, I think it was the 9th August.
“‘You’re doing a great job for us, Ma McCabe, this protesting. That’s what we need, people out there showing their support for us. Patricia was saying about her being on TV and the child in the Republican News. A few of the lads heard about the child in the paper. They are still slagging me about it. Are they keeping alright?
“‘Ma McCabe when you ring up Sean’s will you tell Patricia I had a letter for her but wasn’t able to get it out and I send my love to her and the child and I am thinking of them every day. I am getting carried away there, Ma McCabe, thinking I was writing to Patricia.”
“‘Well, what about yourself? Are you keeping alright? What about the Hibs? Have you any contact with them now?… Does the Dolly Sisters [the two Eileens] still come round for the PDF. You can tell them I was asking for them.
“‘Ma McCabe I want you to get a parcel ready for Patricia to bring up on the visit. You will have to make it around 3ins long. That’s tobacco. Make it round and put in a lot of headache tablets and painkillers also, as we don’t get any medical treatment. Make it round like a hair roller, put red matchheads up it also and papers for the fags. I hope I haven’t mixed you up there. I’m writing this and I’m mixed up!… If you see my mum please tell her that I had a letter for her but couldn’t get it smuggled out.’
“Like most republicans Seando suffered arrest and torture, including on one occasion three days in Springfield Road barracks where he was stripped and a hood placed over his head. He was continually beaten and was the subject of a mock execution and was threatened with being hanged out the window. He sued the RUC and later successfully won a brutality case against them.
“He was eventually caught on active service in 1977 but before he was sentenced to 10, 7 and 4 years in jail he and Patricia got married in Crumlin Road Prison. There is a great photograph of them in the house, taken by Seando’s dear friend Sean ‘Flute’ Osborne on Seando and Patricia’s thirtieth wedding anniversary. They are actually back in the Crum and the photograph is very symbolic of the fact, that although times were extremely tough for a young married couple, Patricia and Seando survived and triumphed over the brutality of Castlereagh, lengthy prison sentences, the blanket and no wash protests and the heartbreaking hunger strikes of 1981.
“A few years ago, the Bobby Sands Trust launched a book to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the hunger strike. I was speaking at it and was describing some of the comms that I received from the blanketmen. I was actually speaking about ones from Seando and him describing to me how these men locked behind doors for four years, regularly beaten, played Bingo to entertain themselves, and I started to cry and could hardly talk because it brought it all back.
“After his release he and Patricia went on to build a good family and home. Their family went on to include besides Francine, Sean, Patricia Ann and James, grandchildren Eoin and Seainin.
“‘After his release from prison,’ as Gerry Adams said the other day, ‘Seando became an indispensable part of Sinn Fein.’ He worked hard locally on community issues and was the driving force behind the work of the commemoration committee.
“But Seando could never forget the memory of ten men dead and when it came to the tenth, twentieth and twenty-fifth commemorations of that incredible prison struggle Seando travelled the length and breadth of Ireland and Britain organising exhibitions, displays, lectures and discussions. Latterly, he was seriously ill and those long journeys were bound to take their toll on his strength but he told one comrade: ‘When the Movement came to ask me to do the commemorations… that was my medicine.’
“It is a tragedy that so many former POWs – and the number is shocking - survived the armed struggle and prison only to be so cruelly cut down by disease, especially cancer.
“Although he was ‘the child’ when he came to Beechmount forty years ago and was known only to a few, in recent times he was probably one of the best known republicans in Ireland. Anytime you spoke to a relative of the hunger strikers the first thing they asked was, ‘How’s Seando?’ I was in a small hotel in the northern outskirts of Cork City a few weeks ago and a couple, total strangers, who weren’t even from the area, but were from Kerry came up to me to ask, ‘How’s Seando keeping?’
“When Seando phoned you it was always with those beguiling few words, ‘Well, mo chara, how’s things?’ You knew that he wanted you to do something.
“About twelve years ago he had the idea of commemorating all the people from A-Company area who had helped the struggle, fed and looked after or sheltered Volunteers, the anonymous people, who having passed on were now beyond British rule. He asked me to help him but he did all the running, collecting the biographies and photographs. It’s an incredible little pamphlet for it demonstrates that the IRA was a real people’s army with support on every street. I cannot mention all of them – or we would be here all day – but there were people like John and Teesie McCullough, the Gills, Mrs Burns, Pearse Graham, Billy Taylor, Ken Smith, the O’Rawes, the McCooeys, Dinky Quigley and May McManus and her brother Joe – and people like Stoker Cosgrove, whose daughter Nora, married to Patricia’s brother Jim, was murdered by the RUC on the morning of Joe McDonnell’s death. And just as they lied when they killed the people on Bloody Sunday the British lied about the circumstances of the death of Nora.
“To Seando’s mother, Ellen, his brother Phillip, and sisters Rosaleen, Margaret and Geraldine, I would like to offer my condolences, the condolences of the Republican Movement and those of everyone here today and all who visited that packed wakehouse since last Saturday. To Patricia and the family you have lost a great, decent man who was so, so proud of you. Patricia, you made him a happy companion and husband; and the children fulfilled him.
“On one of the periods when Seando was low he said to Patricia what if we never see each other again and she responded with a typical Seando answer – ‘you don’t get rid of my that easier, I shall see you in heaven’.
“And last Saturday morning as he was letting go she told him, ‘Seando, today, you will be with the hunger strikers in heaven.’
“In her death notice Patricia wrote: ‘My husband, my best friend, and soulmate. What we had no millionaire could buy and wonderful memories no one can take away. I know in my heart you will look after me and walk beside me every step I take. Wait for me and walk beside me every step I take. Wait for me.
Your loving devoted wife, Patricia.’
“As we were finishing the booklet Green River we looked at a number of poems because we wanted to pick out something appropriate for the introduction. Seando chose this one which was written by a Turkish political prisoner. I would like to dedicate it to Patricia. It is called, ‘You’re Not Alone’.
If one day my eyes cannot see
Or if we part
Never to meet again
I’ll still be by your side.
When you sing a song on your own
Or get angry with people
Or as you learn new things
I’ll be in the sounds and the words.
And, if you ever fall into darkness
I shall come
To your side with amazing lightness of colours.
If you ever fall into darkness
I shall come
To your side with amazing lightness of colours.
New Photos Bobby Sands
Researchers at Stella Maris Secondary School have unearthed early photographs of a young Bobby Sands as part of their study of past pupils who were killed during the conflict. On their website they say: “Twenty six past pupils whose names are known were killed during the ‘troubles’. Of these, twenty four were boys and two girls. Most were in their late teens or early twenties. One, John Rolston, was murdered within two days of leaving school. Three were killed by the Provisional IRA, another three accidentally when handling explosives, nineteen including the two girls by loyalist paramilitaries and one, Bobby Sands, died in prison on hunger strike shortly after he had been elected M.P. for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Eight families who had one or other parent killed in those years also sent children to the school. The full account of those from the school and area that died in the conflict can be read here.
Exhibition of Kilmainham Photographs
Recently we published a review of Niamh O’Sullivan’s book, ‘Written in Stone’, about the graffiti written by republican PoWs on the walls of this famous prison. One of the photographers who contributed to that book, Tess Buckley, is currently exhibiting more of her photographs on the hidden world that lies within the jail. It is in the Central Library, Ilac Centre, Dublin, finishing on the 28th May. Each image is captioned and adds in no small way to encourage the viewer to visit the jail and remember our past!
Remembering the Hunger Strikers
A series of white line pickets were held in republican areas of Belfast today, Wednesday, 5th May, to coincide with the 29th anniversary of the death of IRA Volunteer Bobby Sands after sixty-six days on hunger strike. Bobby was the first of ten IRA and INLA Volunteers to die, including Kieran Doherty from Andersonstown who, like Bobby, was elected to parliament [for Cavan/Monaghan in Kieran’s case] during the seven-month long hunger strike.
The pickets were held between 5 - 5.45pm on the Falls Road, Andersonstown Road, the top of the Whiterock Road, the Stewartstown Road, in Ballymacarret at the Mountpottinger shops and on the Antrim Road/Newington area.
Leaving Cert Special
Bobby Sands and 1916 leader Tom Clarke feature in a series of broadcasts on the Irish radio station Newstalk aimed at Leaving Certificate students. The series, Talking History, has been running since 1st March and is also be available on Podcast and on iTunes for students to download.
A special Leaving Cert programme broadcast on Sunday, April 11th, featuring Patrick Geoghegan and a team of historians, teachers and students, discussing key topics relating to the history syllabus, key questions, examination approaches and themes is also available for downloading.
The documentary on Bobby Sands begins about two minutes into the broadcast and features, amongst others, two hunger strikers, Laurence McKeown and Raymond McCartney, and BBC journalist Peter Taylor who covered the period in question.
Powerful ex-POW Memoir
A memoir by Tim Brannigan, a former republican prisoner from the Falls Road, describing in vivid detail what it was like growing up black in Belfast during the conflict has been showered with praise and has been featured prominently on radio and all the major newspapers in Ireland and Britain.
‘Where Are You Really From?’ is a fascinating and powerful memoir but also a major tribute to Tim’s mother Peggy (nee Brennan) and tells how a year after his birth and while he lived in St Joseph’s Baby Home (run by the Nazareth Sisters) she plotted to adopt the child that her relatives believed had been stillborn.
The reason for the subterfuge was that Peggy, who was married to a Belfast man, was pregnant to a young Ghanaian doctor at the RVH with whom she had had an affair.
Growing up as an ‘adopted’ child Tim remembers hearing stories about his grandmother Kitty Brennan.
“Granny was born in Sailortown,” he says. “She was staunchly nationalist and would sit Mum on her knee and sing old Irish laments to her. Family lore has it that, as a young woman, Granny was arrested and fined for waving one of the first Irish tricolours ever seen in Belfast in support of the men captured during the Easter Rising. The prisoners were taken by ship to Belfast from Dublin and, as they left the docks, they were marched past Granny’s house. It was then that she showed her true colours, defiantly waving her flag.”
As well as being a moving story about Peggy Brannigan and her love for her black son Tim, the book also covers Tim’s time in the H-Blocks as a republican PoW (he was sentenced to seven years for possession of weapons), his later work as a journalist and his journey to meet his biological father.
For the older people of Belfast’s Carrick Hill it will represent a trip down Memory Lane, when they played host to a regiment of US soldiers during the Second World War when they were based in a derelict factory called Marsh’s Buildings, only yards from Peggy’s house. Ironically, these soldiers were part of an exclusively black regiment and caused something of a stir in a community where many people had never seen ‘coloureds’ before!
“A powerful memoir,” is how the author Danny Morrison described it. “Well-written, full of humour and pathos, you just can’t put it down. Fair play to Tim for it takes a lot of courage to be so open, honest and frank about one’s life. But there is no doubt that the character who stands out in this book, who triumphs over life’s adversities is Peggy Brennan from Carrick Hill.”
‘Where Are You Really From?’ by Tim Brannigan is published by Blackstaff Press, £9.99
Daring Escape From Crum
“Accounts of many escapes from Irish jails have been written - yet more books are still eagerly sought from which to learn more of the deeds of IRA prisoners. In truth, until this book,” writes guest reviewer, Gerry O’Hare, “I had only heard verbally anything about the escape attempts made by Danny Donnelly, from Omagh, and Belfast’s John Kelly, from Crumlin Road Jail (in 1960 during ‘Operation Harvest’).” Review continues…
Eamonn Boyce’s ‘The Insider’, and its account of jail breaks of that time, was reviewed earlier.This is the definitive account of Danny Donnelly’s successful escape from the Crum in 1960 - and of the heartbreak and failure of North Belfast’s John Kelly, who didn’t quite make it. It is a story of two men’s attempts to overcome the odds against them by their jailers and - not unsurprisingly - the disapproval of some of their comrades.
Donnelly and Kelly didn’t inform the IRA’s jail council for fear permission would be refused them.
In a tribute to his comrade, Danny dedicates the book to the late John Kelly who died in 2007. The dedication also praises the Kelly family who lived in the shadow of Crumlin Road Jail, in Adela Street, which runs between the Crumlin and Antrim Roads.
When Kelly’s mother died, there was a Belfast silent tribute paid to her. It was said, “She never locked her back door”. IRA men on the run would understand and nod approval. Practically every prisoner who was ever released found their way to Mrs Kelly for breakfast and onward help home.
‘Prisoner 1082, Escape From Crumlin Road – Europe’s Alcatraz’ relives the story of the preparations and escape of Danny Donnelly, an 18-year-old student from Omagh, County Tyrone, convicted of IRA membership in 1957 and sentenced to ten years. We learn that he came from a family steeped in the Gaelic tradition and republicanism.
Born on September 8th 1939, he was the youngest of six children of Peter and Margaret Donnelly (nee Docherty) in a part of Omagh known colloquially as Gallows Hill.
His education was at the hands of the Christian Brothers, mostly from the South, and they would have appeared to install in the young student a love for his country and a yearning for its freedom from the British.
He tells us that growing up in Omagh gave him a sense of being a stranger in his own country. Discrimination was rampant. Catholics had no chance of a job in the town or even with the local county council. His brothers all emigrated except himself: “I went to jail,” he says.
This, of course, was not uncommon for Catholics in the six northern counties.
“We grew up in an atmosphere of disengagement from the organs of the state - from the Bureau of Employment to the local council to the police force. From an early age I wondered why people accepted these unfair conditions. I felt that things must change or be made to change. Such an opportunity seemed to present itself in the early 1950s,” he writes.
Donnelly seems to have been fascinated by the results of British elections and the successes of Tom Mitchell and Philip Clarke. He was outraged at the way the British unseated them, despite the people’s votes. It wasn’t long before he joined the IRA and came under the tutelage of Cork’s Daithi O’Connell. He learned the art of bomb-making and tells us that he became “rather adept” at it. He was also, along with the other local volunteers, taught to use Lee Enfield rifles and the Thompson sub-machine gun. It was the era of the Flying Columns around which ‘Operation Harvest’ was planned.
It began on December 12th and Donnelly’s first taste of action involved an attack on Omagh Barracks. Some of his group went off to commandeer a lorry but, as he and others lay in a ditch, they heard an explosion and, a short time later, another. The column was told that the lorry hadn’t been commandeered as planned and their anticipated element of surprise was gone. They were advised to disperse and head for home in Omagh (others headed further up the Sperrin Mountains).
The following day’s papers were full of other, more successful, operations: the blowing up of Magherafelt Courthouse in County Derry; a ‘B’ Special hall in Newry destroyed; a British Army territorial building blown up in Enniskillen and two bridges blown up in other parts of County Fermanagh.
The young Donnelly’s activities became known to the Special Branch and eventually he was arrested and given ten years for membership of the IRA. He was charged along with ten others from the Omagh districts. The jury took five minutes to convict him and sentence was duly handed down. He had expected four or five years.
Lord Chief Justice Mc Dermot, however, singled him out from the rest of his comrades and said, in passing sentence: “It is quite clear to me that you are one of the ring leaders. Parliament has made provision that the manner in which accused like you may be punished includes, not only long terms of imprisonment and whipping, but the sentence of death”.
Danny says of this tirade: “I listened with growing incredulity as he sentenced me to ten years”.
He finds jail life a culture shock, but knuckles down and continues his studies which will stand by him in later life. Escape was on his mind from the beginning and increased when he heard of the escape from the Curragh by Daithi O’Connell and Ruairi O Bradaigh in December 1958.
“Since my imprisonment, I had dreamed of escaping. On smoggy days I wondered if I could climb the outer wall during periods when the warders would count and re-count, to establish if anyone was missing”.
A decision by his jailers to build a higher wall actually hastened those plans.
“The missing part of my jigsaw … was put in place when the authorities raised the low link-wall (from the administration block to the outer wall) to the same level as the outer wall”.
Having found a weak link in the system, he realized he needed a companion and, in the summer of 1960, found a Belfast man to fit the bill. John Kelly instantly warmed to the idea, and so the plan was hatched. An extra bonus was that John’s cell was immediately above his own. Their idea was to cut through the bars of the cell to access a yard where the wall was nearest to the main Crumlin Road, giving them a starting point that allowed a restricted choice of timing.
Next, they needed a rope, 70-feet long, to stretch from an anchored spot on the administration block across the new link-wall and down the outer wall, which they estimated at 30 feet high.
“The challenge here was that, at a certain spot on the link-wall, and for the last ten yards, we would be in full view of the armed police in the gun towers while crossing. Therefore we planned to be less than ten seconds on that part of the wall so that, even if we were spotted, the chances of them taking up their weapons and firing in that space of time were fairly remote”.
Christmas Eve was set as the escape date, the logic being that Belfast would be so full of shoppers it would be difficult for the police and soldiers to spot them. Also Christmas-time within the jail was a bit more relaxed, especially for the warders.
“As a 21-year old, I also had a romantic historical reason for choosing the date as it was on Christmas Eve that Red Hugh O’Donnell escaped from Dublin Castle in 1592.”
We learn how they acquired their rope and hacksaw blades. It was John’s job to get the material and Danny’s to find the hiding places. There follows a detailed account of the trials and tribulations of their attempts to prepare for the escape - nothing’s ever that easy!
Events led to them having to postpone the escape until Boxing Day. Both men got out of John’s cell and made it to the wall. Danny gets to the top - but the rope breaks, and John falls back into the prison area. They had agreed a plan in case they were separated and, in driving snow, Danny is disappointed there is no outside help. Unfamiliar with the locality, he manages to heed John’s directions and finds himself outside the Kelly home where the door is opened by a young Oliver Kelly.
“Come on in,” he says, as if escaped prisoners are the norm at their door!
Danny says, “The Kellys were highly respected within their own neighbourhood, by churchmen in Belfast and among the business community with whom they worked on a daily basis.
“Internees and released prisoners had a standing invitation to go directly to their house, where they would receive a great welcome, a meal, good advice, directions or lifts to bus and train stations and, on many occasions, money.
“The Kelly household was revered in republican circles not only throughout the North but among many in the South also.”
In excellent hands, he makes good his escape across the border.
It was not all without pain for Danny. He suffered serious injuries to his foot and vertebrae which took a long time to heal. Nevertheless, he reported back to GHQ and eventually met the then Chief of Staff, Ruairi O’Bradaigh, and Mick Ryan.
The final phase of his book concerns how he sought work and continued his business studies.
It is a remarkable tale of success leading to his selection as Honorary Secretary of the Council of the Institute of Purchasing and Materials Management in the Republic and later, on two occasions, President of the Institute.
He drifts away from his active involvement in the IRA gets married and has a family. That he took such a long time before he got down to writing the book is explained through his concern about the direction the IRA took, leading to the long, armed campaign from the ’70s to the ’90s. He blames the British for not acting earlier to promote a just society, and I leave readers with his explanation for not remaining involved.
“I avoided being personally involved in the physical conflict by chance and, to a certain extent, through having other commitments.
“Thus I never rejoined the IRA as many of my Crumlin Road comrades did at that crucial time, nor was I part of the bitter Provisional/Official split. I knew many on both sides, and still meet with some of them from time to time. However, I was, quite frankly, appalled at the ruthlessness with which those feuds were carried out and the business that informed them.
“I consider myself quite fortunate to have been outside all that.”
The book is important as this escape seemed until now to have disappeared off the map.
Historians and the ordinary reader will be grateful to the author for telling his story.
‘Prisoner 1082 - Escape From Crumlin Road’ by Dónal Donnelly, published by The Collins Press, Price: £11.99/€12.99
‘1082′ Goes Missing!
Dónal Donnelly, from Omagh, was sentenced to ten years for membership of the IRA in 1957, during the Border Campaign. However, three years into his sentence, using hacksaw blades, torn sheets and electric flex, and running a gauntlet of searchlights, alarms and machine-guns, Dónal went ‘over the wall’ and escaped from Belfast’s Crumlin Road Jail. As 12,000 RUC men and B Specials pursued him in the cold, wintry days after his escape, nationalists and republicans gave him shelter and support.
Now, as the fiftieth anniversary of his daring escape approaches, Donal has written a remarkable account of how he beat the authorities and made it to freedom, and his subsequent life.
His book, ‘Dónal Donnelly – Prisoner 1082 – Escape From Crumlin Road Jail, Europe’s Alcatraz’ will be published by Collins Press and is being launched in Dublin Castle on Thursday, 8th April, by Robert Ballagh. Also, there will be a reception to mark the publication of the book in Crumlin Road Prison on Sunday 11th April at 3pm when the guest speaker will be Monsignor Raymond Murray, former Chaplain to Armagh Jails.
The book will be reviewed here by veteran republican Gerry O’Hare next week.
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