Prisoner 1082 to launch his memoirs

OVER the past 50 years, author Donál Donnelly has gone from scaling the walls of Crumlin Road Gaol to becoming the president of the Irish Institute of Purchasing and Materials Management. This week, he launches his memoirs in Ballyvaughan.

Donál was born in Omagh in County Tyrone in September 1939. The Second World War had just begun and Northern Ireland would soon be embroiled in a war of its own.
Prisoner 1082, Escape from Europe’s Alcatraz is Donál’s memoirs and a personal account of the period of Irish history, which formed the backdrop to the subsequent Troubles.
At the age of 17, Donál was convicted of membership of the Irish Republican Army and subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison.
“In 1955, 152,000 people voted for Sinn Féin candidates who were mostly prisoners in jail. In mid-Ulster, we elected a fellow called Tom Mitchell. I was 16 when I worked on that campaign. He was elected as MP to the Westminster Parliament. The Westminster Government unseated him because he was a felon. They held another election in 1956 and he was elected a second time. The British Government claimed that the six counties were an integral part of the UK but they only served one section of that people, the Unionists. If anyone in the British Government had been looking at the facts that the God-fearing, peace-loving people of mid-Ulster would vote not once, not twice, but three times for a convicted felon, there was obviously something rotten in the state of Northern Ireland. If they had taken action then, I have no doubt but the 30 years war, as it is often called, would not have happened. If they had given us voting rights, civil rights and disbanded the B Specials, there never would have been the mayhem that happened and affected us all, including those of us living here in the south. Because of that, I hold the British Government responsible. They were the ones we were fighting. People want to know why I was in jail or why I was in the IRA, but as far as we were concerned at the time, there was no other route,” he stated.
However, it was not Donál’s conviction and imprisonment that made him extraordinary but his dramatic escape from Crumlin Road Gaol on St Stephen’s Day, 1960.
“There had been an escape in 1943 but I was the only person to escape from Crumlin Road Gaol during the IRA’s Operation Harvest between the years 1956 and 1962. Twelve thousand RUC and B Specials pursued me. I have never been wanted as much by anybody,” he joked.
“It was a cold, freezing day with sleet and rain. I took refuge first in Belfast and then moved to Tyrone. I was stopped and questioned on a number of occasions. I managed to cross the border in Monaghan. The British had a permanent road block on Craigavon Bridge in Derry because I had relations in Donegal and they thought I would go there,” Donál recalled.
“I was sheltered and helped by people who were risking their livelihoods and their freedom and maybe their lives for someone they never heard of. These people helped me and that really demonstrated the disconnect between the Government and the people. Men stood guard in the country in the places where I slept. It was an amazing thing. No one was hurt in the escape, so there was great support for me from all parties down here,” he added.
Donál dedicated his book to his fellow escapee, John Kelly and to the people on his journey who sheltered him.
“I wrote the story explaining why myself and my colleague John Kelly, who was recaptured, would go up on top of a prison wall risking our lives. I wanted to explain the context of that and to explain that we were rising up against a system where there were no civil rights. There was discrimination and property votes; we were rising up against that. There was also the B Specials, who were an undisciplined, reckless, terror group dressed in Government uniform, who were allowed free reign. We wanted to give people a lift for sure but it was really to cock a snook at the authorities and to show we weren’t going to lie down and we were going to get up off our knees,” Donál claimed.
“When I came out of jail, I was not in the IRA again. I still class myself as a republican though,” he commented.
After his escape, Donál worked for a couple of years in Cork before moving to Dublin.
“The people in Cork were a seminal influence in my life. I had been badly injured in the escape but I recuperated and was brought back to good health by the Cork Polio Clinic. They had expertise in rehabilitation,” he observed.
When he moved to Dublin, Donál became the purchasing and planning manager for Unilever’s food division in Ireland. He was later elected president of the Irish Institute of Purchasing and Materials Management.
“People at work knew about my background because if they didn’t, Special Branch would have told them. I had to be up front no matter what I was doing. It paid dividends though because people either hired me or didn’t,” he commented.
For 30 years, Donál couldn’t go home to Northern Ireland or travel to England. In 1987, 30 years after his incarceration, following legal efforts on his behalf, he received a letter to say that he could move freely in the North and the UK but that his sentence still stood.
Over the years, Donál and his wife have been regular visitors to Ballyvaughan.
“My wife’s family are McConnells from Cabra in Dublin and they have been going on holidays to Ballyvaughan since 1938. They used to stay with Mort O’Loughlin’s granny, known as Nanny Vaughan. Their family sometimes refer to the McConnells as the first tourists in Ballyvaughan because they have been going down there for so long. We go there every year now for a few days,” he explained.
Donál was also involved in the Save the West campaign and through the Dóchas Co-Operative raised money for co-ops in Ballyvaughan and across the West. Ballyvaughan even gets a mention in the book, termed a ‘beacon of hope’ in terms of rural development in the 1960s.
Prisoner 1082, Escape from Europe’s Alcatraz will be launched in Ballyvaughan on Friday in the Burren Fine Wine and Food Restaurant at 8pm. Donál will speak at the launch, detailing his experiences of the late 1950s up to now and will answer audience questions.