Moore's ordeal of being caught up in terrorist bombing plot

THE switch clicked on, the tape started running, the questioning began and Elaine Moore's mind went blank with panic.

It was four years after she was interrogated as a maximum security prisoner desperately protesting her innocence to a hostile British police but the flashbacks were vivid and paralysing.

If she was going to answer the questions this time, it was going to have to be done the old fashioned way - pen, paper, peace, quiet and absolutely no recording devices.

Elaine was surprised at her own reaction when she sat down last autumn with journalist Tony McCullagh to begin work on a book which tells the story of her nightmare as an innocent party caught up in a terrorist bombing plot.

But her story, told in newly published paperback, Danger to Society, explains why fear of a tape recorder is her only lasting scar, then she has proved remarkably resilient.

Dubliner Elaine, now 26, was a 21-year-old employee of a London internet company in July 1998 when an acquaintance of an acquaintance from back home turned up at her apartment needing a place to stay for a few days.

Anthony Hyland stored his rucksack in Elaine's bedroom where it, and the explosives it contained, were easily found by the anti-terrorist police who had him under surveillance.

Elaine was arrested at work, interrogated for four days, charged with conspiring to plant bombs and sent terrified and disbelieving to an all-male maximum security prison.

The tall blonde beauty who had once put together a modelling portfolio was instant news and the myth of "the IRA model" was born.

Danger to Society was a book she didn't intend writing but agreed to in the fear that somebody else might write it and get it wrong.

"I was petrified at the idea of all the publicity again but the story hadn't fully gone away. Family members were still asked about me and what happened and I knew no one could get it exactly right except me.

"Even if someone else does write about it now, at least the record's straight from my point of view."

To put the record straight, Elaine never questioned her arrest but still can not understand why she was charged which was when the real nightmare began.

She has not been compensated by the Crown for wrongful detention, loss of her job, apartment and damage to her character, but then she never lodged a claim.

She wanted to use the book to pay tribute to all those who stood by her, particularly her mum, whom, she says in the acknowledgements, helped her out of the shadows after her ordeal.

"People really rallied around me and took me out of this dark place. Mum set the scene so that I would be accepted. She was my face and my voice at home and paved the way for me to come back. I had expected to be shunned but people accepted me and supported me. That was mum's doing."

After a patchy period work-wise, Elaine is now event manager and administrator with the Project Management Association in Dublin, studies part-time with the Public Relations Institute and shares her time between her mum's home and the house in rural Co Carlow she bought with the love of her life, Cadbury's sales executive, Paul Donegan.

Putting the record straight also means stating that she is not bitter. It was a horrible time but the loss of two beloved aunts in recent years has put the experience into perspective for her.

"That's a void in my life that I can't fill. I am more upset about people that I love than the loss of my time. I have been able to make up my time and fix all that. It's the things you can not fix that hurt you."