Mick Clifford: Governor foiled IRA attempt to get Rose Dugdale out of prison while giving birth

Thu, 11 Aug, 2022 - 21:00

Mick Clifford

A quick-witted prison governor foiled an IRA plan to break one of their members out of prison when she was giving birth, a new book reveals.

The plan involved a rescue operation at a maternity hospital in Limerick where the pregnant prisoner was expected to give birth but the governor foiled the plot.

Author Sean O’Driscoll’s book The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale details how Dugdale found out that she was pregnant soon after she was sentenced to nine years in prison in 1974 for bombing offences.

Dugdale had had a relationship with fellow IRA member Eddie Gallagher, with whom she had been involved in various paramilitary activities.

“She was the only prisoner in the women’s jail in Limerick,” O’Driscoll told the Mick Clifford podcast. “There was enormous security around her, special netting over the exercise yard so a helicopter couldn’t be landed, army turrets, there was even new guidelines for planes to ensure that Eddie Gallagher wouldn’t hijack a plane.”

Dugdale kept her pregnancy secret within the prison right up until her waters broke. By then she had been joined by another prisoner, Angela Duffin, who began banging on the cell door when Dugdale went into labour. The astonished prison authorities could barely believe what was happening.

“They (the IRA) had somebody on the inside in the maternity hospital and as soon as the child was born the IRA men were going to go in there with guns and get her out to a safe house,” O’Driscoll told the podcast.

But in the prison the governor said that if she had been hiding her pregnancy for nine months then this must be some kind of escape attempt. He was 100% correct. You wouldn’t even want to think about would have happened if there had been an IRA escape attempt in a maternity hospital.

The following year, Gallagher and Marion Coyle kidnapped industrialist Thiedda Herrema in a failed attempt to get the government to release Dugdale.

After Dugdale was released from prison, she moved to the inner city in Dublin and became involved in actions taken against drug dealers who were devastating the local communities.

O’Driscoll says that there is a sanitised version about the concerned parents against drugs organisation that suggests the IRA, including Dugdale, muscled in on what was happening, but he says this doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

“The IRA were involved from the beginning. The way Christy Burke tells it, a priest came to him and asked him to get the IRA involved (Burke was a member) but he was reluctant at first and then agreed.

"Christy Burke was involved in the northside and Rose on the southside but Christy got worried about Rose’s radicalisation. She never held back and that’s the way she was all her life. She was always escalating things. She had no fear and that was borne out by her court appearances for assaulting drug dealers.”