JAILED LONDONDERRY DISSIDENT IS FREED CONCERNS AS TONY TAYLOR RELEASED
DISSIDENT republican prisoner Tony Taylor is to be released from jail this morning after almost 1,000 days behind bars.
His wife Lorraine was told that her husband was due to be released last night, but it later emerged that due to “an administrative delay” Taylor will be released this morning.
Londonderry-born Mr Taylor was returned to Maghaberry Prison in March 2016, on the instructions of the then Secretary of State Theresa Villiers.
The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) said his licence had been revoked by the Parole Commission because of “the risk he posed to the public”.
However, he was not charged with or convicted of any new offence.
Mr Taylor, a former IRA man, was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 1994 after he was seriously injured in a premature explosion in Derry.
He was then released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
In 2011, he was sentenced to three years behind bars for possession of a rifle in a case that made history by using covert surveillance evidence gathered by a drone.
The DUP’s Gregory Campbell questioned Mr Taylor’s release yesterday and sought clarity over any restrictions on him to allay “public safety concerns”.
He said: “The overriding consideration in this case will be the one of public safety.”
“Whatever context people might put on the family considerations — which in a family context would be understandable — the wider public safety context is one that has to be borne in mind by the police.
“There have been two previous occasions when Mr Taylor has been released and on both those occasions, it ended up in him appearing in court on other charges.
“So that is what people will be concerned about.
“Hopefully whatever condi- tions are applicable to him — we need to see what they are — will be strict and they will be carefully monitored for precisely that reason.
“Because if people get one opportunity and breach faith in wider society and end up in court, and get a second opportunity and breach faith again and end up in court again, now to get out a third time, we will need to ensure that there is a very, very close monitoring process on him.”
Yesterday, Tommy McCourt, the chairman of the Free Tony Taylor Campaign, said that the release was the result of “immense public pressure”.
“There was an appeal in Belfast last week,” he said.
“Parts of it were held in public and parts in private. There were restrictions put on the people who were there to witness pro- ceedings, no one is allowed to discuss what happened in terms of the evidence or process.
“The powers that be, who took the decision to put him in prison, have in one part been persuaded by all sorts of representation and by the public protests that were taking place and beginning to grow.
“I think that may have affected their point of view.
“There has been quite a lot of input talking about the very negative effects that this type of legal internment is having on any kind of hope for the future in this society.
“People were beginning to question if anything had changed or if we were right back where we started in the 1970s.
“Nothing essentially has changed insofar that Tony has been inside for several years, so his behaviour or actions have not changed.
“So I would say that it is more to do with public opinion than politics. I think they realised that this type of behaviour isn’t acceptable in how they deal with legacy issues.”
A spokesperson for the Northern Ireland Office, when asked what had changed in Mr Taylor’s circumstances to initiate his release, said: “This is a matter for the Parole Commission.”
Foyle Sinn Fein MLA Raymond McCartney welcomed Taylor’s “belated” release, but said it “doesn’t change the fact that he should never have been returned to prison in the first place”.