Rose Dugdale British heiress and debutante who was presented to Queen Elizabeth, joined IRA and became a bomb-maker and art thief

British heiress turned IRA maverick Rose Dugdale was “extremely generous and disturbingly brutal”, according to her biographer Sean O’Driscoll, summing up the life of the extraordinary woman who died last week aged 83.

She also left Ireland an unintended legacy: her infamous art heist at Russborough House contributed to

Sir Alfred and Lady Beit donating a major part of their vast art collection — including the only Vermeer then in private hands — to the National Gallery of Ireland.

Like the brutal IRA chief of staff Seán Mac Stíofáin, Dugdale had no connection with Ireland yet as a rebel in search of a cause she made Irish reunification a career that contributed to the loss of innocent lives and irrevocably severed ties to her family.

She and her lover Eddie Gallagher were also an embarrassment to the IRA and its tightly controlled command structure.

“The fact that I was an ex-prisoner gave me a certain status within the republican movement,” she once said.

“There had always been an attitude that I was from a strange background, from the monied classes. I was considered an oddball and a maverick. Some would have said that I belonged with the Stickies [Official IRA] because I wasn’t the ‘typical’ republican.”

While it has been easy for some to romanticise her life and deeds, there was a dark and dangerous side to her character. She had all the certainty of her British upper-class upbringing and a certain lack of empathy towards the working-classes she was so desperate to liberate.

“You mustn’t forget they were very exciting times… the world looked as if it would change and was likely to be changed and, whoever you were, you could play a part in that,” she told RTÉ once in a rare interview.

Bridget Rose Dugdale was born to Eric Dugdale, a British army officer and Lloyd’s insurance underwriter, and his glamorous wife Caroline, on March 25, 1941. Her mother was an heiress who had been married to John Mosley, brother of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. She had two older stepbrothers, an older sister who married a Conservative MP and died in 2017, and a younger brother.

They lived between their townhouse in Chelsea and a 600-acre farm in Dorset. She “came out” as a debutante and was presented to Queen Elizabeth at a ball in 1958 and later compared the experience to a “pornographic affair”.

At Oxford she had a lesbian affair with her female tutor Peter Ady and became friends with the Dublin-born writer Iris Murdoch. She and a friend disguised as young men became known in the media as the “gatecrash girls” after gaining admittance to the all-male Oxford Union.

Her contemporary, the former Conservative minister Edwina Curry, was contemptuous of her “radical chic” pose. Dugdale was, she said, “one of those privileged idiots who felt she could do whatever she wanted.

“I wasn’t in that position; I’d come from a grammar school and my daddy wasn’t going to bail me out

Rose Dugdale, who has died at the age of 83, was behind the art heist at Russborough House in April 1974 with a job in the City if I messed up.”

On a student trip to Cuba in 1968, she became enamoured by the Castro regime. She worked briefly as an economist for the UN and the British government. In 1971, aged 30, she decided to give away her considerable family trust to the “needy”.

This, in turn, led to the Lotus-driving heiress meeting the married, leftwing, ex-convict Walter Heaton who became her lover.

After Bloody Sunday they became interested in Irish republicanism and decided to begin the “revolution” by robbing her home while her parents were at the races in Epsom. Paintings and silverware worth £82,000 (about €1.4m in today’s money) were stolen, but the pair were soon caught and tried at Exeter Crown Court.

The judge sentenced Heaton to six years in prison, but gave Dugdale a two-year suspended sentence on the basis that the probability of her reoffending was “extremely remote”.

“I love you but hate everything you stand for,” she told her father who she cross-examined as a prosecution witness.

Dugdale returned to Northern Ireland on her own in 1973 and took up with another maverick, Eddie Gallagher, both as a lover and “comrade in arms”.

In January 1974, they hijacked a helicopter in Donegal and flew over Strabane in Co Tyrone, dumping milk churns filled with explosives in an attempt to bomb the RUC barracks.

“The operation was a fiasco — the bombers nearly blew themselves up, failed to cause any damage to the barracks, and endangered the lives of many civilians who gathered to watch the show,” said one commentator.

She told O’Driscoll for his book, Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber: The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale, that it was the happiest day of her life.

“It was the first time I felt like I was really at the centre of things, that I was really doing as I said I would do.”

On April 26, 1974, Dugdale and Gallagher, now on the run, led an armed raid on Russborough House in Co Wicklow, which the Beits had bought to house their art collection.

Sir Alfred Beit (71) was beaten on the head with a pistol and his wife Clementine threatened with a knife.

Dugdale picked the 19 masterpieces which the gang cut from ornate gilt frames and included works by Rubens, Gainsborough, Goya and Vermeer’s masterpiece ‘Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid’. They demanded £500,000 and the release of the IRA bombers Dolours and Marian Price for the return of the paintings.

On May 4, two gardaí were told about a woman living alone in a remote house in Glandore in west Cork — and when they checked it out they found Rose Dugdale, with the 19 canvases rolled up in the boot of her car.

She was jailed for nine years at the Special Criminal Court in 1974 and used the occasion to declare that she was “proudly and incorruptibly guilty.” It came as a surprise to everyone that she was also pregnant and she gave birth to Gallagher’s son, Ruairi, in Limerick Prison.

The couple later got a special dispensation to marry in jail in 1978, although sceptics speculated that this was done to prevent his extradition to face charges relating to the Strabane bombing. Gallagher was also serving time in prison in relation to the kidnapping of Dr Tiede Herrema. One of his demands to release the Dutch industrialist was that Dugdale would be freed.

After her release from prison in 1980, Dugdale joined Sinn Féin. She wrote for An Phoblacht and supported causes it espoused, such as Concerned Parents Against Drugs, the hunger strikes and the Shell to Sea agitation in Belmullet, Co Mayo.

From the mid-1980s she became involved with Jim Monaghan, the IRA bomb-maker who was one of the Colombia Three. Together they developed a powerful new fertiliser-based explosive Ballycroy 3-4, named by security experts after the remote Mayo farmhouse where he and Dugdale lived at the time.

These explosives were used to devastating effect, killing three British soldiers in a bombing in Armagh and at the Baltic Exchange in London in 1992, where three innocent civilians — bystander Paul Butt (29), Exchange attandant Thomas Casey (49) and 15-year-old Danielle Carter who was sitting in a nearby car — were killed.

They were also used in the London Docklands attacks of 1996.

Despite her maverick reputation, Rose Dugdale backed the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. She had been estranged from her family for decades but, according to the Daily Telegraph, she and her son Ruairi, now a businessman in Germany, had an amicable reunion in 2008 with her younger brother James.

After a stroke in 2014 Rose Dugdale lived in a retirement home for nuns, the Maryfield Nursing Home in Chapelizod, Dublin, where she died unexpectedly on March 18.

I love you but hate everything you stand for, Rose Dugdale told her father in court