IRA prison escapee was given pardon

AN IRA man who escaped prison more than 50 years ago was given a royal pardon by Margaret Thatcher’s government, official records from 1985 revealed.

Donal Donnelly fled Belfast’s Crumlin Road jail — which he dubbed Europe’s Alcatraz — on Boxing Day 1960 while serving a sentence for membership of the armed group during its 1950s border campaign.

Former Northern Ireland secretary Lord Hurd, part of a Conservative government scarred by republican violence, agreed to use the Royal Prerogative of Mercy in May 1985.

His decision was made less than two years after the biggest prison break-out in UK history by 38 republicans and ahead of landmark political talks on British cooperation with the Irish Government.

A Northern Ireland Office (NIO) letter from the time said: “The Secretary of State has approved the recommendation ... that the remainder of Mr Donnelly’s sentence should be remitted.”

Donnelly, who was serving a 10-year sentence when he escaped, wrote a book in which he described using hacksaw blades, torn sheets and electric flex as makeshift tools. The title of the book, pictured, was Escape From Crumlin Road, Europe’s Alcatraz.

Afterwards he lived openly in the Irish Republic.

Official files released by the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) reveal Donnelly petitioned three times for the remainder of his sentence to be remitted.

The use of pardons following the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement was disclosed earlier this year after the dramatic collapse of the trial of a man accused of the Hyde Park bombing.

Records released yesterday shed light on the thinking of senior civil servants considering the controversial practice much earlier, while the conflict was still fierce and when Lady Thatcher’s government was adamantly opposed to granting any concessions to republicans.

The month Lord Hurd approved the pardon he was tasked with overseeing talks with the Irish Government on the Northern Ireland issue which led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Less than a year earlier, in October 1984, the IRA targeted a Conservative Party conference in Brighton in a bombing which nearly wiped out the cabinet.

An NIO official suggested: “I cannot help feeling that given the Northern Ireland situation, the time will never be exactly right.

“However the prisons are quiescent at the moment, the Maze escape is 18 months behind us and the trial of the recaptured escapers is some months ahead.

“If we hold off until the late summer we may well end up deferring action yet again rather than remit Donnelly’s sentences during, or immediately after, that trial.”

Picture: PA. Donal Donnelly when he returned to visit the Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast, where he escaped from but was still granted a pardon.