Tiede Herrema
Dutch businessman who was kidnapped by terrorists in Ireland and went on to forgive his captors
TIEDE HERREMA, who has died aged 99, was a Dutch industrialist in the Irish Republic who in 1975 survived 36 days in captivity after being kidnapped by a rogue faction of the Provisional IRA; he coped with his ordeal, culminating in an 18-day siege by the Garda and the Irish army at a council house west of Dublin, using survival skills honed in a Nazi labour camp he had been sent to for joining the Dutch Resistance.
Herrema’s captors, Eddie Gallagher and Marion Coyle, thought they were kidnapping a German whose government would pressure the authorities to free three IRA prisoners, among them Gallagher’s lover Rose Dugdale, an ex-debutante who had pulled off an £8 million art theft.
Having abducted Herrema, who was the chief executive of a Limerick wire factory and the city’s largest employer, Gallagher and Marion Coyle asked him the name of the German ambassador; he had no idea.
Herrema emerged from his ordeal shaken but unhurt. The Ferrenka plant, whose workers had ended a strike to demand his release, closed soon after. But he and his wife Elisabeth bore no grudges and came back to Ireland to work for reconciliation. They criticised the 20- and 15-year prison sentences on Gallagher and Marion Coyle as “too hard”, and insisted on meeting them after their release.
The Herremas were made honorary citizens of the Republic, and after their deaths President Michael Higgins, who met them several times, paid them a heartfelt tribute.
Tiede Herrema was born at Zuilen, near Utrecht, on April 21 1921. When he was a student, the Gestapo arrested him because of his activities in the Resistance, and after interrogation in The Hague, he was transported to Ratibor in Upper Silesia, a camp for prisoners of war and teenagers.
As the war neared its end, Soviet troops liberated the camp. “There was a row of people,” Herrema recalled.
“Half of them were shot. I don’t know why they didn’t shoot me.
“Then I walked, together with a Frenchman, to Pilsen [300 miles away], and there we were helped by the Americans.” They walked for several nights, hiding by daylight as they did not know who they could trust.
He embarked on a career in business, and by 1975 was employing 1,200 workers at the factory in Limerick.
That October 3, Herrema, then 54, had just left his home for an early meeting at the works when he was flagged down at an apparent Garda checkpoint. When he confirmed his name, the “policeman” whipped out a revolver and bundled him into a car.
The kidnappers were nervous, arguing, and waving guns around. A phone call to the Dutch embassy demanded the release of three prisoners, including Rose Dugdale and Marion Coyle’s boyfriend Kevin Mallon; otherwise the kidnappers threatened to kill Herrema in 48 hours.
Gallagher and Marion Coyle hoped the Irish government would cave in under pressure from The Hague if Herrema’s wife begged them to secure his release. But the Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave saw the kidnapping as a challenge to the Irish state – and Elisabeth Herrema supported him in facing it down.
Fitters at Ferrenka marched through Limerick demanding Herrema’s release. The city’s Lord Mayor appealed to the IRA – who denied involvement and were themselves looking for Gallagher – to “find this man and bring him back, otherwise 1,200 people will be out of work”.
The deadline passed. Then, as hope began to fade, fresh demands came, including the shutdown of the plant. The kidnappers hoped its owners would lean on Cosgrave to secure Herrema’s release. The greatest manhunt in the history of the State was launched, with troops watching every port, airport and border track.
After two weeks, the kidnappers released a tape of Herrema’s voice, in which he confirmed he was in good health. It was accompanied by demands for a £2 million ransom and a flight to the Middle East.
Gallagher and Marion Coyle held Herrema first at Mountmellick, in the centre of Ireland. Knowing nothing of his past, they expected him to crack. He coped with his disorientation by doing mathematical puzzles in his head, and by starting a diary he would keep private for 30 years. Herrema cried only once, he said, when he thought of the youngest of his four sons. He told himself: “If I cry I am weak, I am lost, so I won’t think of him.”
Then the kidnappers moved him to the terrace house at Monasterevin, Co Kildare, and on October 21 they were traced there. Special Branch staged a dawn raid, and as police smashed down the front door Gallagher and Marion Coyle, shooting wildly, retreated to a bedroom with their hostage.
With the house surrounded by armoured cars, searchlights, snipers and the world’s media, a haggard Herrema came to a window and told the police to stay away.
The upstairs room became a psychological battleground. Herrema’s jittery captors had three guns, no food, no water, no toilet facilities, a concrete floor for a bed, snipers in the garden, and nowhere to run. He set out to ease the tension by humanising himself in their eyes. Gallagher was the same age as Herrema’s eldest son, which gave him an opening. Marion Coyle, by contrast, “didn’t talk at all. I could never reach her.”
Desperate for liquids, Gallagher tried filtering his urine through a blanket and drinking it. Herrema advised him to suck his fingers instead, “so he would feel as though he had drunk something”.
After several days, the kidnappers accepted food placed in a basket on a lowered rope. There was a failed attempt at another dawn raid through a back window.
When the Garda first made contact, Gallagher replied with a torrent of expletives. But on Day 17 of the siege – November 7 – the kidnappers asked for headache tablets. Hours later they threw down their guns and came out.
Gallagher – who thought he had meningitis – and Marion Coyle were taken into custody. Herrema was driven to the Dutch embassy in Dublin for a medical. Back in the Netherlands he forgave his captors, saying: “They could have been my own children. They must have been through desperate times to come to this.”
In prison, Gallagher, who served 14 years of his sentence, married Rose Dugdale, who had earlier given birth to his son. Marion Coyle, who served nine years of hers, also married; she had a daughter and became a social worker.
Herrema said after meeting them separately: “Eddie had an idea, and he lived for that. He’s OK, he’s nice. She [Marion Coyle] is, well, a bit hard.”
Herrema kept fit into his old age. His hobbies ranged from rebuilding clocks to chess, genealogy and painting in watercolours. He became a freeman of Limerick, and in 2005 donated his papers to the city’s university.
Tiede Herrema died a week after Elisabeth, to whom he was married for 72 years.