HUGH McAteer was IRA chief of staff when he was arrested in October 1942. A serving policeman from his old street in Derry had claimed he could supply the IRA with certain useful information, but when McAteer and his director of intelligence, Gerald O’Reilly, arrived at the man’s house they were arrested and lodged in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Gaol.
McAteer was desperate to escape and found a trapdoor in the ceiling of a toilet that led to an attic under the slates of the jail roof. He suggested to Paddy Donnelly, OC of the republican prisoners on A Wing, that an escape was possible using this route and that Belfast man Jimmy Steele, adjutant IRA Northern Command, should go with them. They brought Ned Maguire into the conspiracy because he was a roof slater by trade.
On the morning of January 15 1943, as the warders breakfasted, the four received permission to go to the toilet. They used a table to get into the attic, replacing the trapdoor beneath them.
Once in the attic, Ned Maguire removed the roof slates, and the four made their way out onto the roof. They slid down from the roof on a rope made of knotted sheets and dashed to the 20-foot perimeter wall.
At the wall, the escapees affixed a hook to a long pole made from brush shafts and strips of leather from the prison shoe shop and, after some trouble, hooked the barbed wire. Within minutes the four were on the other side of the wall. The four men returned to IRA active service.
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In less than nine months, Jimmy Steele was to figure in another daring escape. He accompanied the driver of a hired furniture van from Belfast to Derry which was used to ferry many of the escapees from a tunnel breakout from Derry Jail to what they thought was safety across the border in Donegal.
The majority of the 21 escapees were from Belfast, including Paddy Adams, Séamus ‘Rocky’ Burns, Harry and Jimmy O’Rawe, and Cathal ‘Chips’ McCusker. Interned in the Curragh Camp, Rocky Burns was subsequently ordered to sign a declaration distancing himself from the IRA to get out.
He made his way back to Belfast and continued in active service but was mortally wounded in a shoot-out with RUC detectives at Queen Street.
CRUMLIN KANGAROOS
DURING the exercise period on the morning of November 16 1971, two teams of republicans began playing a game of football on one of the recreation fields near the rear of Crumlin Road Gaol. The teams were in green jerseys and blue jerseys, while dozens of prisoners stood in civilian clothes around the pitch watching the game.
At 11.10am two rope ladders were thrown over the wall near some sheds at the Clifton Park Avenue side. At the blow of a whistle, 11 men in football jerseys and shorts ran to the wall, where two rope ladders had suddenly appeared.
Fifteen men had been designated to hold back the prison warders. Although outnumbered, the warders managed to regain control of the situation. Nine men eventually climbed the rope ladders, dropped over the wall and went out through a hole cut in the perimeter fence earlier by IRA volunteers posing as workmen.
The nine men, all from Belfast, piled into the two vehicles and made good their escape. Two were arrested trying to cross the border disguised as monks, while the other seven escapees successfully made it across.
The escape caught the imagination of the Irish public, and, shortly after the jailbreak, the Wolfhound folk group recorded the now-famous ‘Crumlin Kangaroos’ ballad, which became an instant hit in Ireland and among the Irish abroad.
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
SEÁN Convery was one of the would-be escapees left behind in the Crumlin Road jailbreak. Due to overcrowding, and maybe because he was wearing football gear on the morning of the Crumlin Road escape, Convery was transferred by helicopter to the British prison ship HMS Maidstone, which was moored on Belfast Lough.
On the night of January 17 1972 Convery was one of seven republican internees who escaped from the Maidstone and swam to freedom. The escapees achieved fame in news headlines across the world as ‘The Magnificent Seven’.
The following September escapee Jim Bryson was arrested again and charged with possession of a handgun. He was held in Long Kesh and then taken to Crumlin Road Gaol for trial. On the morning of his trial Bryson staged a spectacular escape.
While being escorted to Crumlin Road Courthouse through the underground tunnel that connects the jail with the courthouse, Bryson produced a small .25 pistol, and he and another prisoner stripped the prison guards of their uniforms.
They then casually walked through the courthouse towards freedom, but Bryson’s accomplice was apprehended. Bryson made it outside, discarded his uniform, headed for the Shankill Road, and hitched a lift from two unsuspecting off-duty Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers who thought they were running a mercy mission to the Royal Victoria Hospital.
On August 31 1973 Bryson was mortally wounded and a fellow volunteer, Paddy Mulvenna, shot dead by a British Army sniper hidden in the roof space of a building in Ballymurphy’s Bullring. Bryson died three weeks later, on September 22.
While being escorted to Crumlin Road Courthouse through the underground tunnel from the jail, Jim Bryson produced a pistol, and he and another prisoner stripped the prison guards of their uniforms. They then casually walked towards freedom... Bryson made it outside, headed for the Shankill Road, and hitched a lift from two unsuspecting UDR soldiers...
SQUAD GOALS
IRA chief of staff Seamus Twomey escaped from Dublin’s Mountjoy Jail in a helicopter airlift in 1973 along with Kevin Mallon and JB O’Hagen. The following year 19 men escaped through a hole blown in the wall at Portlaoise Prison. Three of the men were from Belfast: Liam Brown, Paddy Devenny and Micky Nolan.
The M60 Squad’s dramatic escape from Crumlin Road Gaol in the midst of the 1981 H-Block hunger strikes in Long Kesh was a huge morale boost to the republican movement and the nationalist people. The Belfast IRA unit was known as the M60 Squad because of their use of the powerful American-made general-purpose M60 machine gun during ambushes of Crown forces.
In early June seven Belfast IRA members were within days of their trial on charges of M60 machine gun attacks that had left two members of the Crown forces dead and three wounded, when they broke out.
Joe Doherty, Paul ‘Dingus’ Magee, Robert Campbell, Michael ‘Beaky’ McKee, brothers Tony and Gerry Sloan, Angelo Fusco and another veteran volunteer, Pete Ryan, from the republican heartland of Ardboe, Co Tyrone, shot their way out of the Crum.
BLOCKBUSTERS
Long Kesh, or the Maze Prison, as the British preferred to call it, was considered Europe’s most escape-proof jail. IRA volunteers in H Block 7 proved this wasn’t so when on September 25 1983, 38 of them made an escape bid after taking over the entire block and hijacking the prison food lorry.
Nineteen of the original 38 escapees successfully evaded recapture and were brought across the border to relative safety. Twelve were from Belfast: Kevin Barry Artt, Paul Brennan, Seamus Clarke, Gerard Fryers, Dermot Finucane, Gerry Kelly, Anthony McAllister, Gerry McDonnell, Brendan McFarlane, Robert Russell, Terence Kirby and Jim Smyth.
Most of the escapees were subsequently recaptured and were returned to jails north and south over the ensuing years. Gerard Fryers and Seamus Campbell were never heard of again. Three of the escapees were later killed on active service – Kieran Fleming (1984), Seamus McElwaine (1986) and Padraig McKearney (1987).
