Deirdre Connolly cannot quite believe what has happened over the last week, with the “overwhelming” support contrasting starkly with her family being all alone after being accused of stealing thousands from the Post Office more than a decade ago.
Ms Connolly, from Strabane, is one of the hundreds of post office operators caught up in what has been described as the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history.
After she and her husband, Darius, sat back after watching the ITV drama series ‘Mr Bates vs the Post Office, he asked her; “Did you ever think we would get to this stage.”
In 2010, the family was alone.
Investigators came to the door of the border post office of Killeter, Co Tyrone, inside the shop the couple owned, carried out an audit and claimed there was a shortfall of £17,000, later reduced after £1,000 was found in a safe.
One of her interrogators, an ex-policeman from England, even asked whether she was giving money to paramilitaries, a suggestion that pressured and terrified her.
“We were literally all alone,” Ms Connolly says of the dark days in the immediate aftermath of the closure of the Post Office and the accusation there was a shortfall of approximately £16,000.
“But over the last week, the support has been overwhelming. It has been mental but it was a good mental, if ten years too late.”
She welcomed the announced convictions will be overturned and the compensation process fast tracked.
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Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told MPs: “We will introduce new primary legislation to ensure that those convicted as a result of the Horizon scandal are swiftly exonerated and compensated.”
Up to this point, Ms Connolly has received some small interim payments but the process for full compensation has been slow.
“You have to to through the whole rigmarole with forensic accountants, psychiatrists and others,” the Strabane woman said.
Ms Connolly believes the focus should not only be on the former Post Office Chief Executive Paula Vennells as she believes many others within the company’s hierarchy are to blame, including the investigators.
During one interrogation carried out by ex-policeman from England, she was questioned over whether she took the money for paramilitaries.
The accusation terrified her for if this circulated around Strabane she believed the lives of her and her family’s lives would be at risk.
She managed to scrape together the money from family and pay the £16,000 to the Post Office.
“I feel like we paid the money….under threat to our lives. It was like having money extorted from you with menace,” Ms Connolly told the Post Office Public Inquiry..
Ms Connolly never faced any criminal charges but she was sent a letter stating no charges would be brought against her.
“Up to that point, it never occurred to me there was a possibility of criminal charges because I had done nothing wrong,” she said.
While the couple attempted to keep the shop going following the 2010 closure of the Post Office, people stopped coming as they were regarded as “thieves”. They lost the shop in 2013 and declared bankruptcy the same year.
Over the years, she has suffered serious mental and physical health as a result of the experience.
“What was done to me and others could not be more wrong. Those who did it, and those who allowed it to happen, must be held to account.”
