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November 1983. The IRA has turned to kidnapping to fund its armed campaign in the north. The organisation has a supermarket boss in its sights – Quinnsworth chief executive, Don Tidey. As Tidey does the school run en route to his south Dublin office he pulls up at a garda checkpoint. Within moments he is dragged from his car, bundled into another car and driven away at speed. It was the beginning of a massive manhunt and a 23-day ordeal for Tidey. At the instant he is found, in an isolated Leitrim wood, his captors kill a trainee garda and an army private. After a tense standoff with soldiers and gardaí and an exchange of fire, they escape and are never caught.
It is, and will remain, the deadliest ever confrontation between the Irish security forces and the IRA. The Kidnapping opens with the dramatic story of Tidey’s rescue. No one emerges unscathed – not the rural community where the IRA gang holds its captive, not the gardaí, not the State. And especially not the man at the heart of the drama nor the families bereaved when he is rescued. Don Tidey speaks about his ordeal for the first time. Equally startling and moving are interviews with the families of Patrick Kelly and Gary Sheehan, who reveal the devastating impact of the two men’s violent deaths and the ongoing challenges of coming to terms with their loss. The following excerpt is based on an interview with David Kelly, the eldest of Patrick Kelly’s four sons…
FOR PADDY, THE army was going to be his career. ‘Oh certainly,’ says David. ‘I think he took it very seriously.
From what I can gather, listening to his colleagues, it was his life.’ With his talent for mechanics, Paddy completed an armoured personnel carrier course in 1972 and became an army driver.
It was in March 1974 that he married Caitriona Bradley from Moate, also known as Catherine. He was twenty-six, she was twenty-one. They had first met in The Well pub, a popular country & western music venue in the town.
Caitriona was one of seven siblings; their father Jack worked in a local hardware store. Their mother died at the age of fifty-one in 1976. Jack Bradley died six weeks before his son-in-law was murdered.
The young couple started off married life in a flat in Moate. A year later they moved into a council house at 12 St Patrick’s Terrace. One by one the boys were born. Caitriona had a number of miscarriages. Army pay was poor and money was scarce, but the children were oblivious to that, feeling secure and loved, growing up safe and content.
The area was ‘teeming with children’, David recalls, ‘playing soccer out on the green’. They were mostly from army families as well. The men used to car-share on their way to work. ‘I remember looking out a window. There was [Dad] in the driver’s seat and there were three other soldiers.’
Caitriona had worked in a textiles factory in Clara before she got married. She would still clock up a few hours here and there in a local café or takeaway. As her father got older, she took care of him more and more.
After Jack Bradley died from cancer in 1983, Caitriona went to his solicitor to hand in his rent book. ‘Which one of the daughters are you?’ she was asked. The solicitor checked his paperwork and then told her: ‘He left his home to you.’
David recalls: ‘My father was waiting in the car outside. She got in and told him the good news and she said he was elated. My grandfather had bought the house from the council and willed it to her. I was told that, the weekend my father was killed, he was getting help from people with the move from one house to another. ‘Her husband and father were very important in her life. Within a couple of months she lost the two men she counted on.’
Into that vacuum would come another man, himself a soldier in Custume Barracks, married with a wife and children but separated and living in a flat. The brothers remember him materialising into their lives, gradually becoming a presence in the house until he became a permanent fixture.
On the night of 16 December, people had come streaming into the living room to offer their condolences. The room had been cleared of furniture, bar one armchair, where their mother was sitting to receive the visitors.
At one point David was told to join her by the armchair. ‘I was standing there at her left and one of the people that came in was this man, wearing the Irish army uniform. I didn’t know who he was.’
Pretty soon they would get to know who he was. He had known Paddy Kelly as a colleague in Custume Barracks. After the funeral, he started to turn up regularly at their house. He taught their mother how to drive; he helped her buy her first car. ‘It was a way of getting close to her,’ David says, remembering that some people thought it was ‘happening too quickly, that he was just turning up on the scene all the time, sort of filling my father’s shoes’.
At first controlling, then domineering, the boys say he eventually became physically abusive and was the opposite of the loving father figure they had lost.
‘When I look back on everything,’ says David now, ‘it was coercive control. He took advantage of a grief-stricken woman. It was a classic case of this knight in shining armour; he promised he’d take care of her and us. Her own siblings warned her about him but she sort of pushed them away and became more and more reliant on this man.
‘Because I was the eldest son, I felt like I had to have the role of the father, almost, you know? But I remember me and her just sitting in a room and then he came in and there’s silence. This presence. He became this barrier between me and her.’
Three years after Paddy Kelly’s death, his widow decided to leave Moate and move to London with her children and new partner. David remembers the day they flew from Dublin airport – 28 November 1986 – because it was three days after his twelfth birthday. Caitriona’s partner had retired from the army and planned to work on the building sites in England.
‘She would never have gone to London if it wasn’t for him,’ says David, who feels Caitriona was aware of local hostility towards her new relationship. ‘I think they felt it was the best thing, a fresh start for them – and us, I guess. Just get on the plane and leave Ireland.’
‘I think she was just vulnerable,’ says Michael. ‘This man stepped in when she was maybe at her lowest ebb. She was a thirty-one-year-old widow with four young children. Although she had a supportive family here, there was grief and the stress of trying to deal with all this without the appropriate mental health team or counselling. What people have today just wasn’t there in the early eighties.’
David remembers the flight to London. ‘The plane was half-empty, and it was like, all of a sudden, the mood was very quiet. And I looked at my mother to the left of me and she was looking out the window. And then I looked across at my younger brothers and this awful feeling came over me. I said to my mother, it was like a gut instinct, I said: “I don’t want to go to England.” I just got a bad feeling that we weren’t going for the best of reasons.’
Their first home was a flat in Cricklewood, but it was temporary accommodation. They registered with the local authority and after their short-term lease on the flat expired, the family was officially homeless. They were provided with emergency lodgings in a small hotel in West Hampstead.
From there they were transferred to a flat in Kilburn for maybe six months before finally being allocated a council house on the Grahame Park estate in the district of Colindale in north-west London. It was a vast estate with problems of crime and violence, drugs and antisocial behaviour.
Michael and Patrick were enrolled in a primary school in Cricklewood while David entered second level in St James’s Catholic High School in Colindale.
‘We felt completely uprooted,’ says Michael. ‘We’d never been outside of Moate, other than towns around here. It was a different world, going into school and sitting beside people from different countries, trying to adapt to the new environment, trying to fit in. Obviously, it was tough being Irish there in the eighties. So it was a big change for all of us.’
The boys felt that their mother’s new partner became more controlling once the family moved to London. David recalls her buying groceries one day in a shop in Cricklewood and saying, ‘Don’t tell him how much we spent.’ The Kellys and the Bradleys had relations in London, but they say he deliberately kept away from them.
Unbeknownst to almost everyone, including the children, the couple got married. Being married would fast-track them up the housing list with the local council.
As a widow, Caitriona had been in receipt of an army pension since the death of her husband. She lost that after she remarried. ‘It’s another sign of how she became totally dependent on this man,’ says David. ‘Not alone had she left her home and her country, she gave up her army pension too.’ At that time the boys were not aware that a trust fund had been set up on their behalf by Quinnsworth. Caitriona kept it secret, even from her new husband. ‘I overheard him say to our mother once, “If there’s money there, just withdraw it.”
He was suspecting there was something. But the one thing she emphasised for us was education. I think that’s what she was thinking about: the trust would be there for our education. She didn’t realise it was there for our welfare. A car, clothes, a family holiday, whatever it was.’
The fund was held in Allied Irish Bank and administered by trustees. To draw money from it, Caitriona could submit a request and the trustees would have to approve it. But, according to Michael, ‘it wasn’t touched for years’. Andrew says: ‘All our relations back home believed we were well taken care of, that we were looked after. Little did they know that we were going round in squalor, in terrible clothes.’
It seems that Caitriona’s dream was for the boys to go to university, and the trust fund would facilitate that. It would be activated to give them the education she and Paddy never had, and which would bring her sons better opportunities in life than she had known.
According to the boys, their mother’s partner graduated from coercion to violence. David remembers the first time he realised his mother was being assaulted. ‘I didn’t see it, but I heard it. I was in the room next door. He sort of took out his anger on her. He seemed to be, like, slapping her in the face . . . What really annoyed me was just the way she took it in silence. That’s what made it so particularly painful.
‘I lay in bed that night, and she came in and sat on the bed and she was crying, and I was crying. She said, “I’m so sorry. It’s not his fault. The army made him that way.” I now know it was a case of the victim making excuses for her abuser. I fell asleep that night crying. Part of me died that night.’
The boys say there were similar incidents in the years that followed, and they often didn’t feel safe in their home. David says: ‘I think my saviour in those years was soccer. With all the kids in the area, it was like the UN – so many different nationalities. In our block there were Hungarians, Italians, Nigerians, and we were all out playing football on the green. ‘I think it kept me going, because I loved soccer and all my energy went into it. The estate had a reputation for crime and there was a lot of drug dealing going on, there was violence, and it got to a point that after six in the evening I wouldn’t go to the shopping area. I wouldn’t feel safe.’
Michael adds: ‘You had to protect yourself at home, at school and in the neighbourhood. Life was just tough all round.’ Of the siblings, Michael was the one who most often challenged his mother’s partner. ‘I did stand up to him a good bit, so maybe he took a particular dislike to me. Regularly there were confrontations between us.’ It was perhaps inevitable that Michael would be the first to fly the nest. ‘It was definitely easier for me just to get out of there.’
Tommy Conlon is a sportswriter with the Sunday Independent. Ronan McGreevy is an Irish Times journalist and videographer. ’The Kidnapping’ is published by Penguin Sandycove and is available in shops and online from 26 October.
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Seeing as we are an island surrounded by beautiful (for the most part) coastline it makes sense to play to our strengths, especially if such high employment rates could be achieved. One worry that I would have is how seasonal a lot of these projects and would an uncontrollable factor such as weather be able to negatively impact this initiative very easily?
Absolutely but once we don’t return to the bad old days of rip-off Ireland. We have a habit of shooting ourselves in the foot.
Ha, less is more! No more hype. What we need is well-functioning infrastructure, for example real cycle ways, like the Green Way to Achill Island. We do not need more golf courses, tourist traps or badly signposted and maintained ‘walking’ or ‘cycling’ ways just on roads. It doesn’t become a cycle track by putting a sign or two there: it’s still a road. We also need local ‘bad weather’ attractions’. All tourist amenities and historical attractions are closing from Oct to Mar here in the west. If we want any ‘all year round’ tourism we have to stop this and keep them open with a skeleton staff ratio for some days the week. We do not need only cheap seasonal labour; we need sustainable tourism for the future
100% agreed, we could be a massive market leader in this! Our west coast is pretty incredible and should be developed in a clever way, walking/cycling/hiking are all huge markets and some minor investment could reap huge rewards!
We don’t exploit our natural resources half enough for tourism or even for ourselves. “craic” and leprechauns ain’t gonna bring tourists here.
Our politicians sell off our natural resources to be exploited
Oil and gas attracts tourists how?
They should maybe be thinking along the lines of safari park accommodation in Africa or ski resorts – but in the wilds of Bureen, Donegal or Kerry etc., Not dated old hotels in cities but specifically located modern facilities that cater for the activities. That ‘get away from it all’ experience that actually does live up to the phoney TV ad blarney we see all the time.
BTW It’s a real shame so much of the East coast is off limits and blocked off – you can’t walk very far south from Dun Laoghaire without hitting houses directly on the coastline. And of course the whole city harbour is non-existant pretty much with Dublin Port blocking everything. You’d think there would be regular short hop ferries from the City center to Howth, Clontarf, or Dun Laoighaire, Greystones at this stage. We must be the only major city with a harbour that doesn’t do this – like Hong Kong, Sydney, London etc.,
West Cork needs to look at the infestation of private property keep out signs that blight their beautiful countryside. As a regular visitor it leaves a bad taste and it’s not something you see in neighbouring Kerry, nor do we want to see it.
Dublin bay cruises runs every day Dun Loaighaire- Dublin port – Howth and back again , although I would love to see another one from malahide – Howth etc or possibly a park and ride ferry at Clontarf going to Howth . Yes I’m from Howth :)
Hong Kong, Sydney and London are not comparable cities to Dublin.
The Wild Atlantic way is a great idea and takes people along done of the very best and must stunning scenery in Ireland.
In the world I think you meant
What a joke ! A bit of Sun and every Skumbag and his bird took over all the coastal beaches the last few days and We want tourists to bring a Towel ! Clean up the filth first.
I think the staff spend their time on beaches, the staff at the College Green office never heard of Francis Bacon never mind where his exhibition was being held. 1 assistant simply replied “NO” when asked where the exhibition was on. I wrote to newspaper hoping somebody in the tourist board would at least inform their staff of important events. People come from all over the world to see this exhibition and out Tourist Board never heard of it. Shameful.
That’s not a Failte Ireland Tourist Office. It’s business, mostly a ticket selling office for day tours etc. It is just designed to look like a tourist office.
hope they don’t end up destroying the landscape
http://www.travelbuddy.mobi have over 450 things to do in Ireland. It’s a good list of what’s available around the country to visitors.
Shameless plug finished.
I bet the government are factoring in McDonald’s into this….no shame
There was a story on the front page of the Western People about a proposed Monasteries of the Moy Greenway, along the shore of the Moy estuary from Ballina to Killala getting blocked by land owners. If these land owners did farm they would probably be the best farmers in the world.
How long before we see the wild atlantic way destroyed with wind turbines and pylons….Irelands politics will see to that
And when the subsidies run out the West will look like this.
http://toryardvaark.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/abandoned_southpoint_wind_farm.jpg
Why? There’s nothing to see in Ireland outside Dublin.
Looking for attention?
Nothing to see in dublin only puke….whenever the wife and I go home we go straight to Cork
I remember this catchphrase during the 80s
Ireland should now capitalize on promoting our radiation free coastline…something that is the envy of a lot of countries around the globe…
The Irish Sea has been described by Greenpeace as the most radioactively contaminated sea in the world with some “eight million litres of nuclear waste”
Britain has been dumping nuclear waste in to the Irish sea for 50 years. Probably the most radioactive sea in Europe.
There is a total media blackout as to what is going on in the pacific ocean and west coast of the United States up as far as Alaska.
Have you ever left a comment that wasn’t negative Frank? Perennial moaner!!!
Marlon Brando…………..The truth about Fukushima is negative……
No point sticking your head in the sand about it.
Why is it always about the coastal areas we have beautiful lakes and river shannon in the middle of the country no money ever spent cmon bord failte huge potential here
We need to think big here. Our West coast is stunningly beautiful from Donegal to kerry and beyond. A cycle way like the one from Westoprt to Achill should be built along the entire west coast with facilities in place like bike hire and small cafés, public toilets, camp sites(proper ones like they have in France and Italy).
We need changing rooms and cafe’s on our popular surfing beaches.
Cycling and hiking holidays are very popular and we should tap into this market as much as we can and push Ireland as the best place on earth to go on a hiking and cycling holidays.
With a bit of planning and investment this would be very achievable and could give people on our west coast a sustainable income by setting up small businesses along this route (like bike hire, camping sites, cafés, B+Bs, surf hire, etc)
I think that there should be a route like the west opened up down in the South West and South East. You would be taking in small towns along the Kerry Cork Waterford and Wexford. Some of the most stunning scenry you can find any were in the world. I might be abit biased but the coast road from Dungarvan to Tramore is stunning with the copper coast and all the small seaside villages like Stradbally , Annestown, Bunmahon and Fenor.
This from Bord Failte’s own Visitor Attitudes Survey:
“The country’s natural heritage including the Burren
and the cliffs of Moher far outperformed other aspects
with 66% of visitors ‘very interested’, compared
with traditional culture (45%) historic Ireland (41%),
Celtic Ireland (37%), Christian Ireland (25%) and
contemporary culture (12%).
An unspoilt environment (85% of respondents) and
the range of natural attractions (81%) resonate with
Europeans selecting an Irish holiday…”
So please Bord Failte, stem the already tragic desecration of our lovely countryside by planning laws that allow modern bungalows or estates of holiday homes to be built in beautiful natural area, especially along the coast…
Imagine going to a Tuscan village and seeing modern bungalows built there – or a French village – it just wouldn’t happen, would it?
Perhaps Failte Ireland need to realise that our natural assets like our wild and unspoilt countryside are what attract tourists (both foreign and domestic). I have heard so many tourists express disappointment at the blighting of our beauty spots by tacky one off modern bungalows and developments, from golf courses to estates of ‘cottage’ holiday homes that should never ever have been given planning permission. It is hideous to see coastal dunes in a beauty spot marred by a golf course. They need also to tackle the fact that the right to roam is so restricted in this country, unlike other countries where they have kept their rights of access to beauty spots – who owns this land after all?
Good work.
The hotel trade in Ireland is in serious debt!
Government should help reduce the Vat rate to zero for 5years to help the industry recover.
The Spanish Government support the tourist industry in Spain financially by subsidising the industry.
The Irish Government could reduce VAT to zero to allow the industry recover!
dermot , the hotel trade in ireland is in serious debt because too many hoteliers borrowed huge sums of money trying to ‘out do’ their competitors by building leisure centers, golf courses and spas instead of concentrating on getting the basics of the hospitality trade right .good service, clean accommodation and good food will always be the main factors for people staying in a hotel or even a b&b , when these factors are ignored or placed lower down the scale than someones pipe dream or ego trip of having a golf course or sauna, thats when things start to fall apart . delusions of grandeur were epidemic in the hospitality industry during the ‘tiger’ years, from hotels to coffee shops, to back street cafe’s far too many of them tried to go beyond their means and capabilities.
If it is not our Tourist Board the CEO of Irish Tourism should be fired and charged with neglecting the Brand name. That makes the whole situation even worse, imagine Apple or Google brand names being treated the same way. I suppose our trademarks are in Irish. Jesus help us, our biggest business brand and they can’t even protect it.
inspired by this article we took a trip out today along the ‘gold coast ‘ and ‘copper coast’ from Dungarvan to Tramore in county Waterford , the beaches at Bunmahon and Annstown cove were fair busy and looked good, but sadly you could hardly see a lot of the beautiful coastline as you drove along the road due to the overgrown grass verges, even the verges around the car parks were overgrown , on land that was obviously farmland (you could see them collecting the silage) the hedges and verges were cut neatly and alongside private houses the same , but when it came to verges and hedgerows along public roads the view was hidden by the overgrowth. surely its not to much to expect local authorities to take care and maintain these roadside verges and hedgerows. tourism brings a lot of money to these areas, if they are left in such a poor state and neglected, tourists will no longer visit and the local economy will suffer . why do we put up with such inept and short sighted national and local government in this country?..
the ‘ big thing ‘ in holidaying and tourism these days is a return to camping and caravaning, people prefare the ability to come and go as they please instead of the more limited structure of staying in hotels or b&b’s, ireland though has a very ‘unfriendly’ attitude to wards motorhomes and caravaners, and although the standards a many of the countries ‘official’ camping sites have greatly improved over the last 10 yrs or so, there is still a shortage of good cheaper sites or ‘wild camping’ sites available, the south east in particular is quite expensive for caravan/camping holidays . the recent changes to the law regarding motorhomes and their use is also very restrictive , the fact that a campervan or motor home should (by law) be classed as a ‘recreational vehicle’ and therefore only used for a short time each year is both restrictive and idiotic , modern motorhomes,campers and caravans are built to be used all year round, also the ban on caravans using lay-byes as short term stop over points is again restrictive . we have enjoyed some fantastic short stays and journey’s around the irish coasts in the past and look forward to many more .
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