A Former IRA Bank Robber On Writing A Heist Novel Based on a Long-Unsolved Crime

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I was 22 when I was shot in the leg by the IRA in 1976. I was an officer in the Ballymurphy IRA and, as a volunteer army, we didn’t always get paid, so money was scarce. One day I was drinking in a pub with another volunteer and we ran out of money. So we went to my friend’s home, grabbed his son’s toy Lone Star gun, and robbed the first place we came across. Our take was something like thirty pounds, which we had drunk up in no time.

Needless to say, the IRA knew within an hour or so that my friend and I were the culprits. Rather graciously, they waited until we had sobered up before addressing the matter. Now, the IRA doesn’t really do “mitigating circumstances,” and we did not plead same—so, consequently, we took our punishment and were each shot in the leg for our stupidity. Afterwards we were welcomed back into the IRA with open arms. As a result of my drunken robbery, I was demoted to the rank of ordinary volunteer. Not one of my most glorious moments.

In 1976, the British government decided to criminalize the freedom struggle in Ireland by criminalizing the IRA and INLA prisoners. As an IRA volunteer, I had just been sentenced to eight years imprisonment for robbing a Northern Bank on the outskirts of Belfast. It was a risky operation because the bank was twenty miles from our base, which made our run-back very precarious, and escape highly improbable. Had I have had the benefit of a dummy-run beforehand, I’d have told my IRA superiors that they were sending us on a suicide mission. Moreover, we must have passed a dozen banks to get to it. In fact, my abiding memories of the trip to the bank was, ‘Where the fuck is this bank?’, and ‘Why can’t we rob that [closer] bank?’

And so, in 1977 I was sentenced to eight years in Long Kesh/Maze prison. In the end I served six years. Whilst there I spent three years and six months on the H-Block Blanket Protest. During that period, we were forced to wear only a course blanket for clothing in a windowless cell (we broke the windows). We were locked up in our cells twenty-four hours a day, and had no access to radios, television, or newspapers. We also instigated a no-wash protest during which we put our excrement on the walls of our cells. And, of course, we were regularly beaten by the screws (the prison officers). The protest culminated in a world-famous hunger strike in 1981, on which ten of our fellow Blanketmen died to prove the point that we were political prisoners and not criminals.

During the hunger strike, I was Public Relations Officer—effectively number two in the prison command structure, and, accordingly, I was privy to some of the secret negotiations that were taking place between leading Republicans on the outside and the British government. The reality was that after the first four hunger strikers died, the British government conceded some of our demands and we, in the prison leadership, believed the hunger strike should be ended. Alas, our outside leadership differed from us, and so another six prisoners died before the strike ended. I was emotionally very upset with the thought that the last six men did not have to die and consequently, in 2005, I wrote a best-selling book called Blanketmen, which, for the first time, shone a discerning light of the secret negotiations that had taken place back in 1981. For breaking ranks, I was castigated by fellow-Republicans in the media. People with whom I had shared a cell ostracized me; people who had been life-long friends walked past me. My detractors were like a pack of wolves, but I fought my corner because I was right. Today, many of those who had ostracized me now greet me and quite a few have told me that they admired the stand I had taken. As a friend of mine from Derry said: ‘It’s hard to be caught out lying when you’re telling the truth’.

In the end I followed up Blanketmen with two more nonfiction books between 2005 and 2017. But doing a crime novel had also been on my mind…

I had long been intrigued by the Northern Bank robbery that had taken place in Belfast in December 2004, when £26,500,000 was taken out of its vaults. And the perpetrators were got away with the dough! Most of it is still unrecovered.

It may not be politic to say this, but at the time, the job struck me, in terms of its professionalism, as, ‘A work of art.’ Such was the ingenuity behind the robbery that I believed the only people in Ireland capable of pulling off a job like this was the IRA. Of course, that evaluation has to tempered by the reality that innocent people were traumatized and victimized during this robbery. Meanwhile, the security forces on both sides of the Irish border agreed with my assessment.

So how did I go from believing the IRA had carried out the robbery, to opening up the prospect that an individual like ‘Ructions’ O’Hare —my protagonist in Northern Heist—could have put it together? One evening in early January 2005, I happened to be sitting in a bar in Belfast with my daughter, Berni, and the thought struck me, ‘What if the IRA didn’t do it?’ We discussed a scenario whereby an ordinary decent criminal (ODC), a mastermind, could have put together a special team to pull off the job… and, within an hour, the protagonist for my book, James ‘Ructions’ O’Hare, had drawn breath—although he wouldn’t actually appear in Heist for another 12 years, due to my nonfiction book writing.

I’ve always believed that the first and last lines of a book are the most important. Unwittingly, Berni gave me the first line when she laughingly recalled telling a nephew that he had ‘lazybonitis’. Thence the first line of the book: ‘They say lazybonitis is in the blood. It’s not in James ‘Ructions’ O’Hare’s blood. Not when it comes to robbing banks’.

But there was very little of my personal experience in the carrying out of the story’s robbery. I did not confer with anyone other than my daughter when researching and writing the book. What I did do was to try to keep the storyline as close to the actual 2004 Northern Bank robbery as possible.

After Northern Heist was published in Ireland in the Fall of 2018, I was doing an interview with a BBC radio interviewer, William Crawley. After a lengthy lead-in, his first question was: ‘What did you do with the money, Ricky?’ My reply was that islands in the Indian Ocean cost a terrible price these days… In other interviews, people wanted to know what it was like to hold 26,000,500 pounds in your hands. But I didn’t know; I never was that lucky!

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