Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber by Sean O’Driscoll

The violent republican movement of the early 20th century was supported by a number from among the British upper class, both English and Irish, several of them women, such as Constance Markievicz, Kathleen Lynn, Albinia Broderick and Maud Gonne.

The subject of Sean O’Driscoll’s biography, Rose Dugdale, was the only person, male or female, of that background involved in the more recent IRA campaign. She came to prominence in 1974 when she joined with Eddie Gallagher breaking into Russborough, the Wicklow home of Sir Alfred and Lady Beit and made away with several Old Masters. They threatened to destroy these unless IRA prisoners held in English jails were transferred to Northern Ireland to enjoy political status.

The paintings were traced to west Cork, where Dugdale had taken them; she ended up serving six years in prison. While there she gave birth to a son. Gallagher, the boy’s father, remained at large and subsequently kidnapped Dutch businessman Tiede Herrema, demanding in vain her release in exchange for Herrema’s.

All this is fairly common knowledge; the originality of this well-researched, balanced, somewhat diffuse biography is in its account of Dugdale’s life before she set foot in Ireland in 1972 and after she left prison in 1980. The author has interviewed his subject, now aged 81, who is in care at the expense of the Irish taxpayer, having suffered a stroke in 2014. He has also had assistance from her family, friends of her early life and IRA collaborators.

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Born into a wealthy, not quite aristocratic English family, with a regimenting, class-conscious mother, Rose Dugdale was presented at court and “did the season” before going up to Oxford in 1959 to read economics. A female don called Peter Abdy excited Dugdale’s interest in the exploitation of the Third World. They became lovers.

After Oxford, Dugdale worked for Abdy as a researcher assisting the Labour government’s minister for development Barbara Castle, and also lectured at London University’s Bedford College, where she got a doctorate.

It was only after 1970, when her affair with Abdy had ebbed out, that Dugdale became more radical. She got money from a family trust and dispensed it to the needy from an office she set up in Tottenham. Through this good-hearted endeavour, she encountered a married ex-soldier with a criminal record called Wally who became her first male lover. It is not enough to give money to the poor, he urged, you must “go deeper” and change the whole system.

Believing English revolutionaries should support the IRA, he took her to Northern Ireland to which they smuggled arms. To provide further funds, he got her to rob valuables from her family’s country mansion. Subsequently convicted, she got away with a suspended sentence, the judge taking the view that she had been led astray by Wally, who got six years in prison. After a few visits their relationship petered out.

Planned heist

In 1973, Eddie Gallagher recruited her to assist him in seizing a helicopter from which he attempted to bomb a barracks in Strabane. They took refuge in the Republic and planned the Russborough heist.

In 1978, near the end of her sentence, Dugdale was allowed to marry Gallagher, who was in prison until 1990 for the Herrema kidnap. The reason for the marriage was unromantic; it protected her from deportation to the United Kingdom to answer charges for offences committed there. Although she took Ruairí to visit his father in prison, the affair never revived.

On her release, Dugdale settled in Dublin, living in the Coombe and later in Drimnagh with Ruairí. She was an active republican, writing articles for An Phoblacht and organising IRA vigilante campaigns against local drug-dealers, leading to her being once prosecuted unsuccessfully. In 1985, she became the lover of the recently released IRA man Jim Monaghan, a well-read fitter, whom she assisted in making bombs; some were used in Britain in the 1990s. Her leftist leanings marginalised her within Sinn Féin.

She was alarmed when Ruairí started to sell the drug Ecstasy but he gave that up, emigrated to Germany, where he married and became a prosperous businessman. When he was young she had not allowed him to go on holidays to her father, who then sent over his groundsman to take the boy on fishing holidays here. In later life, she has been on friendly terms with others of her English kin, who accept her for what she is. She is possessed of a winning charm that has drawn people to her and kept friends.

The author holds back from a verdict on whether it was altruistic idealism or pent-up anger against her own that motivated Rose Dugdale. To her son Ruairí it seemed simple – she had a compulsion to rebel against rules. Was it all, I wonder, her regimenting mother’s doing?