Ella O'Dwyer doesn't fit the image of a republican terrorist. But the UCD graduate was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to plant bombs in Britain. Released under the Belfast Agreement, she talks to Deaglán de Bréadún about her collection of writings, started in jail and published last week

She looks for all the world like a civil servant from one of the more progressive government departments, probably fast-tracked for promotion by a minister anxious to recognise ability and redress the gender balance. The coffee-bar where this interview took place is located close to Leinster House, and the well-dressed, well-groomed woman in her early 40s blended easily with the mix of party officials and politicians seated at the other tables.

But 17 years ago, on June 23rd, 1986, Ella O'Dwyer was sentenced by a judge at the Old Bailey to life imprisonment, for conspiring with others to plant 16 bombs - four in London, the rest at different seaside resorts. One of the bombs was meant to go off at the Rubens Hotel, close to Buckingham Palace. As she left the dock after her sentence, someone shouted: "Ireland unfree shall never be at peace."

O'Dwyer replied: "That's right!"

For a moment I imagine myself a British tabloid journalist, "looking into the face of the terrorist", what Lord Hailsham called the "baboons" of the republican movement. But the photofit doesn't match.

As an honours graduate in English, linguistics and philosophy from University College Dublin, O'Dwyer seemed indistinguishable from thousands of others who go on to carve out a comfortable niche in middle-class Ireland. All the more shocking then, when she was arrested with four other people in a raid on a house in Glasgow in the summer of 1985. Police reported finding two Browning pistols and a schedule of dates and locations for bomb attacks all over Britain. The device in the Rubens Hotel was already ticking away on a 48-day timer, but was defused before it went off.

And so Ella O'Dwyer was put away, and mostly forgotten about. She disappeared into Britain's vast prison complex, presumably not to be seen again for at least 20 years, at which time she would be quietly released, returning to a modest reception in the upstairs room of a Dublin pub, hosted by greying old-timers.

But we reckoned without the peace process. I can still remember covering the Sinn Féin ardfheis of May 1998, when republican prisoners, whose sentences were so long that they were as good as dead in the public mind, suddenly re-appeared and walked about, chatting and saying hello to people, both sides clearly unable to believe what was actually happening. O'Dwyer was not there that day, but her release came the following November, after nearly 14 years behind bars.

"I don't want to talk about the detail around the arrest because it involves other people," she says. Nor does she wish to discuss the case itself. "It is a legal issue, and all legalities are complex."

As a top-security, Category A prisoner in Durham Prison, without a release date, she says she found consolation in the writings of Samuel Beckett. "The man has a tremendous sense of humour. I know he is deadly serious, but somehow he lightened my world up a bit, he cheered me up." She particularly enjoyed the famous sequence in the novel Molloy, where the narrator describes how he collected 16 stones on the beach and passed the time by distributing them between his various pockets, sucking each stone in turn.

Beckett understood the isolation of the prison cell, and she found herself saying, "This guy has it right to a T. How did he click this?" Initially she was allowed only two books a week and read Birdman of Alcatraz, about a prisoner in the US who kept canaries in his cell.

She started a Master's degree in prison, which then developed into a PhD, and has now emerged publicly in the shape of a book called, The Rising of the Moon: the Language of Power, published by the radical London-based Pluto Press. It is a sophisticated work for a specialist audience, drawing on the literary and philosophical theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Martin Heidegger. She analyses the writings of Beckett, W.B Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Edmund Spenser and the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as well as the late Michael Farrell's near-forgotten novel about the War of Independence, Thy Tears Might Cease. Her book is not a page-turner for bringing to the beach this summer, but may well feature on reading-lists compiled by some of the more adventurous university lecturers.

"It is a study of literature, of fiction, the theory of meaning, meaning itself, because, in a sense, if you spend a long time in isolation in a cell your head goes into a lot of stuff in depth because you've got all this leisure time to think about it - you've got a hell of a lot of time to look at meaning, how it operates, the psychological effects of the world and how structures of oppression affect people," she says.

The book was jointly launched in Dublin last week by Prof Seamus Deane and the prominent Belfast republican activist Brian Keenan. Like others of her generation, it was the 1981 hunger-strikes that set O'Dwyer definitively on the republican road: "I couldn't [believe\] that, in this day and age, they would do to young Irish people my own age the same thing as they had done to Thomas Ashe and Terence MacSwiney, it seemed unthinkable." She did not come from a republican family, and politics was never mentioned in her home in Roscrea, Co Tipperary.

Looking back she has, personally, no regrets - apart from the strain on her family and the fact that British policy in Ireland generated such conflict.

Asked if she was ever in the IRA, she replies, "That is quite an irrelevant question. I can tell you that I am a republican since the early 1980s." To those who would have her "repent and confess the error of her ways", she responds, "For me, there is no error involved".

She did not expect to be released until much later. "That is why every day is a gift, in a way." She is "very positive" about the Belfast Agreement, and her book draws some comparisons with the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiated by Michael Collins.

"I am trying to pull the dark cobwebs off this man because I actually think that, in his day, he did his very best. A lot of republicans wouldn't accept that view."

She says there is evidence that Collins might have taken things further if he had lived. "I am not apologising for the Treaty or anything like that, but I am looking at Collins and saying, well, maybe you did your damnedest as well, just as our leadership are doing their very best to create a good Agreement."

At the same time, she believes the Agreement is "not ideal". She adds, "Wouldn't it have been wonderful if they [British troops\] just went away in helicopters, but who was going to believe that was going to happen? You have to have a process of negotiation, whether we like it or not." She remarks on how "terribly difficult the negotiation process is for everybody. It's sometimes more frightening than the threat of immediate war; it is a difficult dynamic. It was a tough one for people to come through but, yes, we had the players to do it".

So does the future lie in politics rather than violent action, as far as republicans are concerned?

"I would like to think so. The dedication that the republican movement is showing towards the pursuit of a just peace and, ultimately, a settlement, their whole endeavour to make the peace process work, speaks for itself." She continues: "When you look at the adrenaline that's being put, on the part of the republican movement, towards this peace process, it seems very promising."

O'Dwyer was offered a fellowship in Boston College but could not get a US visa because of what she describes as her "so-called criminal record, which I don't accept, I'm a political ex-prisoner". Other third-level opportunities in the North and in Poland were also stymied because of her past history. She now works with the Dublin-based Coiste na n-Iarchimí (Committee of Former Republican Prisoners) which has embarked on a "Process of Nation-Building". O'Dwyer comments: "We were strong on demolition; we can be equally energetic on construction." Sinn Féin's participation in the Dáil and Stormont also constituted "participation in the construction of the republic".

She admits that republicans have been at fault in the past because of their "culture of silence". "You couldn't get us to say or sign anything." They have now learnt that, "we do need to start opening up discussion".

Ella O'Dwyer is prepared to give peace a chance. Her book is described by the literary critic Terry Eagleton as "a brilliantly original piece of work".

I put it to her that many people in her position in 1986, facing an interminable stretch in prison, rather than taking up literary criticism would instead have been tempted to take their own lives, as six Durham prisoners did last year.

"No you wouldn't, because it is instinctive for people to survive and you can make a life for yourself anywhere even if you have to jog in your cell," she replies. "You can think, you can dream, you can imagine, you can learn, you can accumulate knowledge and you carry on and you make a life within prison. You are not dead \ because you are in prison."

Or, in the words of her favourite Beckett quotation, "I can't go on, I'll go on".

The Rising of the Moon: the Language of Power by Ella O'Dwyer is published by Pluto Press, €25.