SUSAN O’GALLAGHER (née Tidey) told the court that she was 13 years old at the time of her father’s kidnapping.
He was driving her to school at Alexandra College, in Milltown, Dublin at about 7.45am and she was in the front passenger seat of his car.
She saw a mustard coloured Ford car with a flashing blue light parked across the T-junction at the end of their road.
She said two men dressed in Garda uniforms were standing nearby.
One came towards her father’s window and asked him his name.
That man then pulled a handgun from his jacket, pointed it at her father and ordered him out of the car. The armed man then put the gun to her father’s head and said “don’t you f . . . ing try to get away or I’ll blow your f . . . ing brains out”.
She said the man had a “rough Dublin accent” and was “very agitated”.
She said that as her father was pulled out of the car, a second man came to the passenger door, pulled her from the vehicle and pushed her against a fence at the side of the road.
Ms O’Gallagher said the second man was carrying a machine gun which was two and a half feet long and appeared to be old.
She said three other men then appeared, one of whom drew level with her father’s car and fired shots.
She was ordered to lie on the ground facing away from the road before the man standing over her handed her over to a man wearing a balaclava.
All the men then fled the scene and she and her brother then ran to a neighbour’s house and phoned the Garda.
Don Tidey’s son Alistair gave evidence that he was driving behind his father’s car which had almost crashed into his as his father reversed away from the first man in Garda uniform.
He agreed with Edward Comyn SC, prosecuting, that he was also ordered out of his vehicle by a man with a machine gun. He got out of the car with his hands up and was knocked to the ground.
As he tried to get up he was kicked in the chin. He said that he was terrified but did not suffer any serious injury.
He described the machine guns as “clumsy looking” and said the men all spoke with rough, Southern Irish accents.
Retired detective inspector Patrick Gavin told the court that in 1983 he was called to Derrada Wood in Co Leitrim.
He saw the bodies of a garda and a soldier, dressed in their official uniforms and lying 40ft from a black polythene tent.
He said the tent was concealed under the branches of spruce trees in the centre of a 2½ acre forest.
It was a 12ft by six feet tent and he saw provisions and utensils lying in front of it which indicated it had been recently occupied.
Supermarket executive Don Tidey was kidnapped by an IRA gang in 1983 and rescued after 23 days in captivity.
A trainee garda, Gary Sheehan (23), of Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan and a member of the Defence Forces, Pte Patrick Kelly (35), from Moate, Co Westmeath were killed in a shoot-out with the kidnap gang when Mr Tidey was rescued.
The trial continues today.