Bird on the wire – Frank McNally on a great reporter’s last hurrah

The real-life events summarised in the title of Ransom ‘79 would have been more than enough for one documentary. With little embellishment, in fact, they could have inspired a feature film: part thriller, part farce.

But there is a story at the centre of Ransom ‘79 and there is another story, unreferred to in the title, as its heart. Because this extraordinary tale of attempted extortion in late-20th-century Ireland also turned out to be the last reporting job ever undertaken by the late Charlie Bird.

The warm applause after a preview screening in Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema last week, therefore, was as much for Bird’s life as the documentary itself.

For those of us who lived through the period concerned, Ransom ‘79 is a startling reminder of what a mad, bad, and dangerous place Ireland was back then. For a younger generation, meanwhile, it may be a useful introduction to the theme of how far the country has come since, obvious faults and all.

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The action starts at the end of August 1979, during a week that also featured the IRA’s deadliest day of the Northern Troubles, during which Lord Mountbatten and three civilians were blown up on a boat in Sligo and 18 British soldiers died in a double bombing at Warrenpoint.

Forty-eight hours later, in a country already flirting with bankruptcy, the Department of Agriculture in Dublin received an anonymous letter reading as follows:

“To get straight to the point, this is a demand for £5million. The reason you are paying us £5million is very simple. If you do this, we shall not introduce [...] one of the most deadly and costliest diseases that could afflict any country, namely foot-and-mouth disease.”

During a five-month-long intrigue that followed this initial demand, the usually sedate surroundings of The Irish Times’s back page became central to the drama.

It was there that on September 1st, playing along with the blackmailers’ directions, agents of the State took out a saying personal ad: “Tom Smith has read your proposals and will agree to your conditions.”

A worried IT advertising department, more used to fielding special offers from hotels and restaurants, had first sought clarification from the customer, in this case the Garda Fraud Squad.

The sheer audacity of the foot-and-mouth plot quickly led investigators to suspect the hand of a Carlow-based member of Saor Éire, a Trotskyite republican group until then better known for bank robberies. This suspicion deepened when a second letter arrived with a Carlow postmark. And after a sub-plot involving a parking bay outside Dublin’s Gresham Hotel, the hunch hardened into a definite line of inquiry.

The gang (numbering five by their own account) had demanded that, as a dry run for the cash handover, the State should first park a white Mini with a certain number plate in front of the Gresham.

But the fraud squad played a three-car trick on them, bracketing the main Mini with two others, parked so tightly that anyone checking the plate would have to get up close, revealing themselves to hidden watchers.

When somebody did that, he was a clearly identifiable barrister, then a junior but later a well-known senior counsel, who was also a known associate of the Carlow suspect. (Although he has been dead for some years, the question of whether to name the lawyer is a minor subplot of the documentary).

Ransom ‘79 even has that staple of the cinematic thriller, a car chase: albeit one in which the lead vehicle was limited to 45mph for a long-distance tour of Leinster, as mapped out by the extortionists for the hand-over.

The chase may have been slow but it was tension-filled. The lead driver, a long-haired undercover detective whose identity still needs to be disguised, had a Smith-and-Wesson revolver strapped to his leg and a back-up “lady’s gun” in his boxer shorts.

Dramatic as the basic story is, however, it became overshadowed in the documentary by the fate of the story-teller.

In the most belated scoop of his career, Charlie Bird broke the news of the ransom plot 42 years after it happened, via a 2021 podcast for Senior Times magazine.

But that was also the year he revealed his diagnosis of motor neurone disease. And when he approached playwright and journalist Colin Murphy about making a documentary on the extortion plot, both men knew it would be the last assignment of one of Ireland’s great journalistic careers.

So as they and surviving protagonists explore this madcap chapter of modern Irish history, the film doubles as a chronicle of Charlie Bird’s physical decline.

There is a moving moment near the end, as dramatic as anything in the main story, when Murphy gives his collaborator a congratulatory hug and the playwright’s normally sober demeanour is overwhelmed by the emotions of the moment.

It seems astonishing, even given its financial woes, that RTÉ passed up on the opportunity to screen the film.

But directed by Colm Quinn, who also co-wrote it, Ransom ‘79 will open in cinemas on May 24th.