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- [00:00]
Julian Morgans
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson. And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [00:12]
Stephen (The Smash Daddy)
And we are currently deep diving Brandon
- [00:14]
Julian Morgans
Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
- [00:21]
Gerry Kelly
That's right.
- [00:21]
BetterHelp Ad Voice
Hey.
- [00:21]
Stephen (The Smash Daddy)
Hey.
- [00:22]
Julian Morgans
So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter. And along the way we'll do character
- [00:27]
Stephen (The Smash Daddy)
deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will
- [00:30]
Julian Morgans
even try to guess what's next. Spoiler Al he'll be wrong. Newsflash, I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday and you can find Fantasy Fan fellows wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:40]
Stephen (The Smash Daddy)
This ad is sponsored by zocdoc. Hi, it's Danny Pellegrino from Everything Iconic. Have you been putting off that annual doctor's appointment because you don't want to make the call? Or maybe you've been meaning to find a new dentist but you have no idea where to start? I find that's especially true when you move. It's hard to find your people. I've been there, which is why I use ZocDoc now. As a busy podcaster, parent, and someone who's always juggling a million things, I love anything that makes life eas. And ZocDoc lets you search and compare local in network Doctors with over 250,000 providers across more than 200 specialties. You can read reviews from real patients, find a provider who feels like the right fit, see actual appointment openings, and book instantly. I recently had a last minute health issue pop up and needed to see someone fast and instead of calling around or sitting on hold, I found a doctor on zocdoc and booked an appointment in just a few minutes. It made the whole process so much less stressful. Now taking care of your health just got easier. Download the zocdoc app today. That's zocdoc Z O C D O C and book that appointment on your to do list.
- [01:44]
BetterHelp Ad Voice
A Better Help ad After my session and talking to my therapist and really feeling seen and heard for the first time, I just felt like a weight just was lifted off of my shoulders and I felt like it was a good match. From the first time we talked, I could tell people from lived experience that they should try therapy. I could really be myself again and I have this continued support with better help wherever you are. That's where BetterHelp begins. Visit betterhelp.comrandompodcast to get started.
- [02:14]
Julian Morgans
Pay testimonials. Results may vary.
- [02:20]
Gerry Kelly
Super real. This is a real gun. It's an IRA operation. If you do exactly what you're told, there's no problem. But if you don't, I will use this gun.
- [02:35]
Julian Morgans
What they wanted was a mass escape. They wanted a propaganda coup. First, they have to get themselves into uniforms that they've stolen off the guards. Second, they have to hijack the kitchen truck or the lorry. When it turns up, they have to drive this lorry out through the front gate like it's a normal Sunday afternoon. But of course, the lorry was running late and they've missed their window. And he opens up the back of the truck where everyone is still waiting for the front gates to open and he starts yelling, it's everybody for themselves.
- [03:06]
Gerry Kelly
Take their fields.
- [03:08]
Julian Morgans
Take the fields. Which means the plan is dead. Run. Hey, I'm Julian Morgans, and you're listening to what It Was like, the show that asks people who have lived through big dramatic events what it was like. Hey, everyone, welcome back. So this week we're going to do something that we've never done before. It's a Prison Break story, and it's actually a story on the biggest prison break in UK history, and it took place in Northern Ireland in 1983. What happened is that 38 imprisoned members of the Irish Republican army, you probably know them as the ira. They escaped by smuggling in guns which they used to take the prison officers hostage and then they swapped into the officer clothing. They hijacked a truck and they managed to drive this truck through multiple security gates to freedom. At the time, the escape was great propaganda for the IRA and a huge embarrassment for the British government. People actually got fired. But for our purposes, it's just a really fun Prison Break story. And we've actually got two of them because for subscribers, I'm going to speak to an Australian man who escaped prison in a helicopter. This is a very cool, sexy story. His girlfriend hijacked a helicopter, landed it in the prison yard, he jumped in and the two of them flew off to safety. That's our subscriber only episode this week. But for the rest of you, gather around, please come this way because I'm going to give you a very short, hopefully accessible, one minute lesson in Irish history. So I told you before that this episode, this story takes place in Ireland in the 1980s. Now, this was during a time that we call the Troubles and before working on this story, I didn't know anything about the Troubles. I'd heard the phrase. I knew that it was something about you too. You know, like, I know that song Sunday Bloody Sunday. I knew that it was somehow related to this period of history, the Troubles. But here's what you need to know to make sense of this story and that song. So about a thousand years ago in the year 1169, the English arrived in Ireland and they just kind of never left. An island basically became England's very first colony in a collection that would later include India, Canada, and, yes, Australia. But this was never a peaceful arrangement. There was tension, tension for centuries, and particularly between those who saw themselves as ethnically Irish. And those people were mostly Catholic and anyone who was British or just kind of loyal to the British crown. And keep in mind, those people were mostly Protestant. And this friction was hottest in Northern Ireland, where from 1969 British troops were deployed into streets to try to keep the peace or reinforce the status quo. And big brick walls got built to separate British loyalist neighborhoods from. From Republican neighborhoods. And then in 1972, the situation escalated again when British soldiers opened fire on a peaceful protest and killed 13 people. And this event became known as Bloody Sunday, which gave the world my favorite U2 song. And after that, if you were young and living in Northern Ireland, you kind of had to pick a side. Were you going to align yourself with the local Catholics or align yourself with the bullies, the interlopers, the intruders and the Protestants from England? And our guest decided to fight for Irish independence. Hey, Jerry, welcome to the show.
- [06:51]
Gerry Kelly
Thank you for inviting me, Julian. It was a bit of a surprise, but I'm glad to be here.
- [06:56]
Julian Morgans
You're surprised to be hearing from an Australian podcast that wants to feature your story?
- [07:01]
Gerry Kelly
Absolutely, but thanks for the interest.
- [07:05]
Julian Morgans
This is Gerry Kelly, who, yes, has a very Irish name and a very Irish accent. He's also quite a well known politician for Ireland's largest political party. He wears a suit and shows up to our interview with neat hair and wears glasses. But back in the 1970s, he was quite a different guy. He had long hair and he was a freedom fighter with the Irish Republican army, also known as the Iraq.
- [07:28]
Gerry Kelly
My generation was basically, you know, we're going to fight back. There's a military force in our streets where we're going to fight back militarily. And that's how I joined the IRA. I was then arrested in 1973 actually in London when I went over with an IRA unit and I was arrested and charged with conspiracy and ended up with two life sentences and 20 years sentence.
- [07:55]
Julian Morgans
Two life sentences plus 20 years serving his time in the HM Prison Maze, which is also known as Long Kesh. Now this was a very feared prison across Ireland. It was a maximum security prison, considered to be one of the most escape proof in Europe. And conditions for inmates were just terrible.
- [08:14]
Gerry Kelly
I mean, what people were living in at that stage was a mattress, just a sponge mattress, no cover on it, just a sponge mattress on the floor and a blanket and a pat to do your ablutions in that you'd see used to see in old prisons and when they came in, it was generally they come in to beat you. So what they started doing because there was nowhere to put their excreta, their urine out there is they started throwing it out the windows. So they covered up the windows and then they started putting it right onto the door to get it out of the cell. And when they couldn't do that, so they blocked the doors, they started then putting the excreta on the wall and to get rid of it, they spread it on the wall and that's where it became the no wyse. That ended up being called the New Weiss protest. And that went on for about five years. And the biddings, they were systemic. And you would get, if you got food, you would get half rations. So it would be very little food. So you might have seen photographs of some of the men. They were very gaunt, you know, they couldn't shave, so they long hair and all of that. So it was horrendous. And you didn't get any meal, you weren't allowed mail, you weren't allowed anything to write on, you weren't allowed anything to read. The system was trying to break your will and therefore the biddings became part of that.
- [09:40]
Julian Morgans
And it's really clear to me that through this there's no sense of guilt or shame. I mean, you are prisoners. You said before that you'd been in prison for around 10 years at this point, but you're not prisoners in the traditional sense. Like you hadn't committed any sort of ethical transgressions, you were political prisoners. Can you just sort of talk to me about this culture of righteousness?
- [10:05]
Gerry Kelly
Well, I mean, I joined the IRA. I didn't waken up when I was 16 or 17 and think I want to go out and fight Brits, you know. But yes, there was a righteousness and we were fighting for the freedom of our country. It had been partitioned. We had had basically an apartheid system there. We weren't all brought up, you know, rampant militarists or anything like that. But I think for any human being, if I could put it that way, personalize it almost, you know, this is time to fight back.
- [10:38]
Julian Morgans
So it's almost like you almost have a duty to escape then, given those circumstances.
- [10:44]
Gerry Kelly
Good question. And yes, it's true, in my priorities and probably in most people's priorities, escape was the number one priority. But in the meantime, we were involved in a lot of probably self education, if I could put it that way. So we read an eclectic number of books. We even tried a bit of Marx and Angles, right through to John Smith. So we learned a lot. I was well read at least during that period. I don't know about now.
- [11:16]
Julian Morgans
So that's how Jerry and his comrades saw themselves. I'll be honest, I grew up thinking of the IRA as this pretty bloodthirsty group of terrorists. You know, just lots of car bombs, lots of carnage. And that version of events isn't wrong. Lots of innocent people did lose their lives on both sides, actually. But I think it was really interesting to sit across from Jerry and hear an insider's account of what it was like to fight an invader in his own country. I don't think I'd seen that framing of the IRA before. But learning about how so many of these men, and they were just kids, really, like these are 18 or 19 year olds, they'd all been convicted without juries. And I can see how they saw themselves as prisoners of war. And they just behaved accordingly. Which brings us to the plan of their escape.
- [12:02]
Gerry Kelly
We, you know, pick people. People were doing sometimes fairly short sentences. And there was lots of people doing life sentences. Somebody who tried to escape before, you know, who has a bit of experience. I tried to escape a few times before myself in England and elsewhere, which is why I was sort of, I suppose, brought into it. And then the key thing with escapes, actually with any operation, outset as well, is a need to know basis. In other words, only people who are involved in the endeavor should know about it. Otherwise somebody talks to another friend, to another friend and it gets out. And that was crucial to this escape because it was a complicated escape. It was complex.
- [12:46]
Julian Morgans
Jerry really wasn't kidding about it being a complicated escape. The Maze prison was kind of like a prison within a prison inside a British army barracks. Imagine a series of H shaped mini prisons fenced in by concrete walls topped with razor wire. And these walled mini prisons are clustered inside another wall, which is in itself inside another wall. And all of these walls are topped by Razor wire with a series of electronically operated gates to open up between them. That's what they were up against. And they didn't want to get just one or two people out. What they wanted was a mass escape. They wanted a propaganda coup.
- [13:25]
Gerry Kelly
We need a spectacular escape which will get people back to the struggle, but will also show the British that they can never break, you know, that we can smash the hitch blacks in another way. That's where the ideas and the discussions came from. And then it was two of our comrades on the escape committee were walking around one of the yards, not actually in H7 where the escape took place, but one of them said, what's that noise? It was a luray. And they said, well, that's the. They used to call it the meat wagon or the kitchen luray. That's bringing up the meals. And they came into every block three times a day. And so the plan started centering around. Well, can we do that? Can we take over a lorry?
- [14:06]
Julian Morgans
Can we do it for the whole camp just quickly? For our American listeners, a lorry is British slang for a truck. The idea was to hijack a truck that was bringing meals into the cell blocks from one part of the prison to the other. But to do that, they were gonna need guns. I mean, how do you smuggle a bunch of guns into a prison?
- [14:25]
Gerry Kelly
Well, I can't tell you. Because people can still go to jail. I know, Yeah. I mean, it's 40. What, 43. 43 years ago. Oh, yeah, yeah. People could still go to jail. There were, I think, six. Six guns. And then there was a replica one which was made out of wood. Some of the people said it looked better than some of the guns because all the other guns were very small, as you may guess, and very small caliber.
- [14:55]
Julian Morgans
So Jerry wouldn't tell me how they got the guns, but he was very keen to talk about the process of choosing who would escape and who would stay, because not everyone could fit in the truck. And they'd also need some people to stay behind and to look after the guards that they'd tied up. They called these people the rear guard.
- [15:13]
Gerry Kelly
The other thing was that we needed what you might call a rear guard. So we were taking something like 24 prison warders, right, subduing them, and then people had to watch them, you know, so that couldn't be the escapees because they were escaping. It had to be others. So a number of people, and some of them I know were within weeks of leaving, were approached. These are people you knew, you know, entrusted to become the rear guard, in other words. As we arrested them all, got them all settled, we put pillowcases over their heads so they couldn't see, and they were attached to each other by their hands, et cetera. Once you did that, you could hand over these people so they couldn't come out on till that point, because they would have been seen.
- [16:05]
Julian Morgans
Right. Of course.
- [16:05]
Gerry Kelly
And I have to say they're the courageous ones because they could have ended up getting life sentences on top of what they were doing.
- [16:14]
Julian Morgans
The plan was to subdue every officer in every lookout post and to control every room in the block one by one, starting from the centre and working their way out. And they'd have to do this quietly and quickly without anyone tripping the alarm. And then once the block was under their control, they'd wait for the truck, which they'd hijack and drive calmly through the prison gates with a trailer full of escapees. It was obviously a pretty ambitious plan, and to work it relied on flawless choreography.
- [16:43]
Gerry Kelly
This is the way we explain to people, everybody's got a partner's escape. Concentrate on your part. Don't worry about what the other person's doing, what your comrade's doing. I hope he got that right. I hope this is done right. Forget all that. If you do your job properly and everybody does their jobs properly, then we're getting out of here. It was as straightforward as that, you know.
- [17:05]
Julian Morgans
Okay, I just want to dive into your emotional state in the hours before the escape. I imagine you were tense.
- [17:16]
Gerry Kelly
So the night before. I'm actually a very good sleeper. There's very little keeps me awake, but, yeah, and I woke up very early. One of the things that happened, strange enough, because I had approached somebody to be part of the rear guard, and he came in to me first thing in the morning. So we open up at about seven o'clock in the morning. And he came in and he said, jerry, he says, I have something to tell you. I says, okay, what is it? He says, I don't think I can do it. What do you ask me to do now? This is in the morning of the escape, right? And we're going out around 2:00'. Clock. And so you have to think on your feet, you know, There was no point in me arguing with him. I just. And he gave me a reason, which I understood. He said, I'm not doing long enough, you know, and I don't want to end up with a life sentence. And I says, fair enough. What worried me was that there might be more. And I says, that's okay, leave it with me. So then my mind was going a mile a minute. Who am I going to get to replace him because he needed replaced? And I went down until the canteen where people were having their breakfast. And there was two friends I knew from outside, two young guys at this stage. I was 30, so these guys were a bit younger. I'd been in jail 10 years or so, and they were having their corn flakes. So I went over and I sat down. I says, how you doing, lads? He says, how you doing? We knew each other well. I says, I have a wee favorite, Osseous. And I says, okay, what's that? I says, there's an escape on this morning and I need you to take over somebody's place. I say, youse will be well covered up, but there's still a risk in it. And I put them at the end. They were, is that an alarm bell? And there could have been a prison water there as well. And I says, stay in the cell right beside it. Keep the door open so as you can see what's going on. But once this goes off, I says, that bell and any person who's there, that you need to get them on the ground very quickly, somebody else will take over at a point, but that's the risk you're taking. Ice ages will be covered. We'll give you hood to wear and all of that there, but it's still a risk. And in fairness to both of them, they say right in front of, in
- [19:29]
Julian Morgans
a moment, the escape. But right now, we're going to cut to a quick ad break. Stay with us. Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [19:52]
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- [20:22]
Julian Morgans
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- [20:33]
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- [20:34]
Gerry Kelly
Before you know it, I was matched with a therapist.
- [20:36]
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- [21:40]
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- [22:49]
Julian Morgans
Welcome back. So it's the day of the prison break and Jerry and the rest of the escape committee are about to hit go and their code word to start is bumper.
- [22:59]
Gerry Kelly
And we gathered in a back room. It was like a wee storeroom and we had already agreed to gather in there so we all Gathered in there. And then Beck McFarlane, he was really the one. Bobby's story was still in his wing. And the code word that it was on so that everybody's in their places but that it was going ahead was bumper. Actually, a bumper is like a policy machine. You know, I'm electric polish machines that they do for the floors. Beck said, have you got the bumper? That's actually what triggered it all off.
- [23:34]
Julian Morgans
So the whole thing kicked off at two in the afternoon. IRA prisoners, working from a script that they'd practiced for months, pulled the smuggled guns out one by one and subdued the 24 hour officers on duty in H Block 7 officers were taken by surprise, tied up, hooded with pillowcases and handed over to the rear guard. At first it went perfectly until one of the senior prison officers, a man named John Adams, tried to resist.
- [24:02]
Gerry Kelly
When the thing was triggered, there was a number of incidents. A major one was, there's a control room, what's called a control room, which is really just the size of a cell. My job was to secure it. And I raised a weapon and pointed it towards him and said his name was John. I said, john, this is a real gun. It's an IRA operation. If you do exactly what you're told, there's no problem, you'll be safe. But if you don't, I will use this gun. I says, I want you to get down on the floor, face down and put your hands behind your head. I says, you will not be harmed. So we did. What happened next was that there was two toilet doors just beset and a prison water came out of one of them. And everybody else was busy. I had my person on the ground and I turned to arrest him, right? And I just went through to see him. I said, I says, don't be moving, get on the ground, you won't be hurt. That'll be it. And then another guy come out. So as I was doing that in the control room, John Adams was trying to hold the door closed. And a volunteer, and there was five or six of us in the circle, a volunteer who was free went and opened the door, or at least opened the door a small bit and fired two single shots. And one hit him, right? And he went down. Then John Adams was unconscious for maybe 30 seconds or whatever. And then he started speaking, but he had been hit in the head, but he's speaking calmly enough. And he said something like, can I get up? And he was told, john, no, you can't, but we're going to get medical attention for you. And he was pulled out of there and him and the medic were put into a different room and he gave medical attention.
- [26:18]
Julian Morgans
So this is Jerry's description of how his comrade shot a prison officer in the head. But this description of events is actually controversial because the prison officer, John Adams, claims that it was Jerry who'd shot him. But Jerry is never admitted to shooting John and was actually found not guilty at his trial in 1987. John went on to live with lifelong disabilities from the injury and eventually died from complications in 2016. So I guess this is another point on which I feel the lines of right and wrong are pretty blurry. In any case, 24 waters are now subdued. The medic is stitching up John Adams in a side room, and the escapees now have a very specific window. They have to be out through the front gate before 4 o', clock, because at 4 o' clock, the shift changes and dozens of fresh prison waters will pour in. So they've got about 90 minutes. And the plan for those 90 minutes has three stages. First, they have to get themselves into uniforms that they've stolen off the guards. Second, they have to hijack the kitchen truck or the lorry when it turns up. And then finally they have to drive this lorry out through the front gate like it's a normal Sunday afternoon. The uniforms come first. About 13 escapees are going to have to walk out visibly as prison officers, which means that the uniforms actually have to fit them, because a warder in an obviously wrong sized outfit is exactly the kind of thing that a colleague at the gate might notice.
- [27:48]
Gerry Kelly
When the uniforms were being taken off, the people who were taking them off were putting them into three separate bags. One was small, medium and large.
- [27:56]
Julian Morgans
Everyone put on their outfit in the right size and now they just needed the lorry. But of course, the lorry was running late.
- [28:04]
Gerry Kelly
It was late coming up. But in the meantime, or Brent McFarlane, who was out at the front, he had taken the front door of the thing. He had arrested his guy, he had handed him over to the rear guard and he went down. He had also made a habit of offering to clean the yard and all of that, just to get him out so he could get down there. It's about 50 yards away, like it's a big, big yard. He had gotten the habit of cleaning it, so it was acceptable for him to do it. So he took a brooch with him, went down the yard.
- [28:42]
Julian Morgans
Big Brendan McFarlane, keep in mind he's one of the escape leaders. He walks down the yard with a broom Just like he does every day. And he gets to the airlock and he has a friendly chat with the officer on duty by first name, and then he gets waved in on the pretext of sweeping around the security hut, and he takes over the airlock. The two visible waters at the gate are now IRA men installing uniforms. And from outside, it's all working. Nothing looks wrong. They're just still waiting for the lorry.
- [29:12]
Gerry Kelly
Then the problem was what time will lorry came up and the lorry came late, later than expected. And that's what threw the whole thing, essentially, until jeopardy, you could put it that way.
- [29:25]
Julian Morgans
The plan was getting thrown into jeopardy because they're running so late. But finally the lorry arrives. A man named Davey is in the driver's seat, and he has no idea what's about to happen. Jerry and Bobby, the operation commander, take Davey aside, and what follows is one of the most calmly conducted hijackings I've ever heard of.
- [29:45]
Gerry Kelly
Myself and Bobby Storey had debriefed the driver of the lorry. Psychologically, he had to be basically frightened enough not to do anything, but he had to be calm enough because he was going to drive the Larry.
- [30:05]
Julian Morgans
So Davey had to be scared enough to do exactly what he was told, but not so scared that he looked weird or froze at the wheel. So Bobby handled the coaxing, and Jerry clambered in over the front seat and lay down under the dashboard with a gun trained on Davey. And he tied Davey's foot to the clutch and told him that if he did anything sudden or drove off course, he'd get shot.
- [30:27]
Gerry Kelly
He sort of reluctantly agreed, if I could put it that way. And everybody else was in the back of the lorry, including the guys who were in uniform. So I did feel a big responsibility.
- [30:39]
Julian Morgans
Remember, Jerry's crouched in the footwell of the passenger seat. And then Bobby, at the back of the lorry, closes the roller door. The truck rolls out through the first airlock, which is still held by their own people, and it drives slowly down the main road inside the prison now at the second airlock. The prison warder should have actually looked in the back of the truck to inspect it, but he didn't. He often didn't. And they expected this. And it's because he knew Davey, the truck driver, who just kind of nodded. So the truck continued to roll straight through third gate, same deal. And now Davey pulls up outside a little wooden hut that's sitting between them and the front gate. And this was the hard part, because it's the check in point 6 prison officers usually staff this thing. Everyone entering or leaving the prison passes through it, logs their ID and gets their pass stamped. There aren't any windows, and directly above it is a big concrete fortification with a British army soldier looking down over the whole yard with a machine gun. So it's all pretty tense, but the plan continues. Picture the truck coming to a stop just outside this hut and the back doors swing open and a couple of the prisoners step out wearing their water uniforms and they kind of saunter over to the hut. Some of them have got their hands in their pockets where they're concealing their guns and they wait for Jerry to give the signal and take over the hut.
- [32:02]
Gerry Kelly
I was the nod when the prison water was coming out of the security hut. So as he came out, I just nodded. The first guy moved out, I moved over to him and he was in uniform, so he took him by surprise. This is an ARA operation. Don't do anything, I'll shoot you.
- [32:20]
Julian Morgans
Meanwhile, Jerry is sitting in the front of the lorry in a stolen prison uniform, watching his comrades take the security hut one man at a time. And in this amazing moment that could only happen in Northern Ireland, Jerry decides to strike up a conversation with the British soldier that's 15ft above him in this concrete guardhouse. To appear calm and, you know, just to sort of make the whole thing seem normal.
- [32:44]
Gerry Kelly
And he says, you're married? He says, yeah, mate. He says, any kids? He says, you have two kids. I says, don't mind me asking him what's he compared? He says, he says, not fucking enough, Jerry. And I say, I said, I'm. Go get that.
- [33:00]
Julian Morgans
So the soldier thinks that Jerry is a warder called Johnny. And in Jerry's mind, he's about 90 seconds from a mass escape. But actually everything is about to go pear shaped and it's because the lorry was late and they've missed their window. So four o' clock has arrived and suddenly all these prison warders start showing up at the front gate to clock on for their evening sh. And the prisoners who are controlling that gate, they've got to let them through because turning them away is going to look wrong. So each one walks into the hut and then gets a gun trained on him and is tied up. But there are only three prisoners inside to tie them up and the waters just keep coming.
- [33:38]
Gerry Kelly
There was three main people actually in the tally lodge, tan them up as command, which is okay. If there had been six, they just, there was too many and they had to stop, tan them up and they were lying on the floor on top of each other. There was, I think it ended up over 30. We're in this small hut. It's like just a cabin.
- [33:58]
Julian Morgans
Imagine 30 warders piled on the floor of a wooden hut about the size of a garden shed. They're held at gunpoint by three men with pistols, small enough that some of the warders actually think they might be replicas. And then one of the warders manages to escape.
- [34:13]
Gerry Kelly
One of them managed to run back out and says, it's the ira. It's the ira.
- [34:18]
Julian Morgans
So he's outside now and he's shouting. And other waters across the yard start turning towards the lorry.
- [34:23]
Gerry Kelly
And so the ones who hadn't come in through the gate then started shouting all of that out and sort of caught on. In other words, the balloon was up. Basically, they had blocked the front gate, the big gates, with two cars, so the lorry wasn't getting out. And one of the gates wasn't fully opened either. So Bobby opened up the pack. We're all arrested. And they didn't know what was going on, you know, and said to them, it's everybody for themselves.
- [34:52]
Julian Morgans
Take their fields, take the fields. Which means the plan is dead. Everyone for themselves. Run.
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- [36:18]
Julian Morgans
So the truck was late. Which means by the time that the prisoners get to the front gate, a whole wave of prison warders has arrived for their evening shift. They'd tried detaining them, but there were too many. And now one of them has sounded the alarm and the game is up. So Jerry and his friends decide to run for it. And what lies between them and open countryside is about 12ft of barbed wire spooled across the ground. It's old wartime stuff. It's not like modern razor wire. And Jerry, who's escaped a few times before, he knows the difference. He told me that if you try to run at razor wire, it's going to really dice you up. But old fashioned barbed wire, like, old fashioned, like World War I style Barbed wire is something that you can kind of scramble through. Like it'll tear you up a bit and pull your clothes, but you'll get through it. So he sprints towards the wire and throws off his prison officer hat at the last minute and jumps.
- [37:13]
Gerry Kelly
I just threw the hat off and just ran and jumped as far into it as I possibly could. And then I fell forward, right because
- [37:23]
Julian Morgans
of the jump, he'd been planning to clear the wire cleanly, but instead he landed face down in the middle of it. And his comrades behind him, seeing him go down, assumed he had just really charitably turned himself into a bridge on purpose. So they ran over the top of him.
- [37:40]
Gerry Kelly
So the first person in the company are platoon fobs and he's the bridge that get the rest of them over. And then he gets up with. So. So I was lantern. It was two or three run over and I, I don't, I, says Fox.
- [37:54]
Julian Morgans
Once everyone had finished running across him, two of his comrades pulled him out of the wire onto the other side. He'd lost a shoe and he'd lost a sock and his face was all cut open, but he was out. In front of him was a steep hill and wide open country. And behind him, alarms were going off and soldiers were scrambling after them. Jerry took to the hill in bare feet, zigzagging, and near the top he slipped and went down hard. But an older guy who was actually further up ahead decided to stop and come back for him. Together, the two men ran towards a farm where they hijacked a tiny little car, something called a Hillman Hunter. I had to Google it. It's a tiny car and they managed to squeeze 11 people into this thing. And then they took to the back roads. The rest of that afternoon plays out with a series of new cars. The Hillman Hunter's clutch eventually failed, so they hijacked a red Sunbeam Rapier off a couple in a country road with Jerry pretending to cry and a mate pretending to be injured. Jerry rode the last of this stretch with his head sticking out of the sunroof. And then they hijacked two more cars from a petrol station and they all split up. Now, it's really sad, but actually half of them got caught just the next day. They were trying to hide in a storm drain and they were shivering because it was cold and a cop noticed the ripples in the water. But Jerry's group, they actually got away and they ended up hiding under the floor boards of a young Irish Republican couple's house. And then after that he was on the run for about two and a half years. You weren't recaptured, were you?
- [39:29]
Gerry Kelly
I was. You were, Yeah. I reported back to the IRA to rejoin the struggle and South Arma. So I was on what we call active service there. And then I was asked to go to Europe, mainland Europe. So I ended up in France and then in Holland, and then we were arrested in Amsterdam. Myself and Beck McFarlane actually were arrested in Amsterdam. After about two and a half years,
- [40:03]
Julian Morgans
Jerry was trialed in the Netherlands, which was actually a giant win. He'd been serving two life sentences plus 20 years, plus another five for an earlier attempted breakout. And the British wanted to extradite him to serve all of it, but the Dutch courts refused. They wouldn't actually extradite him on his original sentence at all, only on the escape. And they made the British reduce the charges from 75 to just seven. So Jerry actually came home to Belfast in 1986 with just 13 months left to serve.
- [40:34]
Gerry Kelly
My father had decided not to go down to the court because he thought I was going to go away again for a very long sentence. But he went out to celebrate his son getting five years because it was much less than he was expecting.
- [40:51]
Julian Morgans
So Jerry did his last 13 months and he walked out of the Mays Prison in the late 1980s and stepped straight into the political process that would eventually become the Good Friday Agreement. You might have heard of this. It's the peace deal that ended the troubles in 1998. That's right. The Brits and the Irish, they stopped fighting in 1998 and Gerry was one of the central figures to broker that deal. And that is basically the story of the largest prison break in UK history. But there's something else that I still want to explore, because these days Jerry is quite a famous politician in Ireland, but he's also an ex felon who may or may not have shot a man in the head, which I think says a lot about Ireland's very unique respect for rule breakers. In most places, if you've been to prison, you can pretty much forget about a career in politics, but not in Ireland. So I asked Gerry what that says about his country's national character. I just think that Ireland sort of champions an underdog in the way that many cultures do not. Australian culture does not. There's this real sense of, like, standing up to bullies. It doesn't exist anywhere else like it does in Ireland.
- [42:05]
Gerry Kelly
Yeah, well, as a person in the IRA and all of that there, obviously it was a military organization, so I was involved in military operations. But, you know, sue was Nelson Mandela, ironically, so was the first and second and maybe the third leaders of Israel, you know, and were condemned for being terrorists, you know. And as the saying goes, one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. Now I'm a freedom fetter.
- [42:37]
Julian Morgans
Gerry Kelly spent decades being called a terrorist. He was one of the men who ran an IRA bombing campaign in London in 1973, and he served two life sentences. But now he's an elected representative, a senior figure in the largest political party on both sides of the Irish border. But for Gerry, the fact that Ireland still has a border at all is a problem. He wants the whole country to be united and independent from the Brits, which is still yet to happen.
- [43:07]
Gerry Kelly
But we're still on that road, and I'll still be on it. I'm getting older, but my heart and my mind are still. I believe we'll get a united Ireland. I believe will get my lifetime. But that has a caveat on it, because you never know what day you're going to die.
- [43:32]
Julian Morgans
Well, Jerry, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thanks so much for telling me your story.
- [43:38]
Gerry Kelly
Well, thanks for your interest.
- [43:41]
Julian Morgans
Thanks for listening. If you want to read more about the 1983 Maze prison escape or just about Jerry Kelly's life sense, his memoir is called Playing My Part, and it covers a lot of ground that we didn't get to today. I'll link to it in the show description. Also, dear subscribers, please stick around because this week I'm speaking with an Australian man who escaped prison in a helicopter. His girlfriend actually hijacked the helicopter, landed it in the prison yard, and the two of them flew off to safety. It's kind of a sexy story, like Bonnie and Clyde, and it's available right now only for subscribers. For the rest of you. I'll see you all next week. Monday.com AI agents took over my work and I absolutely love it. Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind.
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Jameela Jamil
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Julian Morgans
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