Mick Clifford: Rose Dugdale was a killer for a redundant revolution

It has received positive reviews and portrays the inner life of a young aristocratic Englishwoman who gave up her inheritance to join the Provisional IRA’s revolution. 

The narrative follows the gang down to a hideout in West Cork where they hid out with the paintings.

Rose Dugdale had a long life, the chance to do a lot more living than was afforded to others. 

Danielle Carter would have been 47 this year had she lived. 

One can speculate on the kind of life she may have had, whether fate would have been kind to her in adulthood, whether she would have been lucky in love, whether she would have given life herself. 

None of that was to be. On April 2, 1992, when she was aged 15, she was sitting in her father’s car in London’s financial district.

 It was around 9.30pm and her father was dropping a business vehicle back to a nearby underground car park after which the pair were due to return to the family home in Essex.

A bomb exploded killing Danielle and two others, 29-year-old Paul Butt, and Thomas Casey, a 49-year-old doorman in a nearby building. 

Rose Dugdale was part of the crew which perfected the bomb. 

For months they tinkered and experimented with technology in a Co Mayo base to perfect detonators that would explode a huge bomb, causing maximum damage and destruction. 

This was the fruit of her work, a successful attack, as she and her comrades saw it, on the British establishment. 

The civilian dead, including a child, were collateral damage in the revolution. 

That’s what happens when bombs are used to terrorise, whether it be on a city street or dropped from the air as the Israeli defence forces have been doing in Gaza for the last six months.

It is unclear whether Rose Dugdale had any input into the bomb in Warrington in the north of England that killed three-year-old Jonathan Ball and 12-year-old Timothy Parry in March 1993. 

But she definitely celebrated after an innovative detonating cord she had devised was used in a bomb on February 9, 1996, in the London Docklands. 

The tremors from that Semtex explosion were reportedly heard and felt right across London. 

Two men, 29-year-old Inam Bashir, and John Jeffries, 31, died instantly. Both worked in a nearby newsagents and had nothing to do with the British armed forces, or government, or any amorphous establishment. 

As Rose Dugdale would have it, their deaths were necessary for Ireland’s alleged freedom.

On the night of that bombing, Rose and her partner in life and bombs, Jim Monaghan, were driving to Mayo. When they arrived they were told the news, according to Sean O’Driscoll’s excellent biography on Dugdale, Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber.

“Jim records Rose as saying that while the British were picking up the pieces of their financial centre, they could think back to why they’re known around the world as ‘Perfidious Albion’.

“Negotiating in bad faith was always their strong point,” she said.

As with any such self-styled revolutionaries, the dead were merely an afterthought in the struggle for ideological victory.

There was more to Dugdale than devising ways in which bombs could be assembled to cause maximum damage. 

She was a mother, having given birth in prison during a sentence for the Beit robbery. 

Later, she worked in her community in inner city Dublin and featured in the anti-drugs movement there at a time when the state had ignored the scourge being visited on working class enclaves.

But ultimately, as a legacy, it’s difficult to get past somebody who felt fulfilled and at times even jubilant in devising methods by which limbs are violently torn from human bodies.

Before opting for a life of fanaticism, she was a genuine radical. She gave away her possessions to the poor and went to work in London’s most disadvantaged areas. 

Some who travelled the same road with her went on to dedicate their lives to left-wing and even radical politics, striving for equality within the parameters of democratic norms. 

A life on the frontline of revolution

Dugdale could have done likewise but instead opted for a life of excitement on the frontline of revolution, attacking the human rights of others in the name of her higher calling.

And what exactly was the revolution about? In 2011, in an interview with An Phoblacht, she made an extraordinary admission. 

“My background had me believe that armed struggle was the only way forward but the revolutionary army that was the IRA had achieved its principal objective, which was to get your enemy to negotiate with you.

“They did that with amazing skill and ability and I can’t help but respect what was done in terms of the Good Friday Agreement.”

Excuse me? What happened to the 32-county socialist republic which the Provisional IRA consistently said was the aim of its killing? 

In 1972, when the revolution was in its infancy, the British wanted to negotiate, but the Provos refused to do so without a British commitment to withdraw from the island. 

Strangely enough, there was no such commitment in the Good Friday Agreement.

So what was the intervening 25 years about and when precisely did Rose give up on her revolution for a fantasy Ireland?

Dugdale was one of the more exotic creatures to emerge from the violence that blighted Ireland for so long. 

Unlike others who were drawn in, she was not a victim of or witness to the state violence that was sometimes indiscriminately deployed to take on the Provos. 

She was on a frolic, working out her own stuff, in the market for a revolution to pursue, until it became expedient to spin the revolution as something else.

At a time when retro republican chic is so easily consumed by young people in particular, the reality of what went on should get an airing now and then.

In that respect, the life of Rose Dugdale is an interesting case study. She told the author O’Driscoll that the occasion when she was part of a group that attempted to bomb an RUC station from a helicopter in 1974 was “the happiest day of my life”.

“It was the first time I felt at the centre of things, that I was really doing as I said I would do,” she said.

She had her fun, both then and later when she perfected the art of bombmaking. 

Like those at the top of the Provisional movement, she organised for others to be killed as if they were pawns in a game, lesser beings whose lives were expendable in the name of some redundant revolution.