November 1983. The IRA has turned to kidnapping to fund its armed campaign in the north. The organisation has a supermarket boss in its sights – Quinnsworth chief executive, Don Tidey. As Tidey does the school run en route to his south Dublin office he pulls up at a garda checkpoint. Within moments he is dragged from his car, bundled into another car and driven away at speed. It was the beginning of a massive manhunt and a 23-day ordeal for Tidey. At the instant he is found, in an isolated Leitrim wood, his captors kill a trainee garda and an army private. After a tense standoff with soldiers and gardaí and an exchange of fire, they escape and are never caught.

It is, and will remain, the deadliest ever confrontation between the Irish security forces and the IRA. The Kidnapping opens with the dramatic story of Tidey’s rescue. No one emerges unscathed – not the rural community where the IRA gang holds its captive, not the gardaí, not the State. And especially not the man at the heart of the drama nor the families bereaved when he is rescued. Don Tidey speaks about his ordeal for the first time. Equally startling and moving are interviews with the families of Patrick Kelly and Gary Sheehan, who reveal the devastating impact of the two men’s violent deaths and the ongoing challenges of coming to terms with their loss. The following excerpt is based on an interview with David Kelly, the eldest of Patrick Kelly’s four sons…

FOR PADDY, THE army was going to be his career. ‘Oh certainly,’ says David. ‘I think he took it very seriously.

From what I can gather, listening to his colleagues, it was his life.’ With his talent for mechanics, Paddy completed an armoured personnel carrier course in 1972 and became an army driver.

It was in March 1974 that he married Caitriona Bradley from Moate, also known as Catherine. He was twenty-six, she was twenty-one. They had first met in The Well pub, a popular country & western music venue in the town.

Patrick and Caitriona on their wedding day.

Caitriona was one of seven siblings; their father Jack worked in a local hardware store. Their mother died at the age of fifty-one in 1976. Jack Bradley died six weeks before his son-in-law was murdered. 

Young family

The young couple started off married life in a flat in Moate. A year later they moved into a council house at 12 St Patrick’s Terrace. One by one the boys were born. Caitriona had a number of miscarriages. Army pay was poor and money was scarce, but the children were oblivious to that, feeling secure and loved, growing up safe and content.

The area was ‘teeming with children’, David recalls, ‘playing soccer out on the green’. They were mostly from army families as well. The men used to car-share on their way to work. ‘I remember looking out a window. There was [Dad] in the driver’s seat and there were three other soldiers.’

Paddy Kelly.

Caitriona had worked in a textiles factory in Clara before she got married. She would still clock up a few hours here and there in a local café or takeaway. As her father got older, she took care of him more and more.

After Jack Bradley died from cancer in 1983, Caitriona went to his solicitor to hand in his rent book. ‘Which one of the daughters are you?’ she was asked. The solicitor checked his paperwork and then told her: ‘He left his home to you.’

David recalls: ‘My father was waiting in the car outside. She got in and told him the good news and she said he was elated. My grandfather had bought the house from the council and willed it to her. I was told that, the weekend my father was killed, he was getting help from people with the move from one house to another. ‘Her husband and father were very important in her life. Within a couple of months she lost the two men she counted on.’

Unwelcome changes

Into that vacuum would come another man, himself a soldier in Custume Barracks, married with a wife and children but separated and living in a flat. The brothers remember him materialising into their lives, gradually becoming a presence in the house until he became a permanent fixture.

On the night of 16 December, people had come streaming into the living room to offer their condolences. The room had been cleared of furniture, bar one armchair, where their mother was sitting to receive the visitors.

At one point David was told to join her by the armchair. ‘I was standing there at her left and one of the people that came in was this man, wearing the Irish army uniform. I didn’t know who he was.’

Pretty soon they would get to know who he was. He had known Paddy Kelly as a colleague in Custume Barracks. After the funeral, he started to turn up regularly at their house. He taught their mother how to drive; he helped her buy her first car. ‘It was a way of getting close to her,’ David says, remembering that some people thought it was ‘happening too quickly, that he was just turning up on the scene all the time, sort of filling my father’s shoes’.

At first controlling, then domineering, the boys say he eventually became physically abusive and was the opposite of the loving father figure they had lost.

Left to right, three of the four Kelly brothers: David, Michael, Andrew.

‘When I look back on everything,’ says David now, ‘it was coercive control. He took advantage of a grief-stricken woman. It was a classic case of this knight in shining armour; he promised he’d take care of her and us. Her own siblings warned her about him but she sort of pushed them away and became more and more reliant on this man.

‘Because I was the eldest son, I felt like I had to have the role of the father, almost, you know? But I remember me and her just sitting in a room and then he came in and there’s silence. This presence. He became this barrier between me and her.’

‘She was just vulnerable’

Three years after Paddy Kelly’s death, his widow decided to leave Moate and move to London with her children and new partner. David remembers the day they flew from Dublin airport – 28 November 1986 – because it was three days after his twelfth birthday. Caitriona’s partner had retired from the army and planned to work on the building sites in England.

‘She would never have gone to London if it wasn’t for him,’ says David, who feels Caitriona was aware of local hostility towards her new relationship. ‘I think they felt it was the best thing, a fresh start for them – and us, I guess. Just get on the plane and leave Ireland.’

David Kelly.

‘I think she was just vulnerable,’ says Michael. ‘This man stepped in when she was maybe at her lowest ebb. She was a thirty-one-year-old widow with four young children. Although she had a supportive family here, there was grief and the stress of trying to deal with all this without the appropriate mental health team or counselling. What people have today just wasn’t there in the early eighties.’

David remembers the flight to London. ‘The plane was half-empty, and it was like, all of a sudden, the mood was very quiet. And I looked at my mother to the left of me and she was looking out the window. And then I looked across at my younger brothers and this awful feeling came over me. I said to my mother, it was like a gut instinct, I said: “I don’t want to go to England.” I just got a bad feeling that we weren’t going for the best of reasons.’

Their first home was a flat in Cricklewood, but it was temporary accommodation. They registered with the local authority and after their short-term lease on the flat expired, the family was officially homeless. They were provided with emergency lodgings in a small hotel in West Hampstead.

From there they were transferred to a flat in Kilburn for maybe six months before finally being allocated a council house on the Grahame Park estate in the district of Colindale in north-west London. It was a vast estate with problems of crime and violence, drugs and antisocial behaviour.

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Michael and Patrick were enrolled in a primary school in Cricklewood while David entered second level in St James’s Catholic High School in Colindale.

‘We felt completely uprooted,’ says Michael. ‘We’d never been outside of Moate, other than towns around here. It was a different world, going into school and sitting beside people from different countries, trying to adapt to the new environment, trying to fit in. Obviously, it was tough being Irish there in the eighties. So it was a big change for all of us.’

The boys felt that their mother’s new partner became more controlling once the family moved to London. David recalls her buying groceries one day in a shop in Cricklewood and saying, ‘Don’t tell him how much we spent.’ The Kellys and the Bradleys had relations in London, but they say he deliberately kept away from them.

Unbeknownst to almost everyone, including the children, the couple got married. Being married would fast-track them up the housing list with the local council.

As a widow, Caitriona had been in receipt of an army pension since the death of her husband. She lost that after she remarried. ‘It’s another sign of how she became totally dependent on this man,’ says David. ‘Not alone had she left her home and her country, she gave up her army pension too.’ At that time the boys were not aware that a trust fund had been set up on their behalf by Quinnsworth. Caitriona kept it secret, even from her new husband. ‘I overheard him say to our mother once, “If there’s money there, just withdraw it.”

He was suspecting there was something. But the one thing she emphasised for us was education. I think that’s what she was thinking about: the trust would be there for our education. She didn’t realise it was there for our welfare. A car, clothes, a family holiday, whatever it was.’

The fund was held in Allied Irish Bank and administered by trustees. To draw money from it, Caitriona could submit a request and the trustees would have to approve it. But, according to Michael, ‘it wasn’t touched for years’. Andrew says: ‘All our relations back home believed we were well taken care of, that we were looked after. Little did they know that we were going round in squalor, in terrible clothes.’

From coercion to violence

It seems that Caitriona’s dream was for the boys to go to university, and the trust fund would facilitate that. It would be activated to give them the education she and Paddy never had, and which would bring her sons better opportunities in life than she had known.

According to the boys, their mother’s partner graduated from coercion to violence. David remembers the first time he realised his mother was being assaulted. ‘I didn’t see it, but I heard it. I was in the room next door. He sort of took out his anger on her. He seemed to be, like, slapping her in the face . . . What really annoyed me was just the way she took it in silence. That’s what made it so particularly painful.

‘I lay in bed that night, and she came in and sat on the bed and she was crying, and I was crying. She said, “I’m so sorry. It’s not his fault. The army made him that way.” I now know it was a case of the victim making excuses for her abuser. I fell asleep that night crying. Part of me died that night.’

The boys say there were similar incidents in the years that followed, and they often didn’t feel safe in their home. David says: ‘I think my saviour in those years was soccer. With all the kids in the area, it was like the UN – so many different nationalities. In our block there were Hungarians, Italians, Nigerians, and we were all out playing football on the green. ‘I think it kept me going, because I loved soccer and all my energy went into it. The estate had a reputation for crime and there was a lot of drug dealing going on, there was violence, and it got to a point that after six in the evening I wouldn’t go to the shopping area. I wouldn’t feel safe.’

Michael adds: ‘You had to protect yourself at home, at school and in the neighbourhood. Life was just tough all round.’ Of the siblings, Michael was the one who most often challenged his mother’s partner. ‘I did stand up to him a good bit, so maybe he took a particular dislike to me. Regularly there were confrontations between us.’ It was perhaps inevitable that Michael would be the first to fly the nest. ‘It was definitely easier for me just to get out of there.’

Tommy Conlon is a sportswriter with the Sunday Independent. Ronan McGreevy is an Irish Times journalist and videographer. ’The Kidnapping’ is published by Penguin Sandycove and is available in shops and online from 26 October.