Shane O’Doherty Casey Schmauder
Casey Schmauder meets former IRA bomber Shane O’Doherty who turned to God while in prison
Sitting down to a pot of tea and a blueberry muffin, Shane O’Doherty says, “I work at a shelter just around the corner, so this is where I come prior to starting my 12-hour night shift.”
Shane has moved through numerous jobs over the years. He worked in an IT department in Sweden before returning to Ireland and talking to a vocations director about religious life as a late vocation. Shane hoped to drive a four-by-four in the winter in Medjugorje, delivering food to those who couldn’t access it through an American company. The vocations director said no. Instead, Shane was to help the homeless in Dublin for a year for free.
The director placed him with Crosscare, the social support agency of the Archdiocese of Dublin. He did a year of nights for free, “proving his manliness” after working in condemned buildings with desperate conditions, and then he entered the seminary for two years. He later returned to Crosscare and worked as their IT guy – he had donated computers in his first year there for their numerous services such as food banks and services for youth and Travellers. Finally, he switched from IT guy back to nights with the homeless in Crosscare, this time on staff.
Perhaps the reason he got drawn back to spending his nights with the men and women in Crosscare is because many of his young homeless clientele have been imprisoned, and Shane himself once served 14 years.
“For Heaven’s sake, I spent 14 years in prison for the IRA, so a lot of our clientele are young lads who are fresh out of prison and they are homeless and they assume all the staff are these hoity-toity, well-educated people with glasses and nice clothes. They wouldn’t realise they were people like me,” Shane says. “It meant that I could handle these guys, these kids, and talk to them, make them laugh. They see staff as very authoritarian, like prison screws, but you quickly try and mould them out of that view. We’re here to help you. We’re here to help you change your life.”
When Shane was just 15, he formally joined the IRA, and became a prolific bomber in the early 1970s. He carried out bombing campaigns in Derry and on the border, but his most infamous campaign was in London where he carried out a letter bombing campaign, sending bombs through the mail to prominent figures in Britain, even sending a bomb in a hollowed-out Bible to Bishop Richard Tickle, Catholic chaplain to the British armed forces.
Shane’s bombs never killed anyone, but numerous people were seriously injured.
In 1976, during an IRA ceasefire which he had voted for, the 21-year-old Shane was convicted on 31 counts of attempted murder, and sentenced to 30 life sentences. Imprisoned in England, he protested fiercely to be returned to Northern Ireland, spending over a year naked in solitary, refusing to wear the English prison uniform.
“I protested the whole 10 years to get back to Northern Ireland, so the effect was I spent a lot of time in solitary, five or six years in solitary, and in many ways, it enabled me to grow, change, see myself as I truly was,” he says.
In prison, Shane encountered a Jesuit priest who was known to hate the Irish, and especially IRA men. A young lad and ex-bomber, Shane was quick to start a fight with him.
“I had a row with him one day in the cell, and I said, where’s the proof your God exists?” says Shane. “And he shoved it back at me, he said, why in the four Gospels of course! And I said **** that, I want to read these four Gospels, so I demanded a copy of the four Gospels and that evening the guards brought in a book to my solitary cell, and it was a Bible.”
Gospels
Shane recalls turning through the Bible one page at a time, looking for the Gospels, not realising they were toward the back of the book. Catholics in the North didn’t read the Bible, he jokes.
“After finding them, I read them in one evening, and that quick, short, deep, intense reading of the four Gospels in one night blew me away, and I thought that Jesus Christ was a very fascinating character,” Shane says. “So I thought, wow, if He was really who He said He was, the Son of God, why did He not use violence in support of His cause? And here we are, we’re not innocent, and we are using violence in support of our non-divine cause.”
Following that, Shane felt profoundly drawn to the character of Christ, yet he couldn’t imagine that this figure who had walked the Earth 2,000 years ago could still be alive. That was until Shane was introduced to the figure of Padre Pio.
“About two weeks later, my bishop, Edward Daly, sent me a book on Padre Pio which had an added attraction because it was written by a former Second World War soldier, a war hero, so it was a very masculine look at things, a soldier, a tough guy, who was converted by Padre Pio,” Shane says. “I was blown away. So the moment I read this book, I was convinced that Jesus Christ was still alive, and I’m still convinced to this day.”
From then on, Shane fervently sought God in prison, despite prison guards and fellow prisoners who believed he was faking or crazy or a leading IRA figure trying to get out early, and was regularly visited by preachers, cardinals, and the late Bishop Edward Daly.
He wrote to the Northern press condemning the armed struggle, calling for an end to the war, and officially resigning from the IRA, the likes of which had never been done.
Shane befriended such famous victims of miscarriages of justice as the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, helping connect them with a prominent lawyer and giving them hope that despite serving years for a crime not committed, they could still receive justice.
When he was finally returned to Northern Ireland, Shane rejected plans to place him in the prison’s IRA wing, instead asking the prison governor to place him in the sex offender wing rather than having to rejoin a group he’d resigned from.
In describing this radical change of behaviour, Shane explains that he goes at everything wholeheartedly.
“The problem I’ve had is, I don’t do something by halves. If I was gonna fight in the IRA, I was gonna fight in the IRA. If I was gonna bomb the enemy, I was gonna bomb the enemy. So when I came back to my faith, I thought, damn, do a proper job. Come right back to your faith,” Shane says. “So I fought a campaign to write to my victims – you weren’t allowed to write to victims in those times. I had to fight a campaign for a year for the right to write to my victims and say sorry.”
Nearly half of his victims responded to his letters with gratitude, he says.
Masculine Faith
Now decades out of prison, Shane continues to pursue his faith alongside his Scottish wife, and is particularly interested in how men can pursue a ‘masculine’ faith. His 1993 memoir The Volunteer: A Former IRA Man’s True Story and a subsequent play about Kevin Barry both sought to understand faith for masculine men.
“There’s very little out there that bad boys can turn to: prisoners, ex-prisoners, gang members,” Shane says. “I recorded a meditation called Is There Mercy For Sinners, and it’s just a hard-hitting meditation, and I followed that one up with A Guide To Repentance. So for young lads or men who wouldn’t go near a priest, they can read my original The Volunteer and they can find something. It’s not for everybody, but there’s a niche market of bad boys who can turn to the kind of stuff I write.”
Given his past, Shane faces mixed reactions when it comes to him and his faith in God. He encounters religious people who trust that he is forgiven and no longer needs to seek out repentance for crimes committed long ago and for which he has already repented sincerely, but also those who find it disgraceful to see Shane in places of worship, feeling his sins are too great to overcome.
Priesthood
After speaking with a vocations director for a year, volunteering for a year at Crosscare for free to show his readiness to move forward to priesthood, and two years in the seminary during which he passed all of his examinations, Shane was brusquely asked to stop pursuing the priesthood. He considers this action to be ignorant of Church teaching that repentance is for the forgiveness of sins.
Shane feels himself looking for a middle ground. He knows that his sins can be forgiven. At the same time, though, he doesn’t feel that he can accept that he is forgiven and be done with it.
“I agree that I am forgiven, and I agree that grand sinners are forgiven, but you still feel a duty to lead people out of sin,” Shane says. “Young people might’ve looked at my career and thought, oh my God, he’s a hero, I want to follow him. So I do a lot of talks for young people. I’ve spoken in nearly every city in Spain because my book was published in Spanish, and I get around 1,500 local college students at each talk.”
Shane talks to them about his realisation that, in participating in armed conflict to solve a problem, he and the paramilitaries only created more problems and more injustices to be remedied.
He writes at night when the homeless shelter is quiet, though it often isn’t. Drug addicts and alcohol-addicted homeless often consume more at night to get through until the morning, and Shane has to struggle with people engaging in self-harm, suicide attempts, and overdoses on a near nightly basis. Yet, on those rare nights of solitude, Shane sits down in front of the computer, having chosen to start a book trilogy called Stories of a Soul, shares small tales of faith from a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, from prison, and from his time in seminary.
His Small Tales of Medjugorje is quick and simple, but he uses the book to try and encourage those who feel they don’t know how to move forward in their faith, especially adult males.
“That little book is saying, here’s what a current Catholic man is doing in order to hold his faith, and there’s not much out there like that,” Shane says. “As the Church is crumbling around us, seminaries, bishops falling out amongst themselves, there’s not much for people to go forward in their faith. So I thought, I’ll knock out this little book for encouragement. There’s just so much happening in the Church, people are worn out.”
Shane knows that people in his home town, the people he fought beside, will be rolling their eyes when they see a book about Shane going all the way to Medjugorje, because, Shane says, there’s a large number of people who practice an “intellectual faith” that “doesn’t travel anywhere”. Shane himself has been told that Padre Pio, a major player in his conversion, isn’t important. Yet he refuses to let himself and others be turned away from the piety that led them to convert and want to serve Christ in the first place.
“I’m putting my name to a book about Medjugorje because I’m a Catholic man who practices and carries out the faith every night for 12 hours, but where do I feed from? I can’t feed from this intellectual dead zone. I have to feed from where all the other people in Ireland feed from,” he says. “The sacraments, pilgrimages, the saints, Mother Mary: that’s where the streams of grace are coming from. They’re not coming from the dwindling, dead seminary.”
Shane credits Medjugorje, where a major theme is prayer from the heart, with teaching him to pray truly from the heart to forgive religious leaders, like the one who expelled him from seminary, even though he disagrees with them.
In the future, Shane will release a Guide to Armed Struggle that in fact won’t be a guide at all but a condemnation of the hypocrisy of armed struggle. He speaks out against older men exploiting young men to do violence in gangs or paramilitary organizations, pointing out that he joined the IRA at just 15, and blindly followed orders without checking the facts.
Bomb
In the case of the bishop who received a bomb from Shane in a hollowed-out Bible, Shane had read that Dr Tickle praised British troops for the murders of Catholics they’d committed on Bloody Sunday. Having been shot at on Bloody Sunday, Shane read this article as if the bishop had praised troops for trying to kill him. However, it would turn out that the bishop never gave accolades to the troops. Fortunately for Shane, the bomb the bishop received never went off.
And yet, though he was quite young, certainly young to be armed with guns and bombs, Shane recognises his need to continuously repent. He cites the age of reason as being around nine or ten, and believes people older than that need to stop blaming “their mother, their father, and society” for their sins.
“You get cleansed…you move on through taking responsibility. Repenting is good, we do it every day,” he says, continuing, “It’s not something you do once. I would say I’m on a trajectory of repentance for the rest of my life.”