The Penitent

From the IRA to the Fear of God with Shane Paul O’Doherty

“Who forgives? Who in the end declares that I’m forgiven? Inside my head, let’s imagine that I don’t care about the victims, or the press, or the government, or the security services — forget all that… How do I know I’m forgiven? Can I ever know that I’m forgiven by God?

“How can I know that God forgives me? Am I always uncertain? Should I remain uncertain? For reasons of humility, or whatever? If I believe I’m truly forgiven — is that not an arrogant reading of Scripture, or an arrogant abuse of religion? Where does forgiveness come from? Do we have a right to channel it? Claim that we can control it? That’s the question.”

In 1970, as Northern Ireland descended into the violence of its Troubles, fifteen-year-old Shane Paul O’Doherty joined the Derry Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He quickly proved a capable volunteer, a well-respected operator, and found his niche as a careful and innovative bomb maker.

In 1973 he single-handedly initiated a letter bomb campaign in London, targeting officials of the British government. Eventually arrested and tried, Shane was sentenced to thirty life sentences, plus twenty years.

“Though he was IRA,” wrote friend and fellow prisoner Gerry Conlon, remembering their time together behind bars, “he was really a law unto himself.”

In 1975, while awaiting trial in Brixton Prison, Shane met a Jesuit chaplain, Fr. Anthony Lawn, widely known for his hatred of Irish prisoners:

“He told me he’d sent his passport back to the passport office to have the word ‘British’ taken off it, and to have the word ‘English’ put on it, because he couldn’t stand being mixed in with the Celts.

“I remember getting into this big fight with him in my cell, and saying to him as he left, ‘Where’s the proof your God exists?’ There might have been a f-word in there somewhere. As he took snuff up his nose, just before he slammed the door, he said, ‘Why the four Gospels of course!’ So I rang the cell bell and demanded a copy of the Bible. And I remember leafing through one-thousand-five-hundred or eight-hundred pages to try and find the Gospels, and found them at the very end of the book — strange place to find them — and read them…

“The holy fear of God hit me like an atomic bomb. I often say to people, ‘You don’t take a twenty-year-old hardened IRA bomber kid who’s completely brainwashed by the Republican movement — you’re not going to give some kind of candy-floss talk that’s going to move me out of the IRA — it wasn’t going to be some nice-nice, Holy Joe little homily that was going to move me, it took a nuclear explosion, a nuclear power to get me out of the IRA.’

“I was reading St. Matthew’s Gospel, I was reading about Hell, I was reading about ‘Don’t worry about those who can kill the body. What about the person who has power over body and soul?’ And you know, this concept of being opposed to God, and somehow kind of frozen in that state through death… because in prison you could be killed in a second, and you were super aware every day that you could be killed in a second. I got this incredible sense reading the Gospels that this was a humongous warning for me… ‘Shane, you may have taken on the British government… but you risk your soul.’ Suddenly I had this incredible awareness that I had this eternal soul, and I had this amazing awareness, ‘Wow, everything you have done has put you on a path against God.’ It was electrifying, really. It was the holy fear of God, that’s all I can tell you — the holy fear of God. And for a guy that’s in solitary confinement, refusing to wear a criminal uniform, utterly dedicated to the IRA’s aims — you know, blow the Brits out of Ireland, bomb London… I put a letter bomb in 10 Downing Street! I’d blown up the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, who was in charge of Bloody Sunday… I had been a crazed IRA teenager… in one evening, to be completely converted to the idea that [this] was all in contravention of God’s law — it was just so powerful, it’s stayed with me to this day.

“Within a very short time a second kind of bombshell hit me. Not just the Gospels and this holy fear of God…

“My bishop back in Derry, Bishop Edward Daly, the Bloody Sunday white-handkerchief-waving priest, who had become the bishop of Derry in the meantime, he’d been trying to contact me and I’d been telling him more or less to fuck off and leave me alone. He was very close to my mother, you see. I came from a very Catholic family. My father taught in the Christian Brothers school in Derry his entire career. So, Bishop Daly was trying to be helpful to me. But he sent me a book, it arrived in the post about a week later, after this whole Gospel experience. And I’d been thinking for a week, ‘OK, I’m shocked, I can see that Jesus was this incredible character 2000 years ago, speaking for God and warning people like me, bad boys like me, about hellfire and decisions that might affect you in eternity.’ But I did question, ‘Why has Jesus gone into kind of hibernation for 2000 years? I mean, why isn’t he more active? Why doesn’t he communicate more with his followers?’ I was Thomas, Doubting Thomas. Because I was saying, you know, ‘Why is God, why is Jesus, so inattentive to his followers? Why’d he leave [us] hanging?’

“About a week later, when I was walking up and down my cell for hours each day, wondering ‘Why doesn’t Jesus say more, do more, kick ass more, support his front-line soldiers more — priests and people — with evidence?’ About a week later Bishop Daly... his sister had a holiday home in Mountcharles in Donegal, beautiful little place… he’d sneak down [there] for quiet weekends on his own. And in the village of Mountcharles he met this larger-than-life, really famous character, John McCaffery, who had been a Second World War hero, a Scotsman… and [McCaffery] had met Padre Pio at a time when he was full of doubts and this and that and the other, and Padre Pio had said, ‘You’ll be my fundraiser after the war for the hospital I’m going to build here near my monastery.’ John McCaffery became his number-one fund raiser, and became a great, great friend of Padre Pio. And [McCaffery] wrote this little simple book in his retirement in Donegal… The Friar of San Giovanni: Tales of Padre Pio. Very simple little short tales and very simple writing — almost Gospel-like writing, really. And Bishop Daly had met him in the village, Mountcharles, and had gotten a copy signed to me by him, so here I’m sitting in my cell reading about this most amazing saint, stigmatist and mystic Padre Pio, who was the very answer to my question, ‘Why doesn’t Jesus give his people more sustenance, give them more support, more signs?’ So Padre Pio became, as he is today, the biggest single influence on my life outside the Gospel. To this day he pervades my whole existence, every day. To this day.

“The best praise to describe Padre Pio down all the years I’ve been reading about him, following him, is Christ re-presented to the world. Because he so negated himself in his monastic life and his Franciscan calling that Jesus could kind of poke through. There are many records of those who’ve attended Padre Pio’s Masses who during the Mass didn’t see Padre Pio’s face anymore — they saw the face of Christ during the Mass, the suffering face of Christ.

“It was the Thomas proof I asked for…. it was visible proof. It was [Padre Pio’s] mystical miraculous life, his reading of souls in the confessional. Through him there were so many healings, miraculous healings… it was just Jesus, re-presented, the power of Christ re-presented to the world with no covers, no masks, nothing hidden — here was the power of God in this humble monk. He backed me up straight away — I felt he was right at my elbow every single day.  I appealed to him, and he answered. That’s the only thing I can tell you… he never let me down, I can honestly say that, he never let me down in those years.”

“There used to be a series of pamphlets in Britain and Ireland — I don’t know if they were in the States. It was called the Catholic Truth Society, and when you went into any church in Britain or Ireland there was like a wooden stand at the back of the church with fifty pockets in it, and in each one of these they had a series of these one penny or dime pamphlets — they were always incredibly well written. But there was one that I read, I think it was about confession. There was an introduction in it by a famous Jesuit… he described, in a paragraph, sin. And I read his paragraph in solitary confinement, and I still remember it to this day. He said ‘You can tell sin by its three consequences — the sinner feels a sense of isolation from God, the sinner feels a sense of isolation from the community around him or her, and the sinner feels a sense of isolation from his or herself.’ And I was in solitary confinement cut off from the world. I was feeling that I had isolated myself from God by my sin. And I felt unhappy in my own conscience... And there were those three barriers he said signaled sin, you know... I embodied those three… I could see I was mired in sin, and the first part in my journey back to normality or life or freedom was to overcome sin.

“I knew the risks I was running — because in those days, to come out with some kind of conversion in prison, [that] never happened… There were two rules in prison —nobody ever mentioned guilt, and nobody ever said sorry…

“There was a new chaplain there, a new priest… this guy who had been a banker, his brother was a magistrate… he was an older guy, and he was about to get married and he was driving past a seminary in England with his fiancé and he just happened to say to her off the top of his head ‘Do you know I always fancied trying that out?’ And she took her ring off on the spot and said, ‘You better try it out!’ He did and he became a late vocation priest — Gerry Ennis, Fr. Gerry Ennis. English guy. His brother was a magistrate in the courts, and he came into the prison system believing everybody was guilty, and terrorists were terrorists — and he met me, in the very moment when I was undergoing this humongous conversion… I presented myself before him one day and said ‘I want to confess my sins’ and he was completely blown away, he was more in tears than I ever was. He used to say to me that he felt when he became a priest and they dumped him into the prison system that he had a shit job… but he loved the prison system from that point on, he used to say to me, ‘My God, I come in here every day and I think — I’m in the best of all jobs in the best of all places. I’m the medic where the medic is needed.’ He absolutely loved his priesthood.

“There was one verse that really haunted me in Matthew’s Gospel: ‘If you come to the altar to offer your gift and there remember that your brother has something against you, go first and be reconciled to your brother — then come offer your gift.’ I had this absolute conviction that I couldn’t come back to the Church, to the Eucharist, until I had made some kind of symbolic effort toward my victims. I was overpowered by the notion of apologizing to my victims. I said to [Fr. Ennis], ‘I absolutely have to apologize to my victims.’ He said, ‘Never in a million years will you get permission from the prison system to write letters of apology to your victims, never. And the British government will never allow that to happen. The security services will never allow it. The prison authorities will never allow it.’ But I fought this campaign for a year and was finally allowed to apologize, in private.

“But one of the Sunday newspapers at the time… News of the World, it was called – used to be nicknamed News of the Screws – a horrific tabloid… one Sunday morning it appeared in the prison, all the prisoners read this rag, you know? It came in with this big headline – ‘Anger As IRA Bomber Says Sorry.’

“When that came out in prison, the IRA prisoners were utterly horrified. Some of them thought I was going to become this sort of supergrass informer, and were discussing killing me in my cell… But, you know, I sailed through those years, completely untouched by any fear, untouched by any idea that I was wrong. The IRA prisoners didn’t speak to me... They turned their back on me in the prison, in the prison yard, wouldn’t speak to me. It didn’t worry me, it didn’t bother me.

“When I was in prison in Wormwood Scrubs, when Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, it completely changed my life. People used to say, ‘How could it have changed your life, when you were in prison in England?’ I’d say, ‘Can you imagine?’ I’d repented very publicly from 1977 all through 1978, had been named in the papers as somebody… who’d written to my victims, I’d been criticized in the press, slagged off as this terrorist who wanted to repent…overnight, in 1979, overnight, the language I had been using for two or three years, the language of repentance, change, peace, making amends, making peace, confronting your victims, giving up violence… that language that had been so abused, that I’d been criticized for trying to associate myself with… John Paul’s visit to Ireland rendered me comprehensible to people… People who couldn’t understand where I was coming from suddenly bounced into me and said, ‘Oh my God, the pennies just dropped! You mean you want to become like a repentant Christian!’ That visit changed my prison life — because I wasn’t being taken seriously.

“When I was moved back to Northern Ireland [in 1985], after ten years in English prisons, I was the first prisoner ever to refuse to go on paramilitary controlled wings and I was the person around whom they built what were called the mixed wings, conforming wings, where hundreds and hundreds of paramilitaries left the IRA wings and the Loyalist wings to join me, to be free of the grip of paramilitaries. And I was the reason within about two years of arriving in Northern Ireland that they opened up Maghaberry Prison and were able to put in many hundreds of what were called conforming prisoners and mixing prisoners — that’s Protestant and Catholic guys who decided give it up, move on, let’s work together. But if I hadn’t come back, after ten years in English prisons, and refused to go on the IRA wings in Long Kesh and initially created, accidentally, a mixed wing, what they called an ODC wing — Ordinary Decent Criminal wing — if I hadn’t broken away and done that, so many other things would not have happened.”

Shane was released from prison in 1989, after fourteen-and-a-half years behind bars.

“I’ve lived to experience being at the heart of the Church’s teaching on conversion and repentance.

“Now I find I’m regarded as a crank. I mention the word repentance and people say, you know, ‘Fuck off, it’s not relevant anymore, don’t burden people with the notion of sin and guilt, move on… it’s an old-style Christianity… We have to liberate people from this notion of guilt and sin and responsibility… you’ll never pack a church with that.’

“The Church didn’t burden me with sin — the Church liberated me from sin! The sacraments liberated me… the power I got to break away from the paramilitary group was a power of freedom.

“With that liberation you gain from your sin in your first great crashing of repentance is a great responsibility to speak against narrow tribal sectarian abuse of the Gospel. If you raise your hand in Irish society… and say that ‘We made a goddess of Kathleen of Ireland, and we sacrificed on behalf of a goddess, we tribalized the people to whom we were going to give the message of liberation, we tribalized them into just Irish people…’ We deified Irish people and false notions of Irish history, and had nothing to say to people who weren’t Irish. The Gospels call to a global community… where I could sit with Cardinal Basil Hume, who had been a Benedictine in England, and whose young students joined the British Army, or where English priests could meet me in the international call of the Gospel, over and above and beyond our divisions…

“As one of the great Protestant writers said, my parish is the world! Here we had become this little narrow sectarian tribe. You often heard at the time, you still hear today — it riles me up — I see it in death notices, particularly do with IRA people: Mary Queen of the Gael, pray for us… The Gael is an old phrase that tried to describe a mixed bunch of Irish tribes who were very disunited, but one thing they had in common is they weren’t English. And so, Mary has been bastardized to serve this sort of cult of Ireland the Supreme, she’s somehow only the Queen of the Gael, and somehow is anti-English and anti-Protestant.

“There was a certain bastardization of Easter when they chose Easter Monday [for the 1916 Rising], to say ‘Oh, you know, Ireland is Christ in the Tomb, by our blood sacrifice we will generate the resurrection of Ireland, à la the resurrection of Christ,’ but it was a bastardization of the message of the resurrection of Jesus as everybody’s Lord, that the lads would claim… I can understand the energy of it… that’s a horrible bastardization and a horrible narrowing of the reach of Jesus’ resurrection, which was overcoming death for all humanity — that He had put Death to death, and promised resurrection to all those who would follow the Good News.

“Once you deify the notion of one country better than any other, then your call to be bringing the Gospel to everybody equally across the world, it becomes much more difficult. In fact, it undermines the Gospel.

“I quote sometimes… the Pope gave a talk in southern Italy about the Mafia, and how they should repent, and they can’t take the fruits of their evil, they can’t take this into the next life, and I quote this in Northern Ireland and say ‘The Pope in southern Italy is saying we shouldn’t incorporate the Mafia into society and they should repent, repent their evil and their ill-gotten gains, and in northern Ireland we have church leaders trying to incorporate the mafia, the IRA mafia, into society without any repentance whatsoever, not to their victims, not [for] their bank robberies, not a word about their ill-gotten gains, and repentance has been covered up.

“You can’t cover up murder. You can’t cover up 1700 IRA murders and pretend they didn’t happen, they don’t need to be repented. But you have church leaders now, happily being photographed with IRA leaders, never mentioning victims, never mentioning repentance. The word repentance has been killed off in Northern Ireland by both the Protestant and Catholic churches. Not needed, not necessary.

“I’m often astonished at modern Catholic spirituality that’s supposed to appeal to men, and young men — and, you know, bad boys — that’s so… effeminate. I can’t understand how young men in gangs, or young men in crime, or drugs, or prison, or paramilitary groups are ever going to be attracted by anything other than something manly, masculine — if that’s allowed anymore. The idea that you can promote God as this big, fluffy, dopey piece of candy floss in the sky who just forgives everything — that’s not going to appeal to anyone in gangs or paramilitaries. It’s not going to move anybody either.

“Really and truly, it becomes much more difficult to explain to anybody why Jesus had to undergo His Passion, His suffering and death, why the redemptive action of Christ needed to involve suffering. How do you explain to people how in God’s plan there’s a thing called death? How do you explain death as the wages of sin? Why does Christ’s Incarnation or Redemption even matter? How does it matter anymore if big, waffly God in the sky… forgives everything? Why do we need commandments, laws, redemption, Jesus, the Eucharist, the sacraments? What does it mean if you undermine it.. and say God forgives everything? How can you promote this as a means of salvation to people in gangs — surely, they can just continue murdering? ‘God forgives everything’… Doesn’t that render repentance, redemption — doesn’t that render everything meaningless?

“Let’s go back to my own repentance, or to the potential repentance of paramilitaries even now, men who are grievously wounded by the murders they committed, and who struggle with the idea of repenting, even now… I’m in touch with people who struggle every day with terrible things they did in the past and they haven’t come back to the faith… where’s the necessity for anybody to repent, or seek forgiveness? Who needs sacraments? What’s the sacrament of reconciliation if God forgives everybody?

“The worst story to come out of the post-peace process peace [in Northern Ireland] is the murder of Paul Quinn [in 2007]. Paul had a fight with a guy, just a few punches, with the son of an IRA leader. Later one of his friends was abducted and taken to a farm on the County Monaghan side of the border, and he was forced to call Paul and say, ‘Paul can you come and collect me, my car’s broken down.’ So this kid came along… to pick up his friend and there were ten or twelve men in boiler suits with iron bars and they dragged him into the middle of the farm and they beat him to death. Every single bone below his neck was broken. They beat him to death, as a sign that you can’t punch the son of an IRA leader. And even though everybody knows who was involved, everybody in that area knows who was involved… the IRA leader was named in the papers recently, named and photographed… nobody can touch these people, they’re untouchable gangsters.

“I’m worried about these young people who were told, ‘Beat this guy to death for this IRA leader,’ who were told, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s all OK…’ I’m concerned about their souls going before God, because nobody’s warned them about sin and the loss of their souls and hellfire…

“I was at a Divine Mercy conference in Dublin, it must be fifteen years ago… A woman stood up, she said, ‘I’ve come to this conference because I’m fascinated by the Divine Mercy angle because I’m a Protestant, and we’ve a huge awareness of God’s justice — how do you guys explain Divine Mercy’s relation with Divine Justice?’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, fantastic question!’ Because nobody ever explains the connection between Divine Mercy and Divine Justice. The entrance to Divine Mercy is fairly often through repentance, it opens the gates. I’m not excluding the fact that God can forgive whoever He wishes to forgive, and the Holy Spirit can, without any influence from me, He can convert anybody He likes, or give the grace of conversion to anybody, forgive anybody directly — He doesn’t need me. God ultimately decides. But in teaching the community about Divine Mercy, there has to be some mention of Divine Justice, that renders mercy relevant. Mercy only has value if there’s Divine Justice.”

Shane is currently working on a documentary about repentance.

Lydwine spoke with him initially by telephone in early March 2020, as Europe and North America began shutting down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People are saying, you know, ‘How are you managing the lockdown?’ and I say, ‘Well, I had fourteen years of lockdown and loved it.

“Solitary confinement… I loved it, really, because I had time to think, you see? I had time to address myself. Being locked away for twenty-four hours a day, you could attend to yourself. It was selfish in many ways…

“I remember reading about some saint who said they’d love to be a sinner all over again, to enjoy the joy of conversion all over again, the joy of being welcomed back…

“One of the Birmingham Six guys, Billy Power, he calls me every few days and he laments, you know, that great spiritual time we had in Wormwood Scrubs prison in London, where we kind of monasticized it, the pair of us. I introduced him to the breviary prayer book, and to prayer and stuff, you know. He often contacts me… he was released after sixteen years for the Birmingham bombings that he didn’t commit, and was handed a million dollars that he lost in a year, and [then] his family kind of fell apart, you know, his children and grandchildren are all damaged by the whole thing… he often calls me and says, ‘Oh my God, Shane, to think of the pristine purity of the monastic year that we had in Wormwood Scrubs’ – and I agree.”

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Holy City of the Wichitas, 2020 - Photograph by Lydwine