Skipping to Freedom

This short piece with my memories of the escape of Danny Keenan initially featured in Magilligan POW Memories.

It was a dark night early in 1975. Cage F had been locked up for the evening which was usually around 9. A skip had been brought into the cage to take away debris from work that builders were doing in either the wash room or the study hut. It was parked outside our middle hut and the half hut.

There was a policy in place at the time where the camp leadership in order not to have its position challenged were refusing to lift suspensions on volunteers. Suspended volunteers could not take part in ‘army life’ nor could they vote in Camp elections. The knock on effect was that suspended volunteers could not make an escape attempt.

There were people more in need of escaping than Danny Keenan. Danny probably even thought so himself. He was in Cage F having been captured after a previous escape from Crumlin Road jail. There was one volunteer in the cage, Curly Coyle from Derry City, serving a sentence of 20 years or more. He was the one prisoner in the cage that the screws were on high alert about. They even had a notice pinned up in their guard hut. It would have been a major publicity coup for the IRA if Coyle had escaped and a red face for the NIO. But the camps staff’s interests were placed before all else.

It was decided in the half hut that Danny was the man to go. A man short the following morning at head head count would lead to the alert going out sooner than was safe. The IRA could never be sure that Keenan would have reached sanctuary by that time; he might not even have left the camp. So the ruse had to be played out for as long as possible until word came in from outside that the man was safe.

As a long haired 17 year old I was one of those picked to donate hair to make up the dummy. A quick trim followed by my hair being passed over to the half hut was all that was needed. The following morning the screws would get their count right but their prisoners wrong. Losing my locks was well worth somebody else escaping the locks that had contained him.

Danny Keenan slipped out through the bars in his hut and into the skip. At one point during the night he re-emerged and approached his hut to ask for chocolate or water. A risk that the organisers were pretty displeased with.

The following morning the skip had gone, Danny with it. That evening the word came through – Danny was safely across the border and a member of the staff approached the screw’s hut to tell them.