IRA SISTERS' MYRA FURY

0 Comments | Sunday Mirror, Sep 25, 2005 | by EXCLUSIVE By ANN McELHINNEY

TWO women IRA prisoners boycotted Mass when Moors murderer Myra Hindley turned up in the prison chapel.

Evil Hindley was transferred to Britain's tough Durham prison where Ann and Eileen Gillespie were jailed for a bombing campaign.

A new book by Annie Maguire - who served nearly 10 years after she was wrongly convicted of running a Provo bomb factory - tells how the IRA prisoners were horrified when Catholic Hindley started going to mass.

Iirsh-born Annie, who was one of the Maguire Seven all wrongly convicted of IRA involvement in 1976, befriended the Gillespie sisters behind bars.

In her book Why I am Still a Catholic, Annie, now 69, says:

"At one stage Myra Hindley came on the wing. She was younger than me so she didn't spend much time with the three of us who were older prisoners and who would sit talking and knitting."

"But some of the girls like Ann and Eileen - said they wouldn't go to mass if Myra Hindley was there too. And Myra was a Catholic.

"But I told them the Devil himself won't keep me out of church."

Ann, who is now married to Pat 'The Cope' Gallagher TD, and sister Eileen both protested their innocence and still deny any IRA involvement.

In her book Annie tells how she felt abandoned by the Church because of her conviction but kept her faith anyway.

Cardinal Basil Hume, the head of the Church in England until he died six years ago, was a leading campaigner to help clear her name.

Annie says that her faith kept her focussed whilst in prison and she would not miss Mass.

But she also accuses the Church of deserting her when she needed them most.

The nine-and-a-half years she spent in prison, even though she was innocent, was the biggest test of her faith.

Annie wrote: "There were things that hurt me about the Church when I was inside.

"No one from the parish I had lived in all those years made any effort to contact me....I had no help whatsoever from the Church generally in London in the city I had lived in all those years.

"Bishop Edward Daly of Derry came to Durham to visit Ann and Eileen Gillespie from Donegal but he didn't see me and that hurt."

And she said prison chaplains angrily refused to accept that she was innocent.

She praised Cardinal Hume but said he was sent from God and not by the Church.

Annie was arrested in 1974 and jailed two years later for running an IRA bomb factory in London.

Her husband and two of her four children were part of a large family group who were also jailed and dubbed the "Maguire Seven". Her nephew Gerry Conlon was one of the Guildford Four.