A Brief History
On October 31, 1973, three Provisional Irish Republican Army members held prisoner in Dublin, Ireland were busted out of prison in a manner befitting an action movie!
Digging Deeper
The Provisional IRA was a group attempting to force a unification of Northern Ireland with the rest of the island, using violence as a main method of “persuasion.”
The prisoners had been convicted and sentenced to prison for “offences against the state.”
An aborted plan to break out the prisoners by blowing a hole in the prison wall was replaced by an even more spectacular plan of using a helicopter to fly the men out of jail. A chartered helicopter was hijacked by armed IRA soldiers and landed in the prison exercise yard where the three convicts were picked up and spirited away.
The remaining IRA prisoners were moved to a more secure prison with wires erected overhead to prevent further helicopter escapes.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Coogan, Tim Pat. The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace. Head of Zeus, 2015.
McKearney, Tommy. The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament. Pluto Press, 2011.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Ryan4314 of a Blue Eagles Sud Aviation Alouette II at Britcar, has been released into the public domain worldwide by the copyright holder of this work.
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