ANNIE MAGUIRE, who was wrongly jailed in 1976 for running an IRA bomb factory in England, has said the Catholic church deserted her when she needed it most.

Writing in a recently published book, Why I am Still a Catholic, Maguire says she was rejected by the clergy and congregation in her parish while she served nine years in prison, and had a series of battles with prison chaplains who wanted her to admit her guilt.

She, her husband and two of their four children, then teenagers, were part of a family group, known as the Maguire Seven, jailed for supposedly running a bomb factory at their London home. Maguire was an aunt of Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four wrongly imprisoned for an IRA bomb attack that killed five people.

Maguire reveals she had a blazing row with a priest who heard her confession in prison, because she would not ask for forgiveness for the offences for which she was convicted. The 69-year-old great-grandmother is scathing about how she was treated by a church she had been faithful to all her life.

“There were things that hurt me about the church when I was inside. Nobody from the parish I had lived in all those years made any effort to contact me,” she said. “I had no help whatsoever from the church in London. And the Irish church didn’t hurry to support me. Bishop Edward Daly of Derry came to Durham to visit Ann and Eileen Gillespie [two IRA prisoners from Donegal] but he didn’t see me.

“That hurt because although I lived in London I was Northern Irish. He must have known I was there.” Daly said yesterday that he had not intended to cause Maguire any hurt. “If she had asked I would have seen her. I am very sorry she’s hurt; there was no hurt intended.”

Maguire says prison chaplains angrily refused to accept that she was innocent. She recalls a stormy confrontation during confession with one chaplain, who had previously served in the British Army. The priest rejected her claim that she had nothing to confess, saying “that’s nonsense, you are in prison”. When Maguire protested her innocence the priest warned her “not to go down that road”. She replied that if she was not allowed to tell the truth there was no point in a confession. He asked her: “Who do you think you are, the Virgin Mary herself?” Maguire walked out of the confession.

Maguire says her Catholicism did help her forgive those behind the miscarriage of justice. “I didn’t struggle with the forgiveness. I couldn’t hate everybody who did this to me ” She praised Cardinal Basil Hume, who eventually campaigned to clear the seven. “I remember looking up at God and asking, ‘Is this the one you’ve sent’? I didn’t see Basil Hume so much as sent by the church as by God.”

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